Finally for this week, Bullseye gets his own miniseries. Because you demanded it. Yes you did. Shut up.
Villain books are usually a tricky proposition. This one seems to be trying a structure that normally ends up cumbersome - the villain explains his origin story in flashbacks, while some story in the present day is somehow entangled with it all. It’s better than that makes it sound, to be fair. But not all that much better.
It’s a mood piece, and it works largely on giving Bullseye the superman build-up. He’s in jail as we start - he has to be, so that the police can spend the entire miniseries interviewing him about his history - but boy, what a jail. They’ve gone to incredible lengths to remove any objects from the area, because Bullseye might turn them into weapons. Because he’s That Damn Good.
Now, this works. This is a good way of building up Bullseye’s improvised-weapon routine as something genuinely threatening rather than just a novelty act. Whether it really needs ten pages of exposition to establish the point is open to debate, but then it’s a Daniel Way book. It’s going to be decompressed. At least here the mood build-up is effective, and it comes across as justified.
There’s a bit more content as we get onto Bullseye’s back story although, as the characters point out, it’s not desperately original material. Child of an abusive home. You’ve read it before. Possibly, having covered this ground in issue #1, Way is getting it out of the way so that he can deal with something more distinctive in future issues.
So far as it goes, it’s well handled. Way’s script is nicely paced, and Steve Dillon is always a fantastic character artist, able to add a ton of depth to a character with subtleties of facial expression that most artists either ignore, or just plain can’t do. It takes an artist like him to pull off a slow-paced script like this - somebody who can convey a ton of additional information about the characters even when, strictly speaking, nothing is really happening. Thanks to his art, the book just about gets away with a first issue that could easily have been painfully slow.
A decent start (hideous cover notwithstanding), but Way will have to find something more original to say about Bullseye if this is going to sustain five issues.
Side note: This issue was solicited as featuring “timely cameos by Daredevil, Elektra, the Kingpin and the Punisher”. It doesn’t. Bad Marvel!
Quoted from http://www.thexaxis.com/misc/bullseye1.htm
Marvel Comics: The Sentry
