Comic Books

Is It Good? Halo: Initiation #3 Review

October 9, 2013

The first two installments of Halo: Initiation were nothing but a series of action, cliches and the word “Spartan”. All that amounts to a not-so-great start to the series. With much reluctance I signed up to review this issue. Does it break the trend of nonsense the first two set in motion? Is it good?

Halo: Initiation #3 (Dark Horse Comics)

Let’s start with this week’s Spartan count: How many times did Brian Reed write the word “Spartan” into this issue? The answer is: 24 times. That’s a lot of Spartan!

And even without all those uses of the word Spartan the writing would be horrible. Cliche follows cliche with cheesy dialogue and a weak story to boot. My first no-no moment came when all of the Spartans were ready to jump into battle and some old guy that we couldn’t give crap less about about has to monologue. Wasting time, man! Although, his monologue only took 26.2 seconds; I timed myself saying it. But that just leads into another complaint. While he was monologuing, all of the Spartans managed to get into their suits. How could they do that in 26.2 seconds?! It just doesn’t make sense.

And then the action starts. Well, sort of. All we get is a push of a button and an explosion. See, my problem with this book — and it’s been this way the whole series — is that we don’t get to know the characters at all. I mean, who cares if a bunch of Spartans blow up if I didn’t even know the guys?

The rest of the battle plays out just like you would expect. The non-Spartans get shuttled around by the remaining Spartans and a few of them die, Palmer and Davis go and defeat the bad guy (I didn’t even care to learn her name) and everything turns out just dandy. No suspense, no drama, no surprise. The ending is a cheesy cliched monologue where some guy we also don’t care about declares independence for the Spartans. It’s an easy, predictable ending.

I have to say, the art is getting much better. Marco Castiello is taking risks, drawing nice action sequences and making this book work. In fact, his art is probably the only redeeming quality.