Static Shock #1

Hold on, let me check my calendar. Ah, excellent, it's 2004. A whale just exploded in Taiwan, water has been confirmed to once have existed on Mars and the Static Shock cartoon series has just wrapped up its four year run on the "Kids! WB" network (yes, they had an exclamation point in the middle of their name). Now is the perfect time for DC Comics to capitalize on Static's national publicity and give him his own comic book.

But wait, it's not 2004, it's 2011. So, seven years after the cartoon wrapped, DC finally decided the iron was hot enough to strike. Problem is, the iron is so cold it's frozen, striking it results in it shattering into a million pieces of useless crap. Pick up one of those frozen shards. Look it over. Congratulations, you've now read Static Shock #1.

Scott McDaniel and John Rozum "wrote" this comic, and McDaniel, not content with the crime he'd committed against storytelling on the verbal end, decided to compound his sins by drawing it as well. McDaniel, along with "Green Arrow" artists George Perez and Dan Jurgens, as well as "Detective Comics" creator Tony Daniel, are part of a growing trend at DC Comics. They're all artists turned writers, and in the weeks to come, the DC Reboot will have even more of them. They mostly suck at writing, and some of them even suck at drawing (that'd be our boy McDaniel). The proliferation of these guys is mystifying, especially given how crappy this particular comic is.

From start to finish, this comic makes me wish that old adage about masturbation making you go blind was true. If it were, I'd buy a gallon of CVS-brand lotion and never have to see another comic this crappy again. From the crap art (does McDaniel know that people are supposed to by symmetrical?) to horrendous dialogue ("Okay buddy, you asked for it, time to take the kid gloves off and put on the plasma gloves!") there's nothing good about this comic.

It's not just the execution though. Conceptual stuff, like Static having a holographic adviser named Hardware (a preexisting character from the DCU who gets no introduction/explanation) to Static having to pretend to be a juvenile delinquent to get an internship (taking one of the few minority characters in comics that hasn't been in prison/grown up in the hood/etc and making supporting characters assume he's a criminal), this comic failed before McDaniel and Rozum even started writing their script.

Buy again: What part of "I'd rather jerk myself into blindness" didn't you understand?

New readers: Nope, and it's a shame, because if this comic had been done seven years ago and with some actual care, you might've actually been able to get some cross-media-pollination going on.