I had no intention of reading Original Sin. I didn’t. I was tired of the “event” storylines that have taken over. You used to have one big event story once in a while. Then every year. Now events run into other events and it is just too much. So, I put my foot down on Original Sin. Nope, not going to do it. Then I made the mistake of picking it up. “Just to flip through” I told myself. There is only two reasons I picked it up at all: Mark Waid and Nova.
I’ve been a Mark Waid fan for a while and his name alone kept me from totally ignoring this new event. I just recently got on the Nova bandwagon and have really started to enjoy the character. So, Nova playing a central role in this issue along with Waid writing, well, I eventually had to give in and get it. I’m glad I did.
Unless you’ve been under a rock, you’ve seen the promos from Marvel about this series and you probably know that it deals with the death of Uatu, The Watcher. This zero issue kicks off the story, but we don’t see Uatu’s death, but instead his life. At least the parts of his life that I don’t believe we’ve seen before. With a name like “The Watcher” it’s not hard to figure out what he does. He watches. However, he also records and, as it turns out, he not only watches our reality, but many, many, many others. Nova comes into the story because he is more interested in not “how” the Watcher watches, but the “why”. There is a great sequence between him and the Avengers that I really liked a lot and it spurred Nova to seek out an answer to his question.
Nova does find out the “why”, but we also get answers to the ”how”. It brings us a little closer to understanding Uatu and I found myself really liking the character by the end of the issue. In other stories I’ve read, I didn’t really care one way or the other for him, but Waid managed to make me like him in a relatively short period of time. I also really liked how Waid wrote Nova in this issue. It fit the character and probably helped me with how I felt about Uatu because I was living the story through Nova’s eyes instead of another character. It was a great choice and I’m glad they went with Nova for this story.
Jim Cheung and Paco Medina do an amazing job with the art by capturing emotion on Uatu than I haven’t seen before. Typically he is just an emotionless alien with a giant head, which he still is, but they captured subtle facial expressions that show the emotion is actually there, which is important since he doesn’t speak. I also appreciated the visual storytelling where a panel tells a story based strictly on what you see and not on what you read. I get the feeling that there is some foreshadowing going on that will come in to play later.
So, if the remaining eight issues maintain the quality of this zero issue, then I guess I am in for another event. Curse you Marvel and Mark Waid. Oh, and you too Nova. Curse you all.
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