Before Watchmen: Still stalling for time

The great J.G. Jones has delivered another solid cover, presenting an old photograph of the Comedian with two Vietnamese boys who have unfortunately decided to pick Eddie Blake as their role model. The Comedian nicknamed them Hearts and Minds in mockery of the U.S. military’s PR campaign. It’s a good-looking cover, but not terribly interesting. I’d like it a lot more if Brian Azzarello had decided to spend a little more time with these two boys, but he didn’t.

Brian Stelfreeze gave us a psychedelic cover that’s not too bad. He really emphasized Eddie’s connection to the Kennedy family, which — again — I wish Azzarello had decided to devote a little bit more time toward.

So … what did Azzarello devote his time to in this issue? Not much. Eddie gets sick and tired of the war effort, especially when he realizes that his handlers are focused on prolonging the war as long as possible to set themselves up for lucrative opportunities afterward. He also becomes quite distressed when he heard Robert Kennedy was running for president and he wouldn’t take Eddie’s phone call. So Eddie got high, basically slaughtered an entire village, then shoved his commanding officer out of a helicopter when he yelled at Eddie for jeopardizing his long-term plans. And that’s about it.

Azzarello mixed things up by presenting this story out of order, but I found all the flashbacks and bouncing around completely pointless. And unnecessarily confusing. A different color scheme would have helped. The story wouldn’t have been any better, but at least I would have had an easier time telling when everything was supposed to be happening. Mostly, though, I felt the same way about this issue as I did the last issue I reviewed. Perhaps six issues was too long for this miniseries. Giving Azzarello just four issues may have required him to tighten up his story and we would have ended up with a better product. Or it might have been rushed. But after reading two comics where nothing seemed to happen, I think I would have liked to take my chances