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Thursday 4 August 2016

Contest of Champions, Volume 1: Battleworld Review (Al Ewing, Paco Medina)


Maestro (the bearded Hulk) wants to rule the shattered ruins of Battleworld because he’s nothing if not persistent - he wanted it during Secret Wars and he still wants it after it’s turned to shit! What a moron. Except he’s enslaved to The Collector who’s using a magical McGuffin to have godlike powers to kidnap Marvel heroes and make them battle one another pointlessly. You’d never know this was all because of a popular game called Contest of Champions would you, the story is so solid!

If you’re not familiar with the game, it’s a beat-em-up with Marvel characters. You make up your team of characters, you go through the stages, level up, fight tougher characters, and so on. It’s actually pretty tedious but it’s been downloaded millions of times so here we are with a spin-off comic! 

Imagine that Bjork song with “rubbish” replacing “quiet” - sshh, it’s so rubbish! - and then characters going after each other in the loud part. That’s basically the structure of Contest of Champions: quiet worthless dialogue in between loud tedious battles. But then it is just arbitrary characters fighting one another - no motivation, no story, no stakes or consequences, no nothing! Boredom would be a step up from what I felt reading this drek. 

There are some well-known characters here like Iron Man and Hulk but most of the comic is weirdly centred around practically unknown characters like Outlaw (the British Punisher) and Night Thrasher (he has a skateboard)! 

Each issue ends with a caption asking “Are You Not Entertained??” - no, not once, not even slightly. If you read this review without following the lines with your finger and moving your lips, you are not the target audience for this garbage.

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