Review: BULLSEYE #1

BULLSEYE No. 1 (2017)
MARVEL COMICS – @Marvel

[This review was originally posted on Patreon.]

WRITERS: Ed Brisson; Marv Wolfman
ART: Guillermo Sanna; Alec Morgan
COLORS: Miroslav Mrva; Frank Martin
LETTERS: VC's Clayton Cowles
COVER: Dave Johnson
VARIANT COVERS: Tim Bradstreet; Marco Checchetto; John Tyler Christopher; Bill Sienkiewicz; Chris Stevens; Skottie Young
36pp, Color, $4.99 U.S. (April 2017)

Parental Advisory

“The Colombian Connection” Part 1

Bullseye is a Marvel Comics supervillain.  The character was created by writer Marv Wolfman and artist John Romita, Sr. and first appeared in Daredevil #131 (cover dated: March 1976).  Bullseye is an assassin and he is best known for his personal vendetta against the superhero Daredevil.  Bullseye does not have super-powers but he can turn almost any object into a lethal weapon.

Bullseye is the new comic book miniseries starring this popular villain.  It is written by Ed Brisson; drawn by Guillermo Sanna; colored by Miroslav Mrva; and lettered by Clayton Cowles.

Bullseye #1 opens to find the titular villain/anti-hero active again after being alive, dead, and imprisoned again and again.  Now, he is at the Houghton Residence in Long Island, New York fulfilling an assassination contract.  But, man!  Bullseye is hoping that his next assignment yields both a high body count and buckets of blood.  Desperate gangster Raph Losani may offer that, but a desperate widow just wants to count one body.

Recently, I reviewed the first issue of Kingpin, another comic book seemingly spun out of the world of Marvel Comics' Daredevil.  I was harsh in my review, but not because I thought the writer (Matthew Rosenberg) and the artist (Ben Torres) lacked talent (Rosenberg) or potential (Torres).  The problem is the fact that these two delivered substandard work and the fact that Marvel Comics would consider such unprofessional material worth publishing and charging readers $3.99 to read.

Bullseye #1 suffers from the same problem of a lack of professionalism.  The story and script that Ed Brisson offers is just lazy hackwork that mimics better storytelling.  The casual depiction of Bullseye's murderous rampages is not imaginative or smart, but it is unimaginative and stupid.  Frank Miller did not create Bullseye, but during his 1980s run on Daredevil, he certainly defined the character, making him the kind of dangerous and alluring villain that becomes timeless.  Here, Bullseye's violence seems as if Brisson took the clever violence of Mark Millar's comic books and turned that into filler material because Brisson could not think of anything else to do with it.

I think artist Guillerma Sanna has a lot of potential, but in Bullseye #1 he draws as if he should still be toiling in the world of micro press black and white comic books.  Everything here looks as if Sanna is simply mimicking (badly) other artists' (good) work; Chris Samnee and Eduardo Risso, come to mind.

There is a backup story by writer Marv Wolfman and artist Alec Morgan, “If I Tell You...” that takes some of the sour out of the main story.  It makes me wonder why Wolfman isn't writing this miniseries.  Is it because he is “too old” and “passè?”  I don't doubt that he would not write as bad a script as Ed Brisson wrote, even if he kept the overall plot.  I also like Alec Morgan's Eduardo Risso-like art.  Why isn't he drawing the main story!?

I am not recommending this, nor do I intend to read another issue.  But I might change my mind...

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux a.k.a. "I Reads You"


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