2. Jonathan Hickman: A Great Ideas Man, A Terrible Storyteller
The pacing of this series is ridiculously fast. After a decent first issue, the second issue opens with Thanos and his army invading Earth - and manages to topple it in 6 panels! That's right, all of the X-Men, Namor and the Atlanteans, Iron Man and the Fantastic Four, the Inhumans, they're all beaten in the span of 2 pages! The epic fight back against the Builders once Thor inspires everyone to rebel, takes 5 pages! 5 stinkin' pages to wrap up an intergalactic star war!! These are the bad guys who they've been fighting since the first issue and suddenly they have the ability to defeat them all in 5 pages! Hickman throws stuff in that sound like something important is happening but the reader has no idea what it means, like Thane's powers when he transforms into his Inhuman form. He's lying amidst the wreckage of his village, charred corpses around him. Apparently he killed them all, but how, when and why? No clue, quick, onto the next thing! (By the way, Thane's power is apparently worse than death but turns out to be similar to Han Solo's fate at the end of Empire - which isn't worse than death, because it's stasis. You can come back from that, you can't come back from death. Usually. Then again this is a Marvel comic!) Then weirdly Hickman chooses to explain unimportant things like Corvus' weapon, though his explanations are even more mystifying than if you didn't know about it: "My spear was forged from a sun trapped in distorted space-time. All at once, it was a life-giving new star, and also an all-consuming supernova." What the hell does that mean?! The speed at which the story is told means the reader barely has time to understand what's going on before we're on to the next thing. It's hard to get invested in a storyline or character when it's poorly explained, or not explained at all, and then suddenly we're on to the next thing. Again, this comes back to bad writing, even worse storytelling, and a total lack of attachment to the story itself. There are some good ideas, they're just very poorly executed, like they're outlines that haven't been written out properly, except all we're getting is the outline. In the hands of a better writer, Infinity might've been good. In Hickman's hands, it's a strong outline but a lousy comic.