Welcome, friends, to the parenthetics-heavy Tuesday-night review of THE FINAL HOST, hosted by yours truly.
Right. I think my years-long affair of self-immolating passion with the works of Jason Aaron has come to an end at last. I read this volume for one reason and one reason only–I knew it would have some bearing on Aaron’s conclusion to the War of the Realms storyline he’s been working on since the early 2010s.
The idea appealed to me on paper. The big three–Iron Man, Cap, and Thor–come together again, and are immediately faced with a massive, world-ending crisis (remember when the Avengers fought more personal threats?). Celestials fall dead all over the world, in a scene that reminded me of of the traumatically bad Original Sin, which was–gasp, also written by Aaron. Wait…have I disliked Jason Aaron’s work before? Has the specter of my dislike haunted me all this time? Anyway, it’s Loki who does it, Loki who’s scheming to get the Avengers back together. I love Loki, and Jason Aaron normally writes him well, but the dialogue between him and Cap is so trite, so exhausted, so overdone! What is up with that, folks? Where has originality gone? Why is this recycled tosh being published by Marvel? How come Aaron isn’t even trying anymore?
The team doesn’t end with the big three, of course: Aaron’s picks for the Avengers roster are Black Panther, She-Hulk, Professor Wyrd (or was it Doctor Strange?), Ghost Rider, and the coma-inducing Captain Marvel (if you don’t get that, you don’t need to. Civil War 2’s the name of the game). Also, I knew they’d made She-Hulk regress, but this copy-paste OG Hulk-like portrayal reads as such a disservice to her character. She-Hulk’s control always defined her as very different and granted her an identity that was missing here. It’s a bummer.
The art is the blandest Marvel thoroughfare I have seen in a while; I’ve been trying, now and again, to get back into superhero comics. They used to be such fun! And there’s plenty of fantastic work out there–Jonathan Hickman’s X-Men run starts off promising enough.
I hate to be this negative–if you follow my reviews or interact with me, you know I tend towards positivity, but there’s very little here I enjoyed. In fact, nothing comes to mind.
The Grimoire Reliquary 
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