2 out of 5

When I criticize a Waid book, often it’s because he’s fallen back on his experience, writing a hero book with a pretty generic cheeky sheen.  Waid’s generic is actually really good comic pap, but when you read enough of it, it feels somewhat phoned – just a template applied to a different character and setting.  I imagine it’s hard to not do this.  But every now and then some new inspiration will grab him, and will get a good, solid 20-issue run like on Daredevil volume 3.  Spektor is not a super-hero, thus preventing Waid from defaulting to this mode.  It’s also not directly a good guy / bad guy book, which means – a la ‘Irredeemable’ – we should probably allow a few books for Mark to find his pacing.  However, because of the direction in which the book ends up going, neither of these considerations really matter.

In the first episode of the first season of ‘Ray Donovan,’ we get a voyeuristic look into the violent, dramatic life of a Hollywood fixer, which is what the ad-spots for the show sorta suggested.  Then the show immediately veers into dealing with Ray’s family, instead (yes yes, ‘fixing’ them), and sets the promised premise of the show waaaay in the background.  …Like it didn’t matter.  The season limped along, but I feel it definitely suffered because of this miscalculation.

Spektor’s pitch was that the TV personality Doctor would use his show (and skills) to go around debunking fake psychics or magicians, or whatever.  As Mark did with Daredevil volume 3 (most of the time) by having Matt Murdock get involved with bad guys as a result of his lawerly job, this setup seemed like a clever way to ground the series and still give it a supernatural backing.  And Mark opens with that setting.  …And then immediately veers into dealing with ghosts or some nonsense from Spektor’s past.  The second issue finds his assistant caught up in some parallel reality nonsense, but the point is – we have no stake in these characters, and Mark abandons the setup that might’ve built those stakes to immediately toss some dramatics in our face.

It still has his professional sheen, so I imagine if I wasn’t sensitive to it I could keep reading the book, but an intriguing premise has already been watered down just two issues in, so… I’m out.