REVIEW: Before Watchmen: Minutemen/Silk Spectre

PLOT: As the predecessor to the Watchmen, the Minutemen were assembled to fight against a world that have more and more rapidly begun to spin out of control. Can these heroes from completely different backgrounds and with completely different attitudes on crime come together? Or will they fall apart before they begin? SILK SPECTRE takes an introspective look at the WATCHMEN feature player's struggles with her overbearing superhero mother and her scattered path toward taking the mantle of the Silk Spectre.

REVIEW: Before Watchmen has either gotten more dull as I've read through the collected volumes, or I read them in the perfect order of quality that I'm now getting to the crappy volumes. I wasn't so much a fan of this volume that chronicles the story of the Minutemen told mostly through the eyes of Nite Owl. I liked the side plot, that seemed like it should have been the main plot, of Hooded Justice and the missing children but it didn't really progress as quickly and as predominately as it should have. Everyone practically knows the small story of the Minutemen as present in the original Watchmen graphic novel and even the movie. The Silk Spectre half was also decent, but again it was just a lot of background to something that already been explained well enough for me the first go around. I'm finding that a lot of these Before Watchmen arcs center on characters that were already pretty well fleshed out and didn't need much more explaining, as I've gotten to more familiar characters and they've gotten less entertaining. Plus what is with writing so much on each and every page, I find a lot of the thought bubbles and informational boxes are pretty unnecessary and I wish there was a lot less to read because it's all pretty boring. This volume and the last one I read suffer from what I like to call, over-writing, because there's too much written on the page that the reader doesn't need to know at all because most of us reading these, read the original Watchmen graphic novel. I know these comics could have been a lot better if they wouldn't have tried to be so entirely faithful to being exact and precise prequels to Watchmen. Here's hoping that the one I have left will be better than the rest of them, because Comedian and Rorschach were the two best characters and that's the volume I haven't read. Plus if Azzarello is involved, odds are that I'm going to enjoy myself right?

WRITING : ( 6 / 10 )

ARTWORK : ( 6 / 10 )
STORY : ( 4 / 10 )

COVERS : ( 7 / 10 )

AWESOME : ( 3 / 10 )

FINAL RATING : ( 5 / 10 )