The more I think about it, the more I think that VM Origins is all about Scanlan retelling how the group first met and came together, only he is taking the story pieces and inserting his own spin on it. And that makes me even more conflicted about the quality of the comics.

pagerunner-j:

If the comic had been written with that as a deliberate framing device, I’d actually get along with it much better. It’s not, though, and so it comes across as “as soon as Scanlan shows up, he TAKES OVER EVERYTHING.”

In general, I think it’s more indicative of Matt Coville defaulting to his usual thing, i.e. talking a lot (see also his YouTube channel). The result is that he’s got pages on pages of giant clumps of text delivered by talking heads,* which is not a great way to write a comic and not really fair to the artist. To be blunt about what should be obvious: comics are a visual medium. He needs to edit himself down on occasion, let the art do a lot more of the heavy lifting, and think harder about how to elevate the characters who aren’t the big talkers (I’m especially thinking about Grog here), because as it is they’re getting lost in favor of the characters who match his preferred style.

(*Related: I was actually glad to see a comment of his in a Reddit thread about the latest issue that lined up very closely with my initial impression of the Vex & Keyleth conversation: that should have been presented at least in part as annotated flashback panels. You could have done SO MUCH INTERESTING STUFF with showing a younger Vex and Vax, the dynamic with their father, all of it, and still let Vex talk enough to narrate it, but avoid it being strictly an infodump. At least the thought occurred to him. But still, it’s not what we got.)