Comics! Two new teams!

Comics this week included the start of two new teams from Marvel Comics – a company which has learned that nothing sells like excess and can now be counted upon to give us multiple X-Men teams, multiple Spider-Man teams, about 100 different upcoming graphic novels of the various splinters of “Dark Reign,” and, somewhat belatedly, about half a dozen new post-“Dark Reign” super-teams.

The first of these new teams isn’t a first issue – it’s just business as usual for “Thunderbolts” (issue #144! When did that happen? Can there really be that many virgins out there with disposable income?), a book built on the idea of super-villains forming a super-hero team for one reason or another (to dupe the public, to redeem their souls, etc). In the wake of “Dark Reign” and the downfall of Norman Osborn, a new team of Thunderbolts is formed in this issue under the leadership of good guy Luke Cage, and I was surprised by how much I liked it. Of course, I just-in-general like the way Marvel has been increasing its usage of Cage, but the idea of putting him in charge of a new team – at least as written by Jeff Parker (with surprisingly retro art by Ken Walker)– really works.

Of course, the main draw of any new team book is the team itself, the picks, the potential chemistry. That draw is all the more dramatic when the team in question is composed mostly of villains or quasi-villains, most of whom certainly aren’t trustworthy. This time around there are some characters I barely recognize – Mach V, Ghost, Songbird (I know the last only from the epic “Avengers Forever” – no idea what’s her deal in normal continuity), Moonstone, Crossbones – although the way Parker writes them makes me at least curious to know more. The team has its resident in-house genius (in this case Hank Pym) and at least two surprising additions that I, for one, didn’t see coming: the Juggernaut, here portrayed as physically immense and pretty openly threatening (in the ‘real world,’ there’s simply no way Luke Cage would allow onto his team a grinning schemer with Hulk-level strength, but hey …), and … the Man-Thing, a non-sentient muck-monster who can’t speak, can’t understand speech, and has virtually no powers to speak of. Not exactly a team player (although he’s been on a team before! I may be the only person here old enough to remember that, however).



Add such wrinkles to the mix and throw in a genuinely didn’t-see-it-coming cliffhanger ending, and I’m certainly hooked enough to read the next issue.



The second new team really is new: a freshly not-dead Steve Rogers, given a free hand by the President, forms a “Secret Avengers” team meant for covert operations and strategic pre-emptive strikes at the bad guys, sort of a Black Ops version of the higher-profile Avengers. It’s a great idea (although ironically enough, the premise for it given in this issue – which kicks off Marvel’s new “Heroic Age” – is that the world in the 21st century has grown so rotten and un-heroic that such a team is necessary), and it’s a premise obviously being enjoyed by writer Ed Brubaker and “Dark Avengers” artist Mike Deodato (when “Dark Avengers” came to its end, I really hoped Marvel would find another team-book to put Deodato on … the fact that it goes right on being the Avengers is all the sweeter).



And again, the main point is the roll-call. In this case it’s Steve Rogers – dressed in a kind of generic-superhero suit and not carrying his famous Captain America shield (or even a really, really tough duplicate, which is the least you’d think he’d do, considering that his entire fighting style is built around having the thing on one arm) – and a team of Marvel second-and third-stringers: Moon Knight, a kid in Hank Pym’s old Ant-Man get-up, Jim Rhodes and the Black Widow (from this summer’s “Iron Man 2”), the Beast from the X-Men (doing duty here as the requisite in-house genius), Nova, and … in another surprise move I find fascinating, the Valkyrie, an Asgardian warrior-woman and long-time criminally underused member of the Defenders (the Marvel group the Secret Avengers most closely resembles, naturally) – it’ll be interesting to see how Brubaker develops her character.

It was a little weird, seeing a Marvel team-book with no marquee names at all – I assume these characters were chosen by Brubaker specifically on the condition that he could mess around with them to a greater degree than he could with the usual roster of Avengers, and I’ll be looking forward to that in the next issue. This issue also ends with a heck of a cliffhanger, so I’ll definitely be around next time.

Comics: Dark Reign Ends!

Comics this week feature the culmination of Marvel’s “Dark Reign” saga, and the issues we’ll be examining – Siege #4, Dark Avengers #16, and the double-sized Finale of New Avengers – gave me immense satisfaction not only in the usual ways, with interesting writing and some great artwork, but also in the sweetest of all possible ways: by playing right into my ‘I told you so’ factor.

As those of you who’ve been following four-color superhero comics (or merely those of you who’ve been following their highlights here at Stevereads) already know, the premise of “Dark Reign” is alluringly simple: what if evil won? Not just ‘won’ in terms of successfully robbing a bank, but ‘won’ in the sense of ‘set up shop and ran things’ – that was the idea behind installing ‘Green Goblin’ psychopathic killer Norman Osborn as head of the super-police force known as H.A.M.M.E.R. and having him create his own team of Avengers consisting of fellow super-villains in disguise. The real avengers were either dead or fugitives in hiding from Osborn and his troops, and the government had passed a Super-Hero Registration Act compelling all super-heroes to register with the government and play by federal rules.

Although of course initially I wasn’t a fan of this whole concept, I quickly came around. It produced some really good stories, and Marvel put some top-notch creative people in charge of keeping the whole thing going. I was so entertained I wasn’t sure I wanted to see the eventual heroes-return storyline I knew was coming.



The four-part mini-series Siege is that storyline, and I’d have read it no matter what, since it’s drawn by the great, the mighty Oliver Coipel. And it’s been thrilling – and notoriously violent. Osborn, apparently drunk with power (and egged on by Loki, the evil Norse god of mischief), decided to muster all his super villains and all his troops and invade the fabled city of Asgard, which at the time was floating about twenty feet above Braxton, Oklahoma. The invasion was led by Osborn’s leashed superman, the mentally unbalanced superhero Sentry, and in Siege’s most widely discussed panel, Coipel draws the Sentry ripping apart Ares, the Greek god of war, like an old T-shirt. The end of the previous issue had Norman Osborn flying into a Green Goblin-style spittle-flecking rant – on national TV – about how he was the only thing stopping the Sentry from going completely bonkers and annihilating all life on Earth. Osborn no sooner finishes saying this than we lay eyes on the Sentry floating above our heroes, only he’s swapped his heroic blue cape for a bunch of muscular red tentacles.

So this issue opens with a fight even our assembled heroes can’t really win – as Osborn puts it, the Sentry has become the ‘Angel of Death,’ and the life-sucking Void he has at his command quickly paralyzes his enemies. Help comes from the most unlikely source: Loki, who’s apparently sorry things have gone so far and tries to make them right again, by using his mystical abilities to infuse the fallen heroes with new vitality.

The Sentry senses this, attacks Loki, and proves that he hasn’t exactly got all the god-shredding out of his system.


Coipel gives us some great action panels – pride of place go to Thor and Iron Man – and eventually our heroes are victorious. The Void is vanquished, and its poor slob of a human host is killed (in a neat touch, Thor gives his body a suitably epic Viking incineration – in the sun, no less), and with any luck, that’ll be the last anybody ever hears of the Sentry, one of the dumbest ideas to come out of Marvel Comics since the Spider-clone.

The issue ends with Steve Rogers refusing to take up the mantle of Captain America but agreeing to fulfill some kind of leadership role in the upcoming ‘Heroic Age.’ There’s celebration in the air: the Registration Act has been ‘thrown out,’ the fugitive heroes can come out of hiding, and the villains who were running the show are either captured or in hiding themselves.



This ties into the double-sized finale of New Avengers, which shows our fugitive team – Luke Cage, Hawkeye as Ronin, Mockingbird, Spider-Man, Ms. Marvel, Bucky as Captain America – in one last covert adventure together, with Brian Michael Bendis putting in plenty of his snarky, chatty dialogue and Brian Hitch doing the artwork with the increasingly incoherent sloppiness that is coming to mark his current work. At the end of that issue, we’re told again that the good guys win- the Registration Act is dismissed, Osborn and his cronies are going to jail, the sun is shining again.



Switch scenes to Dark Avengers #16, written by Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by Mike Deodato (with more – a lot more – of that weird computerized inking and coloring he’s been fooling around with lately), which brings to an end the main storyline of a comic I never thought I’d like and ended up eagerly awaiting every month (and not only for Deodato’s beautiful artwork). This was the central book of “Dark Reign” – this was the fake Avengers team Osborn assembled and held together through force of will, and it made for compelling reading, month after month.

In this issue, it’s all over: the team is beaten and disbanded, war criminals, and Osborn himself is going to the prison to which he sent so many heroes during his quasi-legal reign of terror. And in his typically mind-gaming way, Bendis puts in Osborn’s mouth the perfectly-articulated rationale for everything he did, and you got to have it in its entirety:

I was right.

The world is a mess, and the world needed me to fix it. And I would have. I could have.

This world is a madhouse of mutants, terrorists, psychotics, aliens, and monsters. All of them chasing and crashing into each other every second of every day. People put on costumes and just decide, all by themselves, that they are the savior of the world. That it’s okay for them to go and do whatever the hell they want to whoever they want because they have a costume.

Well, I am telling you the world is going to end. One day soon, it’s going to actually explode. The wrong creature is going to slam into the wrong mutant and boom. That will be it. All of this – all of it will have been for nothing. All I wanted to do was stop it. All I wanted to do was fix the problems before they happened.

I KNOW the mutants of this world will rise up and kill us.

I KNOW that the Hulk will one day decide to destroy everything he sees.

I KNOW the Punisher will one day kill the wrong person and set off a chain of events that will lead to nuclear holocaust.

I know that these heroes will dive head first into something they do not understand and end up doing such insane damage to the world that humans can no longer live on it. Victor Von Doom will crush us under his foot in his last mad gasp of air. I know this is true. I know it.

And I could have stopped it. If not for the fact that you kept standing in my @#$@# way.

All of which sounds convincingly psychotic and creepy, and you’re ready to cheer the fact that the Green Goblin, the speaker of such creepy sentiments, is safely locked up.

The only problem is that Osborn isn’t the Marvel character who originated all those creepy sentiments, nor is he the Marvel character who organized them into a repressive, fascistic governmental policy.

That Marvel character would be Iron Man, the current darling of American movie theaters. The same Iron Man who helped to defeat the evil Sentry and who appears to be a founding member of whatever new Avengers team Steve Rogers is founding with the full blessing of the U.S. government. And that’s where the ‘I told you so’ factor comes in.

Because years ago, when this whole storyline started, when Iron Man and Reed Richards, responding to a super-hero accident in which many innocent lives were lost, decided to enunciate and then support the whole idea behind the Registration Act, I said this was one of those comic book ideas that sound great but probably shouldn’t be done because there’s literally no satisfying way to un-do them. Iron Man himself began hunting down his former allies among the superheroes. Iron Man beat up Captain America, and Reed Richards designed the massive gulag in which dissenters - good guys and bad guys – were locked up. And they both did it because they sincerely believed exactly those creepy sentiments Bendis puts in the mouth of the bad guy, Norman Osborn. Reading these comics this week, you’d assume the whole arc of “Dark Reign” was Osborn’s idea from the start – but the only reason Bendis would want you to assume that is because you have to forget the real causes of the whole story, because if you remember them, no Marvel ‘reset’ is ever possible, and no ‘Heroic Age’ can dawn.

The irony of quintessential ‘I told you so’ scenarios, of course, is that they bring no satisfaction. I knew that if Marvel ever wanted to bring their comics back to ‘normal,’ they’d have to do some major fudging with what had gone before, and I was right: that’s exactly what they did. This week, Iron Man and the others were victims of Norman Osborn’s mad paranoia about the dangers posed by unregulated super-powered beings. The good guys beat him, and now everything can go back to normal.

But normal in the Marvel Universe is still a place where whole city blocks in midtown Manhattan are blown up by warring super-folk, where somebody with powers really can put on a costume and decide who lives and who dies. In other words, we’re right back where we started two or three years ago.

Not that I’m complaining, mind you – at least, not much. The lineup of this new Avengers team strikes me as ridiculously opportunistic … there’s simply no reason to have Wolverine and Spider-Man on the Avengers other than to make Marvel money (kind of amazing that Deadpool didn’t get an invite), and that’s a little sad: one of the things I’ve always liked about the Avengers was that in addition to the headliners who had their own comics, we also got to see in action heroes like the Black Knight or the Vision who didn’t have books of their own. And I admit I’ll miss the subversive fun of Bendis’ Dark Avengers.

So: now we try out “The Heroic Age” and see what comes of it. All in all, Marvel pulled off quite an accomplishment in “Dark Reign” … they ought to commemorate it with a big hardcover slipcased volume of its best stories: the entire run of Dark Avengers, plus all the best related issues – most certainly including the death of the Punisher – and of course all four chapters of Siege. I’d buy it.

Comics: The Penultimates!

Marvel Comics served up two pivotal chapters in its “Siege” storyline this week – the penultimate chapter of “Dark Avengers” (a series in which psychotic government hatchet-man Norman Osborn, with duped official sanction, creates his own team of Avengers using bad guys costumed as good guys), and the penultimate chapter of “Siege” (a series in which the aforementioned Osborn and his ‘dark’ Avengers and their storm troopers launch a full-scale attack on the fabled city of Asgard, home of the Norse gods, which at the moment is hovering about twenty feet over some empty badlands in Oklahoma). The tension – as events that have been percolating for a couple of years now start to boil over – is extremely well-handled by all involved, and the feat of these two issues, which tell very closely interlinked stories in perfect cooperation, is, to put it mildly, not Marvel’s usual way of doing things.

“Dark Avengers” should be read first, if only for the enormous pleasure of seeing Norman Osborn’s secret ally finally revealed. Some of you may recall that I made a prediction about this ally’s identity waaay back when this whole adventure was starting, and I’m happy to admit I was wrong – happy mainly because the actual identity of that mysterious ally is so perfect, so plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face that I laughed a bit when it was revealed: I should have seen this, the simplest possible answer, coming.

Of course the secret ally is the same ultra-powerful secret ally Osborn’s always had: the super-strong energy-wielding Sentry – only in his Edward Hyde persona as ‘the Void.’ Brilliant.

In the previous issue, readers saw Norman Osborn talk the Sentry down from a tantrum in which he might have destroyed Manhattan, and in a moment of criminal insight worthy of the former Green Goblin, Osborn realizes that the Sentry’s terrified, traumatized wife might be the disruptive element in Osborn’s control over her husband. He orders his ‘dark’ Hawkeye (actually the murderous Daredevil villain Bullseye) to make Mrs. Sentry disappear.



In this issue that happens. Under the pretext of flying her to a safe house to wait out the current crisis, Bullseye gets her alone in an auto-piloted plane and proceeds with his trademark snide mind-games:

You’re husband, he’s almost a god – and you – you’re kind of, well, frumpy is the best word I can think of. I mean, he can have anybody.I mean, I can have anybody and all I do is kill people. And I swear, I can get any girl I want. Imagine the ass he’s missing out on because he’s married to you. And look at you. Do you even own a brush? Or a mirror?

This is great, ghoulish stuff, perfectly in character for everybody, despite how ugly those characters are. The issue’s only weird element comes not from the writing but from the artwork. Artist Mike Deodato has been doing the best work of his career on “Dark Avengers,” and that continues here (even the bare-bones horizontal sequence in which Bullseye kills Mrs. Sentry is a homage to the similar linearity other artists have used in some of Bullseye’s more famous murders in other comics), but every so often there are panels that were constructed entirely on a computer, and the contrast between them and Deodato’s regular work is jarring.



The issue segues perfectly into the big-scale goings-on in “Siege,” Marvel’s breakout hit (sales are running at almost three times Marvel’s own exuberantly pumped expectations), in which all Hell is breaking loose during the aforementioned Osborn invasion of Asgard. This issue features more fantastic Oliver Coipel artwork, and it’s a great thrill-ride, despite multiple oddnesses in the storytelling (one minute Thor is furiously fighting the Sentry, the next he’s calmly standing over a defeated Norman Osborn, for instance, and a newly-returned Iron Man (Tony Stark) is able to remotely shut down Osborn’s own super-armor even though we were specifically told many, many issues ago that Osborn had all the Stark-technology suits replaced with his own armor and weapons-tech).



We get some absolutely great, glad-you-waited-for-it moments, the best of which is certainly comes from the fact that writer Brian Michael Bendis remembered which Marvel character should have the payoff moment of finally decking Norman Osborn (and he gives that character a perfect line while doing it, a ‘real person’ line instead of a comic book slogan)(and there’s the fitting little image of Captain America putting a calming hand on his shoulder the moment after). And of course Coipel’s action-sequences are spectacular, especially the fight – such as we see of it – between Thor and the Sentry. When Coipel draws Thor hammering the Sentry with lightning, you can practically feel it (and he’s one of the only working artists who could have convincingly portrayed what happens to the city of Asgard in this issue). But for me, the neatest such little moment passes so quick you almost don’t notice it: in the midst of the melee, Captain America and his former WWII sidekick Bucky are bantering, just as they did in the Jack Kirby-drawn comics of seventy years ago. I smiled.



Oddly, the issue is almost as full of missed moments too – after all, this is the issue where Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man are reunited on the same side after years of separation, alienation, and heartbreak, and yet in this issue they just take up fighting the bad guys with nary a word or look exchanged. I presume such payoff moments will come later, but considering the fact that five pages of this issue are a text-only backup feature, I wonder that room couldn’t have been found to work in just a single panel or two in the main issue, showing how these three react to seeing each other again.



But picky comics fans can’t have everything (!), and this issue delivers a lot, including a slam-bang cliffhanger that sets up what promises to be a very exciting conclusion. You can read all about that here when it ships to comic stores, I'm guessing  sometime in August.