On Secret Empire, Marvel's not-so-problematic problematic event series

I can't recall another instance in my comics-reading life where online reaction to a particular storyline was so virulently negative but, upon my consulting the text, I failed to see where exactly the anger was coming from. In the case of writer Nick Spencer's year-long "Secret Empire" story, which began with the "Avengers: Standoff" crossover event and built through the 25-issue Captain America: Steve Rogers series before reaching its climax in the Secret Empire miniseries, a great deal of the fan, reader and just casual observer upset seemed to stem more from the marketing of the book--up to including comments from Spencer and others at Marvel--than the text of any of those books.

Well, that and, of course, the political climate in the real United States around the time the long-simmering storyline started ramping up. Just as fascists were overthrowing the United States of the Marvel Universe, the real United States of our universe had just elected a president who attracted fans of fascism, as well as actual, self-proclaimed Nazis and white supremacists; a president who, at one point, even proclaimed moral equivalency between a crowd of demonstrating Nazis and white supremacists and the people who were protesting them in Charlottesville, after one of their members literally murdered a counter-demonstrator.

So yeah, bad timing.

The plot of Secret Empire is, on its face, as comic book-simple as possible: A hero goes bad and, because this hero is Captain America, he betrays the United States and its globalist super-police army SHIELD for its rival, Hydra, which has long been aligned with his World War II-borne enemy, The Red Skull. Hydra is, in the Marvel Universe, essentially crypto-Nazis, adopting some of their affectations and aesthetics. Spencer went to rather great pains to decouple Hydra from actual Nazis in the pages of Captain America: Steve Rogers, but Twitter-ers either weren't reading or didn't care.

Among the louder concerns I still remember hearing about? It was offensive that Captain America would join Hydra, since Hydra is kinda sorta Nazi-ish (Although Hydra was created by Jewish creators Jack Kirby and Stan Lee in the mid-1960s as an opposite army for SHIELD and company to fight; after the one-time Nazi Red Skull joined, it was later retconned to be a centuries-old organization that allied itself with the Axis Powers during World War II. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe--i.e. the popular Marvel Universe--they seem to have originated with the Nazis rather than with ancient aliens, but then, I don't watch Agents of SHIELD so I don't know for sure).

It was offensive that the character would join Hydra, since he was created by two Jewish comic book creators, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon.

It was offensive that a variant cover depicted Magneto as a member of Hydra, since Magneto is Jewish (For what it's worth, that was just a variant cover*, showing a popular-ish Marvel character in a redesigned costume, little different than a Gwen Stacy, Mary Jane or Venom version of Magneto; this version of Hydra is completely generic, even anodyne in their fascist philosophy of the strong should rule the weak, something perfectly in line with life-long mutant supremacist Magneto's own philosophy; and you can't judge a comic book by its cover, let alone its variant cover, as Magneto's not a part of Hydra and in the 400+-page Secret Empire collection, his only appearance are two panels of him chucking chunks of metal at a Hydra helicarrier near the climax).

Reading the actual Secret Empire collection, however--which, in Marvel's curation, includes Secret Empire #0-#10, Free Comic Book Day 2017 (Secret Empire), Captain America #25 and Secret Empire Omega--it is, for the most part, as politics-free as can be. Spencer's massive story reduces Hydra's philosophy into that simple strength > weakness formulation that is, perhaps, uncomfortably close to the whole idea of superheroes. There's no real racial component or nationalist component, except to the degree that Inhumans--whom Marvel has spent several years transforming into the new mutants--are a persecuted minority, and thus have to stand in for all minorities, I guess (Mutants, if you're wondering, have established their own breakaway nation-state in northern California somewhere off-panel). But then, that's the bad guys, the villains persecuting them; the book doesn't suggest that Inhumans/mutants/minorities should be persecuted any more than any of the scores of X-Men stories featuring anti-mutant bigots can be read as a writer or publisher's endorsement of bigotry.

At its heart, the storyline remains almost as simple as it seemed from the start. Steve Rogers, the original Captain America, was zapped by Kobik, a sentient cosmic cube with the brain of a little girl, near the climax of "Standoff." Cosmic cubes being reality-warping paperweights that grant wishes, they make for nice, easy tools for super-comics writers, an in-story free pass to do pretty much anything the writer wants. As I've said before, Cap being made into a Hydra sleeper agent by virtue of a cosmic cube is little different than had he been zapped with a beam from a gun marked "Acme villainizer." It's a pretty simple heel turn, albeit it one that hundreds and hundreds of pages were devoted to chronicling.

I suppose it's possible Spencer did part of his storyline too well, in that he didn't make things quite a simple as he could have. Kobik was brainwashed by The Red Skull to believe that Hydra was the cat's pajamas, and so when circumstances arose in which she had to fix Steve Rogers, she also fixed the fact that he wasn't Hydra by making him Hydra. But in the pages of Steve Rogers especially, Spencer gave Rogers' new memories and magically-altered history a lot of attention. Kobik appeared to have re-written the world so that, in Steve's and the rest of Hydra's understanding, in reality, they were going to win World War II, break with the Axis and usher in an age of benevolent dictatorship for the entire world, but for the fact that the U.S. created a cosmic cube and re-wrote reality to suit their vision, and so Cap was simply remembering what he believed to be the "real" version of events, and fighting to restore that version.

Here, then, is where Spencer gets political, but it's a lot more subtle than having the United States conquered by Nazis. The war of Secret Empire, and the year or so worth of comics leading up to it, was essentially a conflict of narratives, between characters who believed in different sets of facts, different histories, different realities, albeit with a superhero twist. In Captain America's narrative, Hydra was not only right, they were the rightful rulers of the world, having already won it once, but they were robbed by the U.S.' usage of the most fantastic weapon imaginable. In the narrative believed by Cap's adversaries, the rest of the heroes of the Marvel Universe--which, remember, is supposed to be just the real world + superheroes, he believes in an insane lie planted in his head by Kobik.

Less subtle, but more subtle than Twitter would have one believe, is the fact that Spencer has the United States crumple almost immediately to the idea of benevolent dictatorship, and these Americans are, in fact, even willing to put up with an awful lot of sueprvillainy in their day-to-day lives, like black, spikey super-robots and a surveillance state, if it means they don't have to worry about terrorists.

Okay, maybe this isn't all that subtle; passages of Secret Empire #1 read like less timely takes on the 9/11-era security vs. freedom debate than what we saw in Mark Millar's Civil War (we don't have to call it Civil War I now, do we...?), and I suppose there is a belated, if clumsy, indictment of America's quick embrace of neoconservatives in times of danger, but...I don't know, it's pretty garbled. Steve Rogers' Hydra is much more Bush administration than Trump administration, and it's much more The Empire/First Order from the Star Wars movies than either. (For what it's worth, the original "Secret Empire" was a Watergate-era Captain America storyline by Steve Englehart and Saul Buscema that was an indictment of the Nixon administration, ending with a pretty strong implication that Nixon himself was the head of the evil organization that had infiltrated the U.S.).

The story is, quite naturally, a complete mess. At around 400-pages, it had an appreciably epic scale, and it is a rather rare Big Two "graphic novel" that reads like a novel. It took me two sittings, including the better part of a sick day, to read. Spencer writes the entire thing, but because this isn't just a storyline but an "event," it sprawled throughout Marvel's entire publishing line--Wikipedia says there were some 23 different comic book titles that tied-in, ranging from one-shots to whole story arcs from different books--and so one imagines a great deal of what happens in the book and seems to come out of left field was done so on purpose, leaving it up to, say, the X-Men writers to detail the founding of the new mutant nation or Kitty Pryde's team's adventures in the Darkforce dimension and so on.

But because of the publishing strategy, like Civil War II, this collection includes some stops and starts, and doesn't flow all that fluidly; there's an awkward, scattershot approach to it as a whole (it's worth noting, however, that this reads a lot better than Civil War II, and makes a heck of a lot more sense...that said, a lot of scenes and status quos in Secret Empire are premised on the events of Civil War II, which, I suppose, makes it necessary reading).

Visually, it's even worse. There are about six primary artists, meaning pencil artists or artists who handle everything, and too many inkers, colorists and "with" credits on the table of contents. Worse, little to no effort was put to finding and hiring artists whose styles mesh in any appreciable way. The two artists responsible for the most pages are probably Steve McNiven and Andrea Sorrentino; the latter has a style I personally abhor and find incredibly challenging to read. It's extremely photo-referency, to the point tat it looks like photographs run through filters.

It's quite off-putting, especially when sandwiched between pages of more traditional-looking pencil-and-ink super-comics work. For example, Sorrentino's Iron Fist wears a mask that doesn't have the opaque white eyes of, um, every drawing of Iron Fist ever, but it has big eye holes cut into them. Some of Sorrentino's art just seems...inaccurate, too. For example, Civil War II ended with Iron Man Tony Stark kinda sorta dying, his body going into a vague coma-like state, while an AI based on his own personality began appearing to Riri Williams, his kinda sorta legacy replacement, Ironheart.

Throughout Secret Empire, Stark plays an understandably large role, and the AI seems to now be Stark in hologram form; it even wears a suit of armor independently, and rarely if ever appears with Ironheart. Spencer has Stark saying and doing all kinds of very un-AI-like things, but Sorrentino goes even further, to the point where he just seems to be drawing Tony Stark, not a hologram of Tony Stark or a suit of Iron Man armor with a hologram of Tony Stark's head projecting out of it. Were it not for the colorist almost always remembering to color Stark's head blue when, say, he goes into a bar in Montana disguised in a hooded sweatshirt, there would be no suggestion of what Stark actually is at the moment.

And man, then there's the action scene near the beginning, where Captain America and Hydra route Iron Man and a mess of superheroes who meet him in battle in Washington D.C. A bunch of...stuff happens, including Thor getting sent to a different dimension, Cap wielding her hammer, Scarlet Witch being possessed by a demon, but none of that is actually apparent, or even really makes sense as it's happening, and it's not until later dialogue that we begin to figure out what the hell happened in the battle, as it is mostly just vague poses, with some yelling and sound-effects.

It's actually kind of the opposite of how comics are supposed to work.

In the first passage of the story, that told in the #0 issue and the Free Comic Book Day issue, Captain America actualizes the plans he has been laying throughout Steve Rogers. Via mind-control, he captures and turns most of SHIELD to Hydra, taking his long-time girlfriend (and former SHIELD Commander) Sharon Carter hostage, rather than taking over her mind, too.

Captain Marvel, The Guardians of The Galaxy, Alpha Flight and a bunch of heavy-ish hitters are off-planet preparing to fight an alien invasion that Cap secretly planned, and then he turns on a super-force field, locking them out in space to face an infinite wave of alien invaders until they die.

A sizable swathe of heroes like Doctor Strange and the current Defenders are battling a small army of sueprvillains in the streets of New York City when all of Manhattan gets shunted off into the Darkforce dimension, further dwindling the heroes available to fight Captain America and Hydra.

Finally, realizing that the heroes and the U.S. are under attack, Tony Stark (or his AI...whatever) sends everyone to Washington D.C., where they are surprised to find themselves facing Captain America and Hydra. Sorrentino draws the 10-page battle sequence and, as stated above, it's illustrated gibberish and nonsense, just artfully designed images that fail to tell a story.

That may be, in part, because it is hard--no, impossible--to imagine how on earth the likes of Baron Zemo, The Taskmaster, Arnim Zola and a couple of other Hydra knuckleheads could possibly slow down, let alone take down the combined might of The Avengers, The U.S. Avengers, The Champions and others...Spencer and Sorrentino just end the scene with a dramatic image of Captain America holding Mjolnir above his head, but, um, I don't really see how that translates into him beating up, say, Hercules and two different Hulks, you know? So perhaps Spencer's script urged Sorrentino's vague art on.

The next passage, some 40 or so pages into the collection, is where we see the state of the Hydra-controlled United States and...it's kind of hard to suspend one's disbelief enough to buy, honestly, which is really saying something, because mere pages before I was okay with, say, a big red Hulk with a mustache and aviator glasses fighting alongside a character named Squirrel Girl, you know?

America is now a dystopia, so radically changed in everything from basic geography to school text books that it seems like years, rather than maybe weeks, have passed. The world Spencer and artist Steve McNiven and Jay Leisten here present us with seems like the sort of alternate future that "Days of Future Past" or Age of Ultron were set in.

Congress has semi-surrendered the United States to Hydra high command, with Captain America Steve Rogers acting as their leader. Cap also leads The Avengers, which now consists of former Thor Odinson, Deadpool, a reprogrammed Vision, a possessed Scarlet Witch and a handful of villains, like Doctor Octopus (I think that's who that's supposed to be) and Taskmaster and The Black Ant, who continue to serve as the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of Spencer's Secret Empire narrative.

As previously mentioned, Inhumans are rounded up and put in prison camps, while mutants have formed their own independent nation state on the West Coast (um, again). The streets are patrolled by Hydra storm-troopers in head-to-toe black-and-red costumes with skull-shaped masks and spiked billy clubs, and Hydra robots built with adaptoid technology hunt superheroes.

Most of the remaining heroes now dwell outside of Las Vegas in The Mount, where a distracted Tony Stark AI tinkers with shit and Hawkeye Clint Barton and Black Widow try to keep everything together.

Things get more hard to swallow before they get less hard to swallow, including Captain America ordering the televised execution of Rick Jones--by firing squad!--and the aerial bombardment of Las Vegas, essentially wiping the city off the map.

From there, our heroes splinter for a while. Hawkeye endorses Stark's plan to take a team--Hercules, Mockingbird, Quicksilver, Sam Wilson and Ant-Man Scott Lang--to seek out shards of the cosmic cube in order to "fix" Captain America. Black Widow, meanwhile, has her own plan: To assassinate Captain America. Spider-Man Miles Morales, still believing there must be something to Ulysses' vision of him killing Cap on the stairs of the Capitol building from Civil War II, volunteers to join her, and The Champions, Wasp Nadia Pym and Ironheart all go with, to support their Spidey.

Meanwhile, Captain America struggles to rule America and keep his cabal from turning on him, all the while seeking out the cube fragments for himself, which actually serves to keep him from going completely into, like, Doctor Doom territory, as the existence of the cube means he really can undo every sin he commits, up to and including bringing Rick Jones back to life.

While the main plot is going on--and, it will surprise no one to hear that its resolution involves the various groups of heroes extricating themselves from their various predicaments and then all returning to D.C. for a dramatic Round Two--there's a pretty goofy parallel track in which a bearded, amnesiac blond hunk named Steve Rogers finds himself lost in the woods, where he encounters versions of Bucky Barnes, Sam Wilson, The Red Skull and a few mysterious ladies. During these sequences, Spencer narrates rather purpley about hope, and how exactly these scenes all relate to the rest of the action involving the other Steve Rogers is, well, it's ultimately kind of dumb.

Bearded Steve Rogers is essentially the parts of Steve Rogers that Kobik had to excise from Steve to make him Hydra, although it's awfully vague; perhaps this Steve is the original, "real" Steve, and she replaced him with the other, Hydra-affiliated Steve on Earth, trapping the other Steve in the cube with her? At any rate, by the climax, there are two Steve Rogers-es fighting one another, one of them borne of each of the two previously mentioned dueling narratives.

Remember what I said about a relative lack of subtlety? Well, here we're borrowing liberally from the Superman-fighting-himself-in-a-junkyard section of Superman III. You know how it ends--Secret Empire received such a negative reaction that Marvel made the insane move of issuing a press release to assure readers that as bad as things might seem for Captain America at the beginning of the story he will, in fact, make it out okay in the end (Oddly, even one of the characters we are told dies during the events of the series--Black Widow--is teased as very much alive at the end of the story).

Even the Bad Cap sticks around. Much of Secret Empire Omega, which serves as an epilogue, features the two Steves having a conversation, with Good Cap set to go out and try to atone for what his evil doppelganger did while he was stuck in a cosmic cube or whatever, and Bad Cap doing pull-ups in a prison cell, where he can remain a viable Marvel villain.

What's next? Well, Marvel relaunched Captain America as part of their "Legacy" initiative, meaning it launched with a new, random-feeling high number. The new creative team of Mark Waid and Chris Samnee are incredibly talented, and seemingly especially chosen for their ability to tell more classic-feeling Captain America narratives.

I'm sure they will be good comics. I don't see anyone talking about them, though; is that a good thing or a bad thing...?



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So the whole time I was writing this post, the hardcover collection of Secret Empire was sitting within arm's reach of me, which means I've spent an awfully long time with that cover in my peripheral vision. It is one of the covers for Secret Empire #1, repurposed as the cover for the entire collection, and it just just a spectacularly poor choice for the cover, based on the characters chosen to place on it. Few are in the story in any sizable way.

Captain America obviously plays an enormous role throughout the series, and Captain Marvel and Doctor Strange play sizable roles as well. Most of the other characters, though? Rocket Raccoon appears in several scenes alongside Star-Lord, and Ironheart and Ms. Marvel play small roles.

Thor and Spider-Man, though, appear at the beginning and the end, maybe a sentence or two of dialogue apiece. I have no memory of Medusa, "Old Man" Logan, Storm or any Human Torches in the book at all...I think Logan might have been in there somewhere.

Meanwhile, Iron Man, Hawkeye, Black Widow, Spider-Man Miles Morales, Sam Wilson, The Punisher and Maria Hill don't even get as much cover-space as the SHIELD helicarriers or the Chitauri warship.





*Marvel was obviously listening, though, and reacted to concerns. That "controversial" Hydra-ized Magneto cover is not one of the 34 variant covers that appear in the back of this collection, which does include many Hydra-ized covers in two different formats, the vast majority of them featuring characters who are not Hydra agents in the story itself.

On four Marvel collections

Apache Skies

This 2002 semi-sequel to the previously discussed Blaze of Glory reunited the creative team of John Ostrander and Leonardo Manco with The Rawhide Kid, who lead the ensemble in the previous miniseries. The title is a reference to the plotline: The Kid is seeking to avenge an old ally of his, The Apache Kid (another old, Marvel-owned character, unrelated to the real-world Apache Kid, who didn't appear in Blaze of Glory–perhaps this was because Red Wolf had fulfilled that story's Native American hero quota, but, more likely, because between Rawhide, Outlaw, Two-Gun and Colt, that story had all the Kids it could handle).

Unlike Blaze of Glory, Apache Skies appeared on Marvel's then-new Max imprint, supposedly the home of the publisher's adult content–with the logo itself reading "Parental Advisory, EXPLICIT Content" and an "MA" rating–but in practice these were almost always just regular Marvel books with regular Marvel characters, allowing for some actual swear words instead of grawlixes or black bars. They rarely if ever actually included nuded or a greater degree of violence than that seen in the regular Marvel line, and certainly never threatened anything approaching literary, the way that rival company DC's Vertigo imprint was so often prone to.

Here, the N-word and the S-word appear a few times, the only sex scene is a single panel in which the couple are naked but posed so as to cover their bathing suit areas, and the violence is no more extreme than in Blaze of Glory, or any old-school Western: When people get shot, they mostly just fall or sprawl. None of this is meant as a criticism of the comic, of course, just a note on the head-scratching nature of the Max imprint in general. Whatever Marvel's plans for it upon its creation, as the years passed and the publisher gave up on younger readers for their core, Marvel Universe line, there was no real distinction. All Marvel readers were adults, after all. (I should note that this has changed more in the past few years, as the publisher does release books now that are perfectly all-ages in content, with Ms. Marvel and Unbeatable Squirrel Girl leaping most immediately to mind.)

Aside from the change in imprint, this story has a much smaller cast and a smaller scale. This makes for a tighter, more focused and, yes, more realistic story, but it also loses some of the operatic grandeur of Blaze; the previous series might have been prone to purple prose and self-importance, but then, that was part of its charm, too.

Ostrander and Manco's Johnny Bart, looking more like a "real" cowboy than the Hollywood version of the original, 20th century Rawhide Kid comics, is going about gunning down the men who killed the Apache Kid, shooting him in the back. So too is another long-haired gunfighter, this one calling herself The Apache Kid–in actuality, the first A.K.'s widow. The pair join forces, with A.K. II being quit resistant to doing so, given how her husband's attempts to bridge the worlds of their people and that of the white men ended up for him.

Lots of gunfights and a spectacular train chase follow, including a final look at The Rawhide Kid that is far more dramatic, even superheroic, than the simple riding off into the sunset of the previous series.

It's a pretty great comic book Western, and Manco's artwork is just as incredible as it was in Blaze, perhaps more so. Like the preceding storyline, this collection has also gone out-of-print. It's kind of too bad, as they are such good comics, but then, that's Marvel's publishing strategy. Perhaps they'll reissue them both in an omnibus if Hollywood starts running out of Marvel superheroes to base films and TV shows on, and finally works its way down to their Western characters.

Captain America & The Mighty Avengers Vol. 1: Open For Business

Don't be fooled by the title or the numeral 1 on the spine; this is only technically the first collection of a new series, collecting the first seven of the nine-issue comic book series by that title. In actuality, it's merely a continuation of writer Al Ewing's Mighty Avengers series, which shipped all of 14 issues before getting technically relaunched with a slightly different (and more distinct) title, a new artist and a new #1 (So, if you want to read Ewing's Mighty Avengers in trade at this point, you'll want to consult Wikipedia, as the reading order is Mighty Avengers Vols. 1-3 and Captain America & The Mighty Avengers Vols. 1-2...careful you don't accidentally get any of the seven Brian Michael Bendis-written volumes of The Mighty Avengers, some numbered and some not).

Underscoring the complete arbitrariness of the relaunch and re-titling is the fact that the book begins apparently where the last one left off, meaning none of the characters are introduced (some, like Captain America Sam Wilson and Luke Cage, probably won't need any introduction to even casual Marvel readers; others, like Blue Marvel or Power Man II*, most definitely will), their new status quo isn't introduced (basically, this is a splinter-group of Avengers functioning as a community organization, a Heroes For Hire that don't actually need to be paid for their service) and plotlines still in-progress (Spider-Man's first appearance is apologizing for what he did to the team while Otto Octavius' mind was in his body and he was the "Superior" Spider-Man, a villain and his company from previous issues are still there, in mid-plot).

If those aren't enough hurdles to the casual reader, who might–quite understandably!–see the "1" on the spine and pick the damn thing up expecting a decent jumping-on point, the very first issue collected herein (that is, Captain America & The Might Avengers #1) is an Axis tie-in, meaning that it introduces the title character on the first pages as a thoughtless, violent vigilante, and his teammate Luke Cage as a self-centered, disrespectful, greedy asshole. The reason for this is that they have been "inverted" before the start of this issue (in the pages of Axis), in which good guys and bad guys had their moral alignments flip-flopped.

Much of the first half of the book is concerned with Axis business, as Wilson and Cage join a team of other inverted Avengers (and Medusa) to fight the non-inverted members of their own team. From there, it resumes storylines in-progress from Mighty Avengers, which is heavy on Blue Marvel, who is a Sentry-like Superman analogue created by Kevin Grevioux in 2008.

I spent most of the time in a state somewhere between bewildered and trying to mentally place this between other Marvel events and what I knew of Marvel's publishing moves the last few years, which is a shame, because I really like quite a few of the characters on the team, and, with a few exceptions, it seemed like Ewing was doing a riff on Brian Michael Bendis' franchise-rejuvenating "street-level" Avengers team that he launched as The New Avengers (Ironically, Bendis' Mighty Avengers title featured his more traditional, superhero action-focused team and adventures).

From what I've seen in this particular book, which is set after a few line-up changes, this is one of–if not the–most diverse superhero teams of the last few years, featuring black characters Cap, Cage, Blue Marvel, Power Man II and Spectrum, the Hispanic White Tiger V (I think this one is the fifth one; I lost count a long time ago) the exotically "oriental" Kaluu (he's a 500-year-old dude from a Himalayan village who hung out with The Ancient One, depicted as an, um, ancient old Asian man, but soon to be played in a feature film by Tilda Swinton, I think...?) and a pair of white people, one of whom spends all of her time with green skin (She-Hulk) and the other who dresses from head-to-toe in red-and-blue tights (Spider-Man, now Amazing rather than Superior).

This diversity appears to be anything but forced, by the way. For the most part, these are all native New Yorkers who seem perfectly suited to the book and some of the characters, like the new Power Man, for example, would likely seem out-of-place were they anywhere other than on this team and in this book at this particular moment in time. In other words, it's a diverse team, but a completely organically diverse team.

This really seems to be a case of Marvel's over-reliance on a strategy that favors short-term sales to the direct market (and, perhaps, their quixotic quest for constant market share dominance over DC, which seems of no real value aside from bragging rights) interfering with their ability to publish collections for the bookstore and library market...or just the folks who read collections instead of serially-published comics. Sure, that Captain America & The Mighty Avengers #1 probably sold quite a few more units to direct market retailers than Mighty Avengers #15 might have, but the collection would have at least been readable as Mighty Avengers Vol. 4.

But then, I don't run a comics company. Marvel certainly knows all this, and are selling the comics and collections to the people they want to, and not to the rest of us.

Uncanny Avengers Vol. 1: Counter-Evolutionary

This is yet another randomly rebooted Marvel comic book series that makes reading the books in trade somewhere between confusing and confounding. This Uncanny Avengers Vol. 1, featuring the first few issues a series entitled Uncanny Avengers written by Rick Remender, shouldn't be confused with Uncanny Avengers Vol. 1: The Red Shadow, which collects the first few issues of a series entitled Uncanny Avengers written by Rick Remender.

Rather randomly relaunched under the same title after the events of Axis, this particular Uncanny Avengers Vol. 1 at least seems to devote some effort towards starting a new storyline in a manner that a new reader could pick it up and not be hopelessly lost, as they might with Captain America & The Mighty Avengers Vol. 1. Yes, Remender is still writing a book with the same title, and a line-up consisting of a mixture of Avengers and X-Men (or at least mutants), but the line-up has changed, its composition a bit more ad hoc and they have a new adventure to embark on. It is, of course, heavily burdened by past events–including those of Remender's own Axis event/series and the fact that Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver have just learned that they are not Magneto's children after all (Because Fox still has the rights to the X-Men, apparently, while Marvel Studios wants to make use of Scarlet Witch in future movies, I guess).

Seeking answers to their true origins and operating under the assumption that The High-Evolutionary is involved, the twins have traveled to Counter-Earth, which is basically The High Evolutionary's Planet of Doctor Moreau. Scarlet Witch aving been off the (seriously diminished) Avengers Unity Squad's radar for a while, Rogue gathers a new Unity Squad to go looking for her.

Rogue, Doctor Voodoo, The Vision, Captain America Sam Wilson and the newly-inverted Sabretooth travel to Counter-Earth via voodoo, but the spell is interrupted, and they end up scattered all over the planet. The remainder of the story arc finds the seven heroes each dealing with different conflicts or challenges, all of which are eventually revealed to be part of a whole, and in the climactic battle against The Counter-Evolutionary and his forces they all come together to win the day.

It's pretty classic (read negatively, basic) superhero team plotting, but Remender does it well. Sure, some of the characters have less to do than others (particularly Cap), but then, this is pretty obviously the story of the twins, and so their getting the most panel-time certainly makes sense.

Remender is still working with artist Daniel Acuna (who drew the previous volume, Uncanny Avengers Vol. 4, because, remember, this second Uncanny Avengers Vol. 1 comes after Vols. 2-4, because Marvel has a peculiar belief in the totemic power of the number 1), and while I've not always been a fan of his work, here he gets all kinds of cool stuff to draw, particularly given all the animal-headed humanoids that populate Counter-Earth. He additionally does a pretty great job rendering some of the super-powers, particularly Quicksilver's super-speed, which he and Remender collaborate on to depict in semi-inspired ways.

It's pretty good super-team comics...although it's also kind of curious, as the title was re-relaunched immediately after this story arc, with another new #1 late last year, so expect a third Uncanny Avengers Vol. 1 soon. That volume, at least, will have a new writer to help distinguish it from the last two Vols. 1.

Uncanny X-Men Vol. 6: Storyville

Brian Michael Bendis is a comic book writer, but, for the sake of saying the same thing that I and others so often say about him in a different way, let's imagine that he was a runner competing in track and field events. If his comic book writing were running, we could say that Bendis is a very experienced, very talented runner. He has pretty great form, and he clearly understands the mechanics of running and what it takes to do well in his chosen sport. He's quite versatile, able to run marathons and super-marathons, as well as shorter distances. It's been a long time since he even attempted a sprint, but one imagines he would do decently at such a short event as well.

The major flaw in his performance isn't the running of the race, but the ending of it. Sometimes he collapses before the finish line, sometimes he trips over it, sometimes he falls flat on his back, sometimes he misses the finish line completely, running off the track and colliding with a bystander.

Uncanny X-Men Vol. 6 collects the end of Bendis' run on the X-Men franchise, which has spanned three years and almost 80 issues of two titles, All-New X-Men and Uncanny X-Men. It is a very poor ending, which shouldn't come as any surprise, given how the ends of Bendis' runs on various other titles, characters, franchises and crossover/event series have gone, but it's not his worst ending. To return to the race-running metaphor, this is more of an ugly, clumsy, stumbling collapse of a finish than some spectacular, laughable, unimaginable collision.

Bendis' run spun out of the events of Avengers Vs. X-Men, a massive status quo-shaking event series in which he was one of the main architects and writers, and was premised on a two basic ideas. First, that Cyclops had done something horrible (he not only took over the world and beat up most of the Marvel Universe, he also killed Charles Xavier), making him a wanted man and an absolute pariah to all but a handful of longtime allies. Second, Beast decided to bring the original X-Men–the teenaged versions of himself, Cyclops, Angel, Iceman and Jean Grey–forward into the present/their future, in order to shock Cyclops back to his senses...or, at the very least, allow Teen Scott to tell off Adult Scott.

These ideas allowed Bendis to write two interconnected X-Men books–one featuring Adult Cyclops and his outcast team of mutants, the other featuring the teen X-Men, who it was eventually determined were stuck in the present–as well as providing an awful lot of tension. The time-travel element especially, as even the most rudimentary understanding of time-travel (i.e. that gained from watching cartoons and reading comic books) would dictate that the X-teens had to go back at some point (the complicated but once strictly enforced rules of time travel in the Marvel Universe are a different matter, and Bendis excused himself from those with a weird "Time is broken" sub-plot tacked on to one of his many event/series).

Hell, even just a basic awareness of how comic books work at the Big Two publishers all but promised that Bendis would have to put things back to some semblance of where he found them when he left. He introduced a seemingly un-resolvable issue...surely he would resolve it, rather than leaving it for another writer, right?

Not so much. The teens are, of course, here to stay (All-New X-Men has already been relaunched). Which is fine: Cyclops is MIA after the events of Secret Wars (or, actually, after the mysterious events after Secret Wars, which the "All-New, All-Different" Marvel Universe skipped over), Jean Grey is dead, Angel is...I lost track (but suffice it to say, quite different than his First Class version), Beast is further mutated so as to look nothing like his original version and Iceman, well, Iceman's really the only true duplicate. The fact that there are basically a million X-Men means having a few doubles hardly matters. It's not like they all always need something to be doing at any one time anyway; the writers and artists use the dozen or dozens they like in the the many X-books, and the others are just left in the limbo of the Marvel Universe occurring off-page until someone decides they want to use Maggot or Jubilee or Cannonball or whoever.

As for the other storyline, regarding Cyclops' place in the Marvel Universe, well, that is apparently To Be Resolved...Bendis just lets it fizzle in his run.

As for the conclusion of that run in Storyville, which collects the last six issues of Uncanny, is simply six single-issue stories, each more-or-less devoted to a single group of characters or plot-point, providing some form of punctuation...even if it is more often than not an ellipses. And, if you're wondering why the conclusion of All-New's storylines might appear in a collection of Uncanny well, as he did during his run on the Avengers franchise, Bendis never let the title of the comic dictate its contents.

The first, drawn by Chris Bachalo, finds Alex "Havoc" Summers meeting with his brother Scott at The New Xavier School, where flashbacks reveal how Scott unilaterally decided to disband his X-Men team and his school, and his break-up with Emma.

The next, drawn by Kris Anka, teams Magik up with Kitty, as their friendship is renewed and they return to the fold of the "real" X-Men, those based at the Jean Grey School. It's set partially on Monster Island, so, in addition to treating readers to Anka art, it treats us to Anka art depicting classic Kirby monsters.

That's followed by another Anka issue, devoted to Dazzler taking her revenge on Mystique, who abused her rather badly throughout much of Bendis' Uncanny.

The penultimate issue, drawn by Valerio Schiti, follows Cyclops' now teacher-less students, The Stepford Cuckoos (here dubbed less evocatively "The Stepford Sisters") and the new characters Bendis co-created for Uncanny, as they strike out on their own. They do alright for awhile, with Goldballs becoming an unlikely celebrity, but things eventually go sideways, and they realize they still have a lot to learn. They're never officially called "The New Mutants" as a team name, but they are alluded to as such. In a more expansive time for Marvel's merry mutants, perhaps they would be starring in a book entitled The All-New, All-Different New Mutants.

And the final issue is renumbered #600, even though it is the 36th issue of this volume of Uncanny, because Marvel only appreciates high numbers when they end in two zeros. Uncanny X-Men also recently relaunched, with that title going to what appears to be the post-Secret Wars version. I can't imagine it will last 100 issues without being relaunched and renumbered, but I'm certain there will be an Uncanny X-Men #700 eventually.

This issue, illustrated in jam fashion by a mixture of artists from throughout Bendis' run on the X-Men books and frequent collaborators of his (of which there is obviously overlap), is basically an issue-length intervention for Beast, based on his having kicked off the two series with his time-travel shenanigans and some other acts of madder-than-usual science (this story, incidentally, doesn't acknowledge that the whole time he was doing all this stuff, he was also part of a clandestine group of super-geniuses trying to save the Multiverse and occasionally having to snuff out alternate earths in New Avengers and the long run-up to Secret Wars, all of which really makes the time travel business seem like small potatoes...relatively, anyway).

In between, Bendis ties up all that he's going to tie up: Colossus makes amends with Magik, Adult Iceman comes out to Teen Iceman (resolving the weird question that Bendis left dangling when he outted Iceman, as to whether the past version was gay and the present one was straight, raising the specter of a text that posits homosexuality as a choice), Jean chooses Teen Beast over Teen Cyclops and Eva Bell reappears to tell Beast to join the cast of one of the too-many Inhumans books.

Also, Cyclops initiates a Million Mutant March in Washington, D.C. which doesn't make any goddam sense, no matter how you want to think about it. Paul O'Brien called the scene "unearned," and I think he's right; also, I think you should read Paul O'Brien's review instead of mine. Too late? Well then, read his and mine.



*Or Power Man III, depending on whether you want to count Erik Josten or not. I don't.

Review: Uncanny Avengers Vol. 2: The Apocalypse Twins

Despite being the second collection of the Rick Remender-written title starring a half-Avengers, half-X-Men "Unity" faction of Avengers, and despite starring the same characters with no additions or subtractions, and despite its reference to the events in the previous volume and the continuing tensions between the characters from that volume, in several respects this read like an entirely different book.

Much of that is visual, given that the "regular" artist for the series, John Cassaday, only lasted four issues, and the artist who drew the remaining, non-Cassaday chapter of Vol. 1 (Olivier Coipel) isn't around either. Art duties have been assumed, at least for six of the seven issues collected here, by Daniel Acuna.

And much more of that seeming like a different book is due to the fact that this volume—much more so than the previous one, which was devoted to premise establishing, character introduction and dealing with the aftermath of a single previous Marvel comic, Avengers Vs. X-Men—is permeated by the at times confusing and slightly unpleasant feeling that can occasionally characterize Big Two super-comics: The sense that one has walked in during the middle of a movie, or, more accurately, started watching a soap opera already a decade or so in progress.

The sub-title characters are descendants of the apparently deceased X-Men villain Apocalypse, and there is apparently a whole culture built up around Apocalyse, including an extended family with feuds over the rights of ascendency, a cult, a connection to the Celestials...probably all stuff devoted Marvel readers are already pretty familiar with. Additionally, characters discuss minor plot points in an off-handed fashion, like Rogue and Sunfire's history with each other and with Apocalypse, while fairly major plot points are culled from many other Marvel stories, some of which I've read (this deals with the fallout from the first story arc of the Remender-written Uncanny X-Force, for example, the death of The Sentry from Siege, and so on) and some of which I haven't (Wasp and Captain America both being lost in time and space for a while, whatever Wonder Man's been up to, like, is whole life, something from another Remender-written Uncanny X-Force story arc in which Wolverine maybe killed Archangel or something, and something from somewhere about Wolverine killing Daken by drowning him in a mud puddle, I guess...?). And there are multiple versions of Kang involved, and thus time-travel and...Oh man. I could follow the plot okay, but I felt pretty left out of the specifics, the texture and the emotional beats of the story, and generally had no idea what was going on regarding the various motivations for the characters' actions, or the finer points of their conflicts and histories.

As near as I can figure out, at some point, Kang kidnapped the titular twins and trained them in time travel or something, leading them to a critical point in history in which seven time lines diverge. They rebel against Kang, and are setting about some incredibly complicated plan involving a mutant rapture that will take all of the mutants from earth to a new planet, Planet X, forever enforcing a sort of segregation between mutants and humans (Or temporarily, I guess; since humans should continue to mutate, right? Again I find myself at the point where I'm not entirely clear as to what distinguishes a mutant from a human being; if the formers are evolutionary jumps of the latter, or if they are a distinct sub-species or a distinct species).

The Avengers Unity Division wants to stop this mad plan, but, to do so, they must first stop fighting themselves, and Remender has them breaking into pretty clear Avengers vs. X-Men factions, with Havoc siding with Cap and The Avengers (in an attempt to keep them team meant to realize Xavier's dream together) and Thor siding with the X-Men, who seem eager to kill the hell out of the Apocalypse Twins, which is something he can get behind, being a warrior and all.

I was lost enough on the core points regarding what the fuck a mutant actually is that the conflict didn't really make a whole lot of sense to me, as in the argument between Rogue and Scarlet Witch regarding Alex's dumb speech in the first volume, nor did the circumstances of the schism really register with me (Cap seems pissed at Wolverine for leading the squad that killed the child version of Apocalypse in X-Force, but I'm pretty sure Fantomex pulled the trigger, and, anyway, isn't that kid alive and well in Wolverine and The X-Men, or is that yet another of Apocalypse kids?).

Also somewhat confounding was the fact that the team seemed to be facing an extinction level event, and yet the rest of the Avengers—those in Avengers and Avengers Assemble, for example—don't answer the all-hands-on-deck distress signal. It's just these half-dozen goofballs, because they happen to be the ones in this title (On the very last pages, though, Remender just check in with the various Avengers and X-Men squads, as they all listen to the Twins' call for a mass mutant exodus from the planet).

All in all though, it's a bigger, richer narrative than the one seen in the first volume, albeit one I found overly-complicated. Part of that's on me, sure, as I'm not well-versed enough in Marvel minutae to "get" much of this, but then, I think it points to a certain degree of failure on the part of the creators and the publisher as well, given that this is a book that is, by the point collected here, less than a year old, and part of a line-wide effort to attract new readers to the Marvel Universe.

Regarding attracting new readers, I thought it was pretty weird that this book collects Uncanny Avengers #8AU, a designation meant to indicate that it ties into Age of Ultron. That issue is drawn by Adam Kubert, and barely mentions Ultron, but instead chronicles Kang's time with the Twins. It's presented out-of-order here too, not appearing on either side of Uncanny Avengers #8, but between issues #6 and #7.

I was quite surprised how much I ended up liking the art, as Acuna is an artist I had started to actively avoid after the few, pretty poor examples of his artwork I've seen in the past. The Acuna who shows up here, however, is head and shoulders above the one I had seen working on DC books in the past, though, the artwork having a much more drawn look to it, and the character acting leaps and bound above what it once was.

I particularly liked his rendering of Alex "Havoc" Summers, which features a leaner, more elongated figure with a slightly angular face; it's a build not unlike that of his brother Scott Summers, and one that distinguishes him from the other big muscular short-haired blond guy on the team, Steve "Captain America" Rogers.

One aspect of his work here I didn't care for? Wolverine's bushy sideburns are still visible when he's wearing his cowl, which makes me think either his sideburns are too big or his mask is too small.

There are some pretty cool designs in this book, although I'm not entirely sure who came up with what—in addition to Acuna and Kubert, Cassaday is still around enough to provide the cover art, and it's possible he did design work on the series before the reality of a monthly (or, knowing Marvel, more-than-monthly) series caught up with him. The Twins are pretty cool-looking, resembling god-like, mythological figures more than Apocalypse himself ever did, and the Four Hourseman that show up during Kubert's section, during medieval times, when Thor carried an axe rather than a hammer, are pretty awesome.

Check them out:

They only last about two pages, but I was pretty sad to see them go, based on how weird and cool-looking they are.

Four new Horsemen appear near the climax, a Horseman unity division including black and blue versions of recently deceased mutants (Banshee and Daken) and recently deceased humans (The Grim Reaper and The Sentry). They also called themselves The Four Horsemen of Death, rather than Apocalypse. They're obviously not as cool-looking as the medieval four above, and they lack horses, robot or otherwise, which makes them pretty poor horsemen in my book. If you're going to be a horseman of any kind, I think it absolutely necessary that you at least have a horse.

And now I leave you with an image of The Sentry peeling apart his face to shoot energy beams at Thor:

Review: Wolverine: Wolverine Vs. The X-Men

While given its own, distinct title and it's own (unnumbered) collection, this is essentially the second half of the "Wolverine Goes To Hell" storyline which I expected to find in Wolverine Goes To Hell (what I got instead was a back-up story that filled out the volume).

Where did we leave Wolvie? Well, Mystique, Melita, Hellstrom and the two Ghost Riders had seemingly just exorcised his demon-possessed body and his soul had just climbed out of hell to reclaim it, when X-Men Cyclops, Emma Frost, Magneto and Namor showed up to kick Wolverine's ass.

Writer Jason Aaron picks up where he left off, although now he's got a new artist collaborator: Daniel Acuna, whose painterly, heavily-referenced style looks better, looser and more organic in there than anywhere I've seen it previously. I'm still not a huge fan, but I do think this is the best it's ever looked—it actually reminded me a bit of Stuart Immonen's nineties work, only with painted-looking covers.

Apparently to keep the fighting going, the exorcism didn't go off all that perfectly, and while Wolverine's soul and/or mind are now back in his brain, so too are all the demons possessing him, so he has to fight it out with them in his head while the X-Men deal with his body.

The newer, colder, crueler, badder Cyclops of course has a contingency plan for killing Wolverine if it ever comes to him—Magneto sucks out his adamantium, Namor rips off his head—but that doesn't take into account Wolverine's new hell-based powers, like fire-claws, flame breath and the ability to force choke dudes at a distance.

The three issues that comprise the storyline are mainly one big, long fight scene, with Wolverine fighting a small contingent of X-Men (Plan B involves the always welcome Dr. Nemesis and Fantomex), while Emma and Melita lead a small band of X-women (Kitty, Robue and Jubilee) inside Wolverine's mind to help him and his memories of himself and loved ones sword fight the demons in their to death.

You can probably guess how it all ends.

Two more single issues are collected in this volume.

The first is the next issue of Wolverine, in which the once again alive and himself goes after Mystique and whoever she was working with to put him through the proceeding story arcs' worth of punishment, and a cool and absurd new Jason Aaron villain—a Mr. Lord Deathstrike—who also wants to kill Mystique.

The final issue is Wolverine #5.1, which has nothing to do with anything, really, which is probably why it's stuck in the back of the volume as it is (Even though it was published before the other four issues, which are Wolverine #6-9). The ".1" issues were designed—or at least sold—as good jumping-on point issues, generally kicking off a storyline.

Aaron's script, entitled "Happy," is about 50% Wolverine 101, and 50% comic relief, with Wolverine's girlfriend Melita planning a surprise party attended by Wolvie's fellow X-Men and Avengers, and Wolverine getting distracted by a trail of blood that leads him to those two guys with bone weapons from the second storyline collected in Wolverine: Goodbye, China Town (So even though I read that book first before Goes To Hell and Vs. The X-Men, I guess it actually comes after these two, in reading order; again, labeling the volumes with volume numbers might help a bit).

(I like that these guys have the superpower of super-whittling)

It's got nice, sharp artwork by artist Jefte Palo, which is in stark contrast to that of Acuna, but aesthetically closer to the work of Ron Garney, whose art I think works best with Aaron's Wolverine comics. There's a pretty nice Paolo Rivera cover to that particular issue, as well.

It's a nice little done-in-one, but it does feel awfully out-of-place here as it breaks the momentum of the previously storyline, in which Wolverine is hotly in pursuit of "The Red Right Hand," those that set him up for the events of the previous two storylines. Not unilke the way the back-up story "Scorched Earth" broke the momentum at the end of Goes To Hell.

********************

I'm not entirely convinced that Wolverine, even with souped-up hell powers, would be able to take Namor, though, especially under water, which is where they fight (Drowning is one of the few ways that Wolverine can really be killed, isn't it...?)

Namor flying punches Wolverine way up into the sky, then dives underwater with him, strangling him and...Wolverine wins. Somehow.

It's kept ambiguous, by happening off-panel, not unlike Wolverine's completely impossible defeat of Lobo in DC Vs. Marvel Comics.