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.

Review: Monsters Unleashed: Monster-Size Hard Cover

Marvel was not kidding around when they named this collection of the five-issue Monsters Unleashed "Monster-Size." It's 14 by 21.6-inches, which might be hard to picture exactly, but, for context, your average trade paperback or comic book is just 6.6-by-10.1. This massive hardcover dwarfs those Street Angel one-shots Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca have been publishing with Image, which are 8.8-by-12.2, or those Alex Ross/Paul Dini one-shots like Superman: Peace on Earth and Batman: War on Crime, which were 9.8-by-13.2.

It is a big comic book. I'm fairly certain it is the biggest comic I've ever read, with Lauren Weinstein's Goddess of War coming the closest (and that was only 10-by-14.9 inches, and remains the most annoying comic I own, as I have no idea where to properly store it). It's a coffee table book, but only in the sense that it is big enough to be a coffee table. As I am typing this, it is sitting on my kitchen table next to me, and it takes up almost half of the table.

Does that massive size matter? Yes, in this particular case, I believe it does. That's because it made the act of reading Monsters Unleashed, a between-events event series that seemed mainly an exercise in maintaining the publisher's ownership of the title of their early 1970s horror anthology, into an experience in and of itself. I may forget plot particulars and which characters or artists participated in the future, but I likely won't forget lugging the huge, heavy tome home from the library, dropping it with a room-shaking thud on my living room floor and reading its poster-sized pages, with some panels the size of some other comics' splash pages.

The story is written by Cullen Bunn, and he works with a different artists on each of the five issues: Steve McNiven and Jay Leisten, Greg Land, Leinil Francis Yu with Gerry Alanguilan and Michael Jason Paz, Salvador Larroca and Adam Kubert. None of these are artists that I would have necessarily picked as an ideal artist for a story involving Marvel's heroes fighting the old Jack Kirby and Stan Lee-created monsters from the pre-Fantastic Four Marvel comics (I probably would have tried to get Nick Bradshaw, whose hyper-detailed style is so similar to that of Art Adams, one of comics' finest monster artists). In fact, there are at least two artists on that list whose work I actively dislike.

Regardless, these huge pages are an incredible showcase for an artist's work; these pages are slightly larger than the size in which most Marvel comics artists used to draw, before the art was reduced to fit into a comic book. That gives a reader an unusually close look at their work, when suddenly no detail is too small that it can't be pored over, and its component shapes and lines scrutinized. I must confess that Land and Larroca, two reference-heavy artists whose work I dislike and, in the case of the former, actively keeps me from reading books he draws, look better-than-ever here. Even if they are drawing over photo reference (and I don't know that's what they do, I just know that's what it looks like), it's difficult to notice on such a big canvas as that offered here.

Additionally, the format infuses all of the pages with import, as almost no panel is smaller than a splash page. And when Bunn does script a splash page, or, heaven forfend, a two-page splash, well it's like one is reading posters rather than comics.

It is therefore a little unfortunate how little there is to Bunn's story. The premise I described above, suggesting Spider-Man and the Marvel heroes battling Fin Fang Foom and the Atlas/Marvel monsters, sounds a simple one, and that simplicity was actually a selling point, particularly since the series was immediately following Civil War II and the crossover series before that was the complex, DC "crisis" style Secret Wars. Despite the covers and the the virtual promise of that premise as seen in the Monsters Unleashed Prelude collection, that wasn't quite the idea of Monsters Unleashed.

Rather, there are three groups of monsters, and the Kirby/Lee creations are but one of them and, honestly, they play a very small part in the proceedings. Giant monsters that we will eventually be told are called "Leviathons" begin raining down on Earth in the form of huge, blazing meteors. Immediately upon landfall, they arise and attack the nearest city, keeping all of Marvel's participating heroes fairly busy. The Atlas/Marvel monsters eventually ally themselves with the superheroes to fight off the alien Leviathons, the idea being that if any giant monster is going to conquer Earth, it's going to be one of them. And, finally, the day is saved by a half-dozen brand new giant monsters, who aren't introduced until the fifth and final issue (and who would go on to star in the ongoing Monsters Unleashed monthly series, which was announced before this event series even wrapped up and, I believe, demonstrating Marvel's willingness to greenlight just about anything, regardless of what the market might be interested in and/or able to support).

Bunn perhaps wisely introduces Marvel's many heroes by the team, with each assembling to battle a Leviathon, and having their names announced in little text boxes next to them: The Avengers (the ones from the Mark Waid/Michael del Mundo series; the Unity Squad and the U.S.Avengers are MIA), The Champions, The X-Men and The Guardians of The Galaxy are introduced as monster-fighting squads in the first issue, with Captain Marvel and Alpha Flight appearing at the beginning of the second. A few solo players are also involved, including Black Panther and, relevant to the story, Elsa Bloodstone and Moon Girl from Moon Girl and Devi Dinosaur.

Also introduced is a mysterious little boy obsessed with monsters, who has some sort of connection to the Marvel monsters like Fin Fang Foom, Gorgilla and company. As the Leviathon shower gets stronger and stronger, Foom and his forces eventually join the fray--Vandoom tries to earlier, but gets mistaken for a "bad" monster and slapped away--and hold the line, while the heroes figure out what's what.

What's what is this: The boy, Kei Kawade, is an Inhuman with the ability to summon, transport and apparently command (to a degree) any monster he draws. Medusa and Karnak show up at Parker Industries to explain some legend of an Inhuman with similar powers who fought off the Leviathon hordes in the ancient past. So, like Civil War II, the very next Marvel crossover event series to follow it was centered on a new Inhuman (I couldn't help but think of former Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada's explanation as to why he wanted to do the whole "No More Mutant" thing; that he felt "because they're a mutant" had become too easy a catch-all origin for any emerging super-character in the Marvel Universe. Here, then, is a pretty concrete example of how Inhumans are the new mutants).

With the help of Moon Girl, who has created a machine to translate the Leviathons' roars, Kei eventually decides to create his own monsters, but, again, these don't appear until the very last issue. When they do, they fight the leader of the Leviathons, they lose for a while and then they win. And...that's the whole story.

There are some fun moments to it all--how could there not be?--but it was really rather surprising what little story there is. What surprised me most was how little the Marvel monsters had to do, to the point that few of them are even named, and only a handful get any lines at all, with those that speak generally only getting a token line or two (FFF gets the most dialogue, but even then his total number of lines could probably be counted on a single hand). Also weird was the fact that the Marvel heroes all acted like they couldn't tell the Marvel monsters from the invaders; granted, many of these characters are relatively new faces, but I'm pretty sure everyone fights Fin Fang Foom eventually (I know both The All-New Wolverine and The Totally Awesome Hulk already have, within the first few issues of their solo titles) and hell, Orrgo was just on the SHIELD payroll as recently as The Howling Commandos of SHIELD and played a part in the "Standoff" storyline.

Some of the new monsters look potentially interesting, but then their weak entrance and similarly small roles in the story mean they are really nothing more than names and designs at this point, so it's actually kind of weird that Marvel green-lit an ongoing in which they star along Kid Kaiju, the superhero name that Spider-Man Miles Morales gives to Kei.

Were this not the biggest comic book I had ever read, and not filled with gigantic, immersive splash pages, it would be a more-or-less completely forgettable story. While I have no idea who it was at Marvel that suggested collecting it in a $50, raft-sized format, it was a pretty good suggestion.

Review: Death of Wolverine

Obviously there's a lot of outside calculus that goes into something like the decision to kill off a character as long-lived and popular as Wolverine. The most popular of the X-Men might not be the sales juggernaut he was at other points in his fictional history, and his solo title might have been getting regularly outsold by those of surprising upstart characters, but Wolverine is still a pretty Big Deal. Killing him off, even only extremely temporarily, as every single person who heard he was going to die immediately thought, would therefore necessarily be a pretty big event, with some pretty big knock-on events throughout the Marvel Universe...or at least their X-Men line, as over the past few years Wolverine has been elevated to the position of Charles Xavier's official, if unlikely, successor.

That said, the comic book in which Wolverine actually dies is pretty small, and it feels more tossed-off than epic. The event occurred in a four-issue miniseries entitled, quite straightforwardly, Death of Wolverine.

It was written by Charles Soule, a prolific and talented writer, albeit one with no real history with the character. (Paul Cornell, who was writing the Wolverine series up until it was canceled to make room for this book, and who started the ball rolling towards killing off Wolverine, would have been the natural choice. Jason Aaron might have made more sense still, given that he had been writing the character through a succession of titles—Wolverine: Weapon X, Wolverine, Wolverine and The X-Men, etc—and is probably the writer most closely associated with him at the moment. Len Wein, the character's co-creator, and Chris Claremont, who all but re-created and popularized him, would have also been slam-dunk choices).

It was drawn by Steve McNiven, who previously drew the character in the Mark Millar-written series Old Man Logan. (As with Soule, McNiven probably wasn't anyone's first choice for drawing the ultimate Wolverine story, but he still has plenty of stature, thanks to his work on Civil War, so having him draw the book did invest it with at least a sense of occasion.)

Marvel's packaging of the book was certainly meant to convey that they felt it was going to be something special—or, at least, that they wanted readers and retailers to consider it such. Each issue cost $5, even though each issue's page count was only between 21 and 23 pages (back matter of dubious quality followed each serially published chapter). There were 40 covers for the four issues—40!—averaging out to about 10 per issue.

But 80 or so pages does not an epic make, and this reads like a fairly generic Wolverine story arc with a cliffhanger ending—his death doesn't even really look too terribly final, to be honest. It appears as if Soule simply did the best he could, including as many Wolverine villains and locations as possible, while keeping the character-count, the locations and, most importantly, the page-count as low as possible.

Death of Wolverine reads like what it is then: Soule and McNiven's response to being tasked with an assignment of doing a four-issue comic in which Wolverine seems to die.

In the early pages of the first issue, we get the premise: Wolverine's healing factor no longer works, making him truly, easily kill-able for the first time in a long time. The more he fights, the more often he uses his claws, the more likely he is to die in action. This is told to the reader by Reed "Mister Fantastic" Richards, who Soule has telling it to Wolverine, apparently urging him to take some time off from Wolverine-ing.

The stubborn Logan knows he can't, however, as once word gets out that he doesn't have his healing factor anymore, villains will come out of the woodwork for him (As to what happened to his healing factor, it's never mentioned in this book at all, and I suppose it's not ultimately important. I believe microscopic aliens somehow turned it off near the end of Cornell's first story arc). This is patently silly, of course, in no small part because it's Mister Fantastic telling him to lie low while they work out a way to turn his healing factor back on, and Wolverine doesn't take him up on it. Between his pals on The Avengers, The X-Men and, apparently, The Fantastic Four, finding a good place to stash Wolverine and keep him pretty well protected shouldn't really be a problem.

Wolverine's home is a heavily fortified and protected mansion full of superheroes that rests on a sentient patch of land that eats trespassers. He's also on another superhero team with guys like Thor, Captain Universe and Hyperion, the latter of whose powers are basically, "Like Superman's, but maybe more." If Wolvie really wanted to stay safe, he shouldn't have much problem doing so.

And this is one of the strange sources of tension in the book. One has to suspend one's disbelief, particularly regarding certain aspects of the shared-universe setting, when reading about characters' solo adventures, but, well, this book includes frequent references to Wolverine's place in the Marvel Universe. He's talking to Mister Fantastic, and mentions having already gone to Tony Stark and Hank McCoy with his healing factor problem. Later he borrows a piece of Iron Man's armor to use as bait, and gets an assist from Kitty Pryde.

It's therefore especially weird when he goes off on what he knows is likely a suicide mission in the book's final issue, rather than bring The X-Men, or The Avengers, or The Uncanny Avengers, or any combination of the above with him. Hell, he probably could have just stayed home and sent one of those teams there in his place.

But anyway, after Mister Fantastic explains the plot to us, Wolverine retires to an island near British Columbia to kill the various bounty hunters that come looking for him, the toughest of which is Nuke. He headbutts part of Nuke's face off (?), and gets his first clue that takes him on a trail to his death.

Next stop? Madrippor, where he goes undercover in a tuxedo (but no eye patch), and fights Viper, Sabertooth (who plays an oddly minor role, given his history with Wolverine) and Lady Deathstrike (ditto). Kitty saves him, and they go off to Japan to fight Ogun and, finally, to a Weapon X lab, to face the ultimate villain. Some guy named Cornelius, who has been collecting adamantium and put a contract out on Wolverine to be taken alive, because he wants Wolverine's healing factor.

His plan makes a bit of symoblic sense, in that he feels guilt for helping create the feral killing machine that is Wolverine and wants to atone by building real heroes out of his guinea pig/victims, adamantium and Wolvie's healing factor.

It obviously doesn't work out—Wolvie's lost his healing factor for one, which sort of contradicts Wolverine's earlier prediction that knowledge of his weakness would be what draws villains to him—and Wolverine proves he's become a hero by saving the helpless victims bound to operating tables by clawing open a molten adamantium vat before the metal could be pumped into them.

In the process, he becomes covered in the stuff, but still manages to not-die long enough to chase down Cornelius and kill him. The end.

And that's how the un-killable Wolverine finally dies: He's encased in molten adamantium, which apparently didn't burn him alive instantly or slide off his body, but instead dried like cement over him? And, of course, if his healing factor got turned back on during the process, then he would still be alive in there, just trapped and essentially buried alive. Or, if the means to turn his healing factor back on are arrived at later, then the adamantium casing he's in might be perfectly preserving his body, for an easy resurrection. Or, simplest of all, Marvel is apparently headed toward a Crisis-like reboot, so Wolverine could just be rebooted back to life.

Whatever happens after Wolverine's death, the story of his death was more than a little underwhelming. It doesn't really stand up as a dramatically satisfying story on its own for several reasons—the off-panel de-powering, the out-of-left-field random villain—and it seems a small, uninspired story arc, paling next to so many of the big, dramatic stories that have starred or prominently featured Wolverine over the years. Given how many times that guy has been extremely near death, this death, even if it's more of a "death" than a death, seemed dull, even prosaic.

The collection gets an oversized hardcover and a ton of back-matter, including all of those covers and an interview with Wein, as well as process material, but there's so much of it that it only makes the story seem smaller. It's a fairly slim book, but the 80-ish pages are followed by 40-ish pages of extras. In other words, about 1/3 of this collection is not comics, which is an awful lot of pages to not be comics in a $25 dollar book (Doing the math, as over-priced as the serially-published comic book-comics were, they were still a better investment than this, which would break down to more than $6-per-issue. Jeez, when exactly did comic books become the hobby of kings?)

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With 40 covers, some of them were bound to be good!

My favorites?

Skottie Young's, in which Wolvie's soul ascends to heaven, looking quite surly about the whole affair:

Based on the look on his face, he doesn't seem to think he's really dead either.

And Juan Doe's:

I really like the implied action generated by the arms in different positions on the two figures, as if raising his claws transforms Logan to Wolverine, and lowering them does the opposite, as well as the contrasting colors in the two versions of the character on the image.

I also kind of like the implied costume on the shadow Wolverine in the back. The (almost) all black look is a good one.

Review: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1: Cosmic Avengers

Remember how Peter Jackson's last Lord of the Rings movie had, like, six different endings, just piled one on top of the next, each seemingly complete unto itself, and you found yourself about to get up from the theater seat repeatedly, just to realize that what seemed like the ending wasn't really the ending, and there was at least one more scene to go?

The first collection of the new volume of Guardians of the Galaxy is sort of like that, only it's all beginnings instead of endings. This volume, which collects the Brian Michael Bendis-written series that spun out of the first Brian Michael Bendis-written arc of the Avengers Assemble series, collects five different comic books, but it reads like a series of three different beginnings of the same series (Come to think of it, Avengers Assemble Vol. 1 was also basically a beginning for this series, too).

The first beginning is that from Guardians of the Galaxy #.1, penciled by Steve McNiven, who also draws all of the parts of the first three issues that Sara Pichelli does not (the credits on this book are kind of a mess, and I had a hard time matching them up with the art that I saw later on, which all looked a lot like a rather rough version of McNiven; in addition to Pichelli pencilling and inking parts of two of the issues, there are two other inkers involved in issues #1-3).

I've actually read and wrote about this beginning already (although not in any great detail). It is essentially the origin story of Peter "Star-Lord" Quill, or at least of his childhood: How his Earthling mother met his marooned spaceman father and nursed him back to health, how his dad left her after he was conceived but before he was born, how the alien Badoon came to earth to kill he and his mom, how he survived and found a raygun.

It skips from that to a modern-day, adult Quill, finishing telling the story with "The second I could find a way off planet earth I took it...I got up here and here I am," before the camera pans out to show Quill standing in a spaceship, surrounded by the current Guardians line-up in their new, less-retro (and less cool) costumes, with Iron Man, also in a new costume, thanking him for telling him the story and saying that he has decided to take them up on their invitation to join them in outer space for a while (an invitation extended in the previously linked-to Avengers Assemble comic, and something he was considering doing at the end of Matt Fraction's run on Invincible Iron Man).

"Now we show them how it's done," Quill tells Stark, as their space ship zooms off to start the new series.

And then we get Beginning #2, which consists of the first three issues of the monthly series.

Quill is in a bar trying to talk a blue lady that looks like Gamora, the green lady on his team, into having sex with him (This isn't a plot point; McNiven just sorta draws them the same). Quill's dad, the king of Spartax, come in and has a long, Bendis-y conversation. Apparently Quill's dad and a Space Illuminati (The cosmic Marvel equivalent of all those scenes Bendis wrote of "The Illuminati" and Norman Osborn's "Dark Reign" cabal) have got together and talked about what they should do about the planet Earth, and they ultimately decide it is off-limits to all alien interference.

Meanwhile, Iron Man is apparently flying around solo in space in his new space-faring costume, which looks like his regular armor save with a higher red-to-yellow ratio, and a mask which somewhat resembles the one Star-Lord was wearing in the Keith Giffen-written StarLord miniseries.

The Badoon attack him, and the Guardians come to his rescue. Fight scene. Another check-in with Quill's dad's space meetings, in a two-page spread featuring a Bendis balloon chain.

It's the raised-hand posed that really annoys me, as it implies he's been in that position for the whole five-minute scene.

The Badoon attack London. Another fight scene (Weirdly, Rocket Raccoon seems kind of...Deadpool-like, shooting his foes in the face over and over and repeating, "Blam! Murdered you" to each as he does so. I don't think one needs to try so hard to make Rocket "funny;" the cognitive dissonance of his role in these stories vs. his appearance kind of does that all by itself).

The Spartax guys capture the Guardians. Another space meeting, where the space board of directors wonder if Quill's dad isn't being pretty manipulative. The Guardians escape, Quill making a speech to his people challenging his dad's authority, and setting the book's premise: This is going to be a book about a group of outsiders banded together to protect Earth from the sinister manipulations of the Galaxies various empires and invaders. It's the good guys from the original Star Wars trilogy versus the bad guys from the second Star Wars trilogy.

Or it's Bendis in space: Lots of chatter, clever repartee, plot-delineating exposition conversations, disregard for whatever was written about these characters by whoever was writing them previously, intimations of the importance of the conflicts to the entire Marvel Universe, better-than-average comics-making in general (Regarding Bendis' disregard, Quill was apparently dead before Bendis started writing him; there's a scene where his dad says "I get updates on you, you know...Heard you dragged yourself back from the dead," which is as much as an explanation as we're given in this whole volume. Gladiator appears in the space-meetings, and seems oddly disconnected from the character I just read in those Annihilators collections; one of which featured Gladiator battling to save Earth alongside a team that had taken over the Guardians of the Galaxy's role in the, um, galaxy. Also, his mohawk looks funny here).

This storyline will apparently continue in the next volume, and the rest of this volume contains Beginning #3, the one-shot special Guardians of The Galaxy: Tomorrow's Avengers #1, featuring a hodge-podge of solo-ish stories featuring the Guardians who are neither Quill nor Iron Man, each written by Bendis and drawn by different artists (Although a Yves Bigerel is credited with lay-outs on three of the four stories).

The first of these features nice (but, in two instances, surprisingly difficult to read) art by Bendis' frequent collaborator Michael Avon Oeming (and Rain Beredo, who I am guessing colored it, but it's unclear from the credits). This features Drax fighting some guys, and then Quill appearing to re-recruit him at the end, setting up expectations that maybe this is a getting-the-band-back-together series of shorts (I think it was the line "We need to get the Guardians back together" that gave me this impression).

But the second, by Michael Del Mundo, scuttles those expectations. It's an over-narrated story told from the perspective of an alien on an alien planet that's being harassed by other, meaner aliens, until Groot shows up and kicks their asses, and then Rocket and the Guardians arrive to pick up Groot in the last panel (So in story #2, the band is already back together, thanks).

The third, nicely drawn by Ming Doyle and either inked or colored (or both?) by Javier Rodriguez, Rocket is in a space-bar, bragging about his adventures and trying to hit on a lady that does not look at all attractive by human or raccoon standards. At some point, a mouthy guy says he saw "another one" like Rocket on Rigel Seven and leaves. Rocket interrogates him by gunpoint, but all he learns is that he once saw "one" just like Rocket, but it was a different color and it wasn't "up on both legs...walking and talkin'..."

Rocket seems to thing this is big, important news. But, um, a creature that looks like Rocket, but is a different color, and doesn't walk and talk? That's a fucking raccoon, and Earth is lousy with 'em. If this was meant to be the revelation that it's presented as (a mysterious assassin kills the mouthy guy before he can say too much, then disappears), then Bendis probably shoulda scripted it a little more carefully.

The final story, this one by Del Mundo again, is just Gamora fighting and killing some dude, with Quill showing up on the last page to pick her up.

So it's a series of beginnings, stopping and starting. I would guess Marvel published these two specials, the "#.1" issue and the Tomorrow's Avengers special, to introduce the characters a little better (though most of the shorts don't; all we learn of Drax and Gamora are that they are green-skinned violent bad-asses, all we learn of Groot is that he is a big tree that says "I am Groot," and all we learn of Rocket is that he is an obnoxious, violent drinker who has never heard of raccoons, despite having "Raccoon" as his surname). Well, that and to promote the series as a sort of big deal, what with the multiple #1s, and the word "Avengers" in the third #1, and so on.

And then I suppose when it came time to collect the first volume, they had little choice but to put them all between the same set of covers. Perhaps a different ordering would have helped, with Tomorrow's Avengers coming first, as it precedes the other two by story chronology, if not publication date? (Actually, the short stories in it seem to pre-date Avengers Assemble Vol. 1 as well).

Regardless of the decent quality of all three basic story units—GotG #.1, GotG #1-3 and Tomorrow's Avengers—they don't read smoothly as a complete whole, and the first collection of the new, higher-profile Guardians of the Galaxy series is a bunch of starts, which are presented in fits and starts.

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One thing I noticed, when I linked to that review of Avengers Assemble was that in that particular story, Rocket Raccoon had his own, distinct style of dialogue bubble, most noticeable in that it was yellow, indicating that his voice sounds much different than all of the humans/humanoid voices, who had yellow dialogue balloons (How different, and in what ways, I can't imagine; I do hope he's not meant to have, like, an Alvin and The Chipmunks chipmunk voice, because good God will that make that movie intolerable).

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Another thing I noticed? There were soooo many variant covers for these issues. Some of them are character-specific. You'll see lots of Rocket-only covers, by the likes of Joe Quesada. There's a really great Gamora, wearing her costume from the previous volume, by Milo Manara. There are a few Ed McGuinness covers and a Joe Madueira one. And there were so many for the first issue that the last few pages of the collection don't show the variants at full-size, but are divided into fourths, so they can show some sixteen variants in just four pages.

Many of these are retailer specific, indicating there was probably some weird ordering scheme I don't understand that triggered the production of a variant. Deadpool appears in a few of the retailer-specific ones—which is kinda weird, as he's not in the book at all—in addition to appearing in the "Deadpool Variant" and the "Hastings Variant." There's something called a "Phantom Variant" that kinda confuses the "Days of Future Past" cover with Wolvie and and Kitty in front of the poster image, showing villain Thanos in front of a poster with various Guardians' pictures and the words "fugitive" stamped/posted over them.

Of these 16 in the last few pages (and there are other full-size variants included throughout the book, like the aforementioned Quesadas and Manara), the only one I really liked was the Marcos Martin one:

He did a Guardians Pose image, but unlike many of them, he puts them all on there, and he does it in a way that is inventive, appealing and striking. I really love this Marcos Martin character.

Special homoerotic subtext variant cover for Secret Invasion #3

After having spent the last few years off-panel, Nick Fury is back, baby! And he's holding his giant gun at crotch-level, the tip exploring The Vision's pretty, pretty android mouth.

Hey, it's not gay if the dude's synthetic, right guys?