Review: Siege #1
Marvel's new world-shaping storyline has started and my comics provider tells me that it really can, in theory, all be followed by just reading the Siege mini-series and not the seven hundred thousand tie-in issues. I was not at all a fan of Dark Reign, but since Siege is about undoing everything that happened last year I was interested enough to subscribe to this four issue core series.
Having just finished the first one, I like it. I actually like it a lot, much to my own surprise. I think it's a perfect example of the distinction between Marvel and DC, both of whose products I enjoy a great deal but who have very different flavors of stories to tell.
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The thing that struck me right out of the gate was that I knew, literally from the first page, roughly what was going on and why: there's a conspiracy afoot and Loki is involved so it's going to consist of plans within plans and it's going to trip up anyone who thinks Loki is on their side. At the same time, I don't know exactly what the conspiracy is, which is intriguing.
Just like that, I had context, foreshadowing and mystery. I was hooked. It occurred to me almost immediately that this is the difference between Marvel's big storylines and DC's.
I know I've ragged pretty hard on Blackest Night but I want to be clear that I'm not taking this as a chance to use DC or Geoff Johns as punching bags. I did really enjoy the last issue of Blackest Night and I like Geoff Johns in particular and at the moment all my favorite comics are DC titles. So, please, please do not think this is some sort of "I'm a Mac"/"I'm a PC", red vs. blue, blabbity-blah game of internet and/or comics Red Rover.
Now, that established, the difference that occurred to me is that Marvel's storylines of late have largely been about the very human motivations of its heroes and villains and the machinations of each whereas DC's have largely been about the vast powers of the universe against which its heroes must be arrayed. If DC is Clash of the Titans then Marvel is an episode of The Sopranos. DC's stories are usually about faces and heels and how they interact with one another on their own rarified stratum of existence. Collateral damage certainly happens - look at Final Crisis and the havoc wrought in the normal world over the course of that book - but mainly it's about the supers and it's told more or less from their perspective.
Marvel, however - at least since Civil War and probably before that, but I wasn't reading much then - has a fascination with telling and viewing stories through the lens of humanity. Not universally, I realize - the X books are all basically from the perspective of mutants and about being an outsider in a world of complacent and ignorant insiders - but their big narratives are about both the big heroes-vs-villains fights and about the wider human society's perspective on these events and what they mean to the non-super in the street. Marvel's narratives employ the media and pundit reactions, often to brilliant editorial and satirical effect, and they in turn use those different, more distant viewpoints to frame the story, to provide context, to emphasize the otherness of supers by creating distance between them and the reader and to humanize the story overall by reminding us of what it would be like to live in a world where things like this happen all the time. It's a fascinating trick and a compelling authorial choice. DC tells stories about supers. Marvel tells stories about the world in which supers live.
Like I said, I don't think one is better than the other. I'm not trying to criticize one or the other. I enjoy both, but I think it's worthwhile to examine that difference to help read with a greater awareness of what's being read.
Oh, yes, Siege #1 has all the other stuff: gorgeous art, supers getting to do big, flashy stuff, lots of fighting and backstabbing and moustaches being generously twirled. Beyond that, though, it has a reason for what's going on. It has scenes in which plots are hatched and then we later see them executed. It has deals being struck and arms being twisted. Supers are involved and costumes are being worn, yes, but it comes down to the things that make for any strong performance or well-told plot: individuals with strong, comprehensible motivations who turn the tools available to them towards achieving those goals.
A lot of this is probably the result of who's writing it, Brian Michael Bendis. I'm not a huge fan of Powers but Bendis is a master of the cop-show format and a good cop show is all about motivations and execution (no pun intended). Bendis has clearly put his prodigious crime-writing skills to good use by writing a story of a grand crime: the siege of Asgard by a bunch of fake heroes. So yes, flashy special effects, Clash of the Titans kind of stuff, but it's also basically a gang war: The Sopranos again. It's about people who want something going up against people who want the opposite. It's accessible and compelling, a tricky balance to strike.
I will confess that some grain of conservatism must exist somewhere in my soul, because I like to watch good guys beat bad guys. I like an orderly universe, a tidy ending and a hero who wins. That's probably a part of why I like Siege right off the bat but I hated Dark Reign, which seemed so self-involved and alienated from the rest of the universe and was at the same time largely about everyone thinking Norman Osborn is awesome instead of barely-functional-alcoholic scary. Regardless of why, though, I do like it. Highly recommended.
Klarion
Posted to Review on 22 January 2010
· Comments (13)
Other stuff like this: Asgard, Brian Michael Bendis, Norman Osborn, Siege, Thor
Your points on Marvel vs. DC are pretty spot-on, This actually echoes a conversation my old boss and I had a few months back.
DC excels at telling "the big story." Universes blowing up, superheroes with the powers of gods clashing with billions of lives in the balance, giant, epic, galactic stuff. They often deal in broad colors and employ solid character archetypes. Their characters are large and iconic but are harder to identify with because they're quite often simply beyond humanity completely.
Marvel is more nuanced, dealing with characters as people rather than ideals. This both helps and harms them, in that I find you empathize more with a Marvel hero because you understand his faults, foibles, and weaknesses (not a green rock but a green bottle, not a weakness to fire but a weakness of the heart), but at the same time when Marvel tries to tell a giant, epic story it usually gets bogged down in personalities and loses some of the scale that DC is good at.
Both are great ways of telling stories, and neither is superior to the other. They're simply different, and as fans we should learn to embrace those differences rather than turn them into pissing contests.
Well, this isn't really a review of Siege 1 as much as it is a comparison to Blackest Night 1-6.
So you're right about the broad strokes, and the scale of the issues involved, and the story being framed around the relationships of the super-powerful without the framing of the everyday.
There are things I didn't like about Siege. I certainly knew what was going to happen. I can't say that about Blackest Night. There have been many surprises, especially with the tertiary characters I am less familiar with. No one is really surprising me yet in Siege. Everyone in Marvel in so self-intrested that I'm sure someone will backstab a backstabber and they will backstab that backstabber, but... it's hard to care.
I really find the cutaways to news reports to be distracting and a little gimmicky. "He's down? Really? You don't say. I thought Osborne convinced him to take a nap in that crater." --Hello? That's what the panel drawings are for? I would like to have the mental "Oh shit he's down!" all by my lonesome.
I haven't figured out why anyone trusts Loki at all either. It's so incredibly bizarre. Talk about non-human behavior. I would like to see the media cutaway to that story. "Dateline: Loki: Trickster Demi-God or Just Another Demi-God In the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time?"
I just want Tony to wake up and apologize for being such a freaking jerk for YEARS. I would really appreciate some reason to enjoy the character.
I know very little about the Marvel incarnation of Ares, but it seemed almost RIDICULOUSLY easy to convince him to fight the Asguardians. Was that two or three sentences? I don't have the comic on hand. He just went from a very definitive "no" to a very accepting "we must."
It seemed like many of the character motivations for the Dark Avengers were forced as well. The whole issue really felt like it was just about having Thor knocked out by the last page. Which really didn't NEED to be this rushed.
To go back to the Darkest Night comparison, it was basically like compressing issues 1-4 in to issue 1. While Blackest Night got off to a bit of a slow start, I think Siege has done quite the opposite.
> not a green rock but a green bottle
Damn, girlfriend, that is straight-up poetry. Nice!
> There are things I didn't like about Siege
I absolutely can see having all of those reactions. Siege just throws the reader in, face first, without context as to how things got to where they are and I can imagine that being a huge turn off. I definitely understand someone preferring Blackest Night or simply not liking Siege, absolutely.
Warning: Rantiness follows...
I basically disagree with one bit: that "at least since Civil War" Marvel's been telling stories about the humanity of the characters. I believe they started losing the basic humanity, or even marginal decency, of the characters between Disassembled and Civil War, making them not into people with whose frailties I can sympathize, but into inhuman "ends justify the means" monsters who deserve to be spat on -- not only Tony Stark in Civil War, but Reed Richards in CW, Professor X re: Vulcan and Danger, and so on. The characters DID have humanity before Bendis, Millar and company started destroying everything that made Marvel fun, and I can only hope that once this dark period is over after Siege, if we don't get some kind of major retcon/repair (which I would greatly prefer), that they brush all the really horrible stuff under the rug and never speak of it again as quickly as possible.
A minor point of contention. What I said was that Marvel has "a fascination with telling and viewing stories through the lens of humanity". By that, I mean that often we see events occur via an additional degree of separation - normal mass media, seeing characters interviewed on camera, having the story presented not as though there's some invisible camera on the scene, but as though we're watching someone else watch those events, such as the news helicopters covering the opening of the actual siege of Asgard.
But, by the same token, I do talk a lot about the humanity represented in the motivations of a lot of the characters, and so I'm probably being too picky.
That said, I wholeheartedly agree that Marvel has had its characters make some really questionable and permanently destructive choices. I think that's a part of why things like The Marvels Project are successful, because they let the reader walk back a familiar hero to a time when that character's story is simpler and they've had fewer chances to be a dick.
On the other hand, I think Marvel gets serious points for being open to tragedy in the classical sense.
As for Tony Stark, he's what one would get if they combined Bruce Wayne and Dick Cheney. There's no hope for Tony Stark, nor will there ever be.
I agree re: Iron Cheney. Tempted to think that Marvel could take things to their logical, grim, classical-tragedy conclusion and then basically undo the whole dystopic mess via a Crisis-style reboot in which the characters basically warn their younger selves not to go down that path. It's all felt like some sort of Days of Future Past nightmare for about 5 years now...
I agree David. I think that's part of the reason they got the old backup of Tony's brain to reformat his noggin.
Retcons kind of make me a little sad when they're a big "REBOOT" button for the universe because there's always stuff that "sticks" that you wish was gone, and stuff that's gone that you wish was there. Look at what they did with Spider-Man for cryin' out loud. Spider-Man is a complete mess.
Also the Crisis style *BOOM* isn't an entirely comforting though either.
I would prefer that someone redirected these characters back towards their core motivations without the ugliness of history rewrites.
Klarion - I never though Tony was anything like Dick Cheney before Civil War. It's something that seems to have been super-imposed on top of the existing character in order to tell the story Millar wanted to tell. I always thought of Tony as a damaged Bruce Wayne who is very willing to give in to self pity and self defeat. He never lived in the black and white world Batman does, so it didn't make much sense that he would try and create that black and white world in Marvel U.
The thing is, I want the retcons of just the last few years gone. They've not only gone and had the characters do awful things in the present storylines, but have retroactively established that they've secretly been unlikable bastards (or, as Moira put it about Xavier with the whole Vulcan/X-Men 1.5 mess, "complete and utter bastard[s]") for most of their published history, not to mention painfully bad nonsense like Romulus.
Oh, and that whole "Kitty's dragon Lockheed has actually been a secret agent spying on you all these years in the guise of an amusing if snarky, friendly beloved quasi-pet" thing makes my head hurt. Ow.
I'm sorry, David, I can't hear you over the sound of me pretending that there is no pet dragon. Shhhhhhhh.
Re: Iron Cheney. Tony Stark was NEVER this guy before Disassembled/Civil War. They took a guy who was an honest to God hero who had battled back his own demons and, for the most part, won and turned him into a complete heel with no warning and for no reason. Maybe it's because my family has history with alcoholism and substance abuse, but Tony's always seemed like the kind of damaged goods you just want to hold and tell that everything's going to be OK, and I found that to be a great juxtaposition with his superhero persona.
Outside, he is The Invincible Iron Man, a metal warrior so strong, fast, tough, and advanced that the only way to hurt him is to steal his technology. He's above and beyond any sort of conventional weaponry and is, in essence, an unstoppable force for good.
Inside he's weak and flawed, a man haunted by his past and stuck at the bottom of a bottle because it's the only way he can escape the failures that lay on his shoulders like iron weights. Tony Stark was always the human at the head of the Avengers. Cap's an icon, an incorruptible symbol. Hawkeye was the rebel, so cool and collected that nothing could get in his way if he didn't want it there. Tony was, in spite of his appearance, the soft, gooey center.
Then they decided that he was going to be the government tool in Civil War (and hunt down the guy wearing the flag! WHAT A TWEEST!), shooting a good 20 years of characterization in the foot on the way there. Tony stopped being a hero and started being the new stock Marvel "As long as it ends up OK, we'll do whatever's necessary" character. It's a dick move to abandon a concept that had become the character's main focus for so long, and an even worse affront to those of us that identified with a guy whose intentions were good but screwed up once in a while.
If you'll indulge a tangent, I'm going to tell you my opinion on this whole Civil War/Dark Reign/Siege thing. Norman Osborn was supposed to be Tony. I think that originally, Secret Invasion would have ended with Tony taking out the Skrull, going all Neocon and building a team of operatives he didn't really know or trust (Dark Avengers) to protect the country. As the series went on, he'd start to realize how far he'd fallen, Cap would be resurrected at the end, and after the fire and doom had fallen, the Avengers would be reborn, stronger than ever before and reunited after Tony finally saw the light. Then a little thing called "Iron Man" came to theatres and Tony was once again a Marvel darling. A hasty rewrite was planned with Osborn as the leader of H.A.M.M.E.R. nee S.H.I.E.L.D. and we are where we are.
My point with all this? Not much, other than they did a fair bit of damage to my second favorite Marvel hero and I'm a little miffed about it.
Indulge a tangent? This is the Internet, we welcome them.
I think you're absolutely right about how compelling Iron Man was before all this my-way-or-the-highway stuff. That's part of the metatextual frisson of having Downey play him, isn't it? One man who's had to battle his demons to enable a public performance in turn becomes another. I think Marvel plans to try to save him, or at least to switch him back to being a human being as abruptly as they turned that part off. Quesada has spent all week talking about how this is "the age of heroes" for Marvel and saying "heroes will be heroic again" as often as he can. They clearly have come to understand that bad boy fantasies have a shelf-life. I have to wonder if the superior sales of DC's big events - the unquestionably human and heroic story of Dick Grayson trying to become Batman, the story of Batwoman, the Green Lanterns who are undoubtedly, collectively, white hats - have something to do with that.
That said, I found the first Iron Man movie to be mindlessly enjoyable but the trailer for Iron Man 2 actually made me want not to see it.
I think it's great that Marvel is reaching to their core properties and their narrative foundations, but I've always found the X-Men and Spider-Man their most sympathetic properties by a mile and those are very different stories. If they want to talk to me about Cap and Thor and Iron Man for a while, great, it's almost no work at all to make a property be of interest to me but Marvel is going to have to work pretty hard to make me love them.
See, at heart I've always been an Avengers man. I love the X-Men, mainly because they were the ones that taught me that being different isn't bad... but the Avengers are the World's Mightiest Heroes now and forever in my book. I even dug when the Avengers were Wolverine (who must have sore legs from all that book jumping), Spider-Man, Cap, and a bunch of heroes that only hardcore fans knew dick about.
It might be nostalgia, but I want a return to the good old days, where the Avengers are out in the thick of it, fighting Dr. Doom on the steps of his Latverian castle, or even throwing down with some goofy combination of villains trying to be an anti-Avengers team. Basically, I'm sick of heroes fighting heroes all the time, and I hope that's what this whole "Age of Heroes" means. I want Thor, Cap, and Tony leading the charge of a new band of heroes, fighting the good fight as the world's heroes, not just New York's or America's. Like the good old days.
I think that while the three of them aren't enough to be their own book, a la "Trinity," there are still enough compelling stories to be told about and around them that a team headed by them can do nothing but impress if given the proper writer. Who that writer is, I haven't the foggiest... just keep them FAR away from Millar.