As I say, I love Ed Brubaker's work and I love Steve Epting's work. I would say these are probably the two most talented people working at Marvel right now. They have some great writers and I'm a big fan of several of them, but Brubaker is really good at what he does - crime stories, war stories, origins stories - and Epting's art is masterful. The two of them have, thus far, rendered this story of Marvel's original hereos lovingly and lavishly. It works very hard to walk the line between reverence, as it tries to capture the wonder of superheroes appearing where none had been before, and the shocked and horrified reactions of the everyday people who encounter them. To that end, the whole thing is narrated by the Angel, a non-superpowered superhero who wears a costume and fights crime.

Overall, though, the series almost feels... too reverent. I get that there's a conscious effort to have it read like a period piece, told by someone of that time who is expressing his own unironic appreciation of the heroism he witnessed, but Brubaker's success in crafting that narrative voice also creates something of a generation or culture gap between me and the narrator. It doesn't help that World War II is such a thoroughly documented and presented time in our history, as are many of the characters in play. When I read The Marvels Project I have to work to remind myself that for the characters in the story this is the first time this has all happened. If I don't, the story seems to lack tension and dynamism. It's easy to forget that Dr. Thomas Halloway is trying to create a sense of the fear and anger of the era and at the same time using the voice of a uniquely privileged and educated native of that time who is, in turn, narrating it in the past tense from some more calm and secure future point in time. It's a twisting maze of perspective that sometimes seems disconnected from the action on the page.

The result is that it sometimes feels less like a comic book and more like a museum piece: elaborate, beautiful and frozen. The art is magnificent, absolutely some of the best to be found on any shelf right now. The dialogue writing is also very good, but that additional distance between me and the events of the story thanks to the narrator make things that much less accessible to me. It does in some ways read like someone narrating a movie instead of watching the movie itself.

However, this is a very good issue. This does possibly the best job yet of feeling like something from the story's own era, featuring a lot of ham-fisted villainy and dialogue that both reflects the propaganda of the time and is appropriate to the genuinely horrific crimes of the Red Skull. It's a World War II book that has huge biceps and a cigar clenched between its teeth, and that can be a thing of beauty. (Well, OK, at least the biceps.) It feels like a classic war story, with a vile enemy and heroes who crack wise and break the rules to do what's right, but it never veers off into rah-rah kneejerk jingoism.

It also has Cap on his motorcycle, diving through the window of a warehouse down by the docks to disrupt a meeting of a Nazi spy cell. It would be very difficult to find anything wrong with that.

The thing that interests me most in this series, though, is the narrator himself: the Angel. I'm a sucker for non-super superheroes and elaborate costumes, and doubly so for stories of people who know how to work the city for information. That is exactly the kind of story I most enjoy and we get some of that but we don't get enough. Reading this, I know I'm going to read issues 6, 7 and 8, which finish out the run. I'll be glad I did, too, because this is just a visual feast and it's clear Ed Brubaker is having fun with the writing even if I don't necessarily always feel like it's enhanced by the narration. They've unearthed this character and given him an engaging back story and a compelling presence in front of the camera that he seems to lack behind it: all fisticuffs, erudition and primary colors. Just a few pages with him in issue #5 made me realize that I want less of the narration and more of the narrator. When The Marvels Project is done, can I please have an ongoing period piece book about the adventures of the Angel? That would completely rule me.