Review: Marvels Project #8
Ed Brubaker's retelling of the origins of Marvel's best-known early heroes comes to an end in this beautifully illustrated if haphazardly-told issue. I'm very, very glad I read this book but if the goal was to make me want to read Captain America or the upcoming Namor: The First Mutant, it didn't especially succeed. Mainly it made me long for more historical comics and perhaps a starring role for the golden-age Angel.
Read on for more thoughts!
This issue was not one to which it was easy for me to form a uniform reaction. On the one hand, it was gorgeous as ever. Steve Epting's work has been wall-to-wall beautiful on this book, including the times when the more human, hand-drawn art style leads to what seem to be superficially inconsistent representations. If the art seemed imperfect here and there in comparison to today's digitally-perfect lines and curves it only added to the work's human, hand-crafted feel. The palette is a little muted in many places but the conscious choice to use brightness and color fairly sparingly helps recreate the feel of a cinematic flashback and simultaneously reinforces the alien otherness of such characters as the other mermen who cooperate with the Nazis.
It's also easy to like any book that has a squadron of superheroes in a retro-future flying ship defending Churchill from attack by foreign powers. That sort of reverse-engineered golden age flavor is smoky and I like it. Brubaker knows exactly the right buttons to push in the collective comics reading psyche to produce spine-tingling thrills and the wistful narration he writes is an only slightly modified version of the regret one hears in the narration of a crime story such as those Brubaker writes so very, very well.
On the other hand, as always seems to happen with these big crossover books, too much of the action gets saved up for the last issue and when everything happens at once none of it is executed to its full potential. All the business of Red and John Steele and the stuff happening in Europe gets kind of thrown aside in favor of telling us about the attack on Pearl Harbor and the role of Toro and the Human Torch in that fight. Touching though that is - and it is genuinely touching - it seems as though it trims as much meat as fat in trying to get to the "point" of the story by ignoring other, equally interesting characters. The whole last issue feels like rush-rush-rush to wrap things up so that Cap can meet up with the intended recipient of Angel's memoir.
I will be the first to say, by the way, that the character in whom I was most interested by the end is, in fact, Angel. That golden-age, normal-strength heroism is one of the things I most enjoy reading and a story of someone inspired to do what good they can, knowing the risks, knowing the odds, will get me every time. This book didn't make me want to go read relaunched Namor books or Captain America; it made me want an original series about the original Angel fighting crime in old New York. The final issue of course suggests that an updated, rebooted, continuity-maintaining Angel title might be in the works, and that's interesting to me, but if the point of an engaging and beautifully-illustrated historical work was to interest me in the now, I don't really understand the logic at work. It didn't make me want more now, it made me want more of then.
Klarion
Posted to Review on 2 June 2010
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Other stuff like this: Angel, Captain America, Marvels Project, Namor
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