Review: Secret Avengers #5
Are you wearing your purple today? Evil Nick Fury over there almost is, but it looks like he wound up a deep royal blue instead. That's OK, we know his heart's in the right place.
I'd forgotten that this comic even came in until I was plowing through a stack of books waiting to be read this past weekend and man am I ever glad I got to it! I realize that I am something of a mindless Ed Brubaker fanboy but this really is a fun comic. The story itself is the worst of soap opera cheese but it's also tremendously self-aware and there's a more meta reading of it available that strikes me as absolutely brilliant.
Read on for more thoughts on Secret Avengers #5!
I have enjoyed Secret Avengers but I haven't felt like it really found its footing. There was this one glaring problem I had with a previous issue when someone surmised that Mars was covered in life as recently as a thousand years ago and my eyes rolled right out of my skull and across the room; so much for Marvel's universe being ours. At any rate, the whole 'investigate something weird on Mars oh nooooo someone's been taken over five seconds after we land' thing struck me as way too schticky and done. It was Brubaker, but it wasn't the Brubaker I was used to. Still, it had some of my favorite characters - I'm a Moon Knight lunatic nyuk nyuk - and it was Brubaker and there was some crazy immortal Confederate guy and... well, it was easy to keep buying it.
This issue, though, is genuinely great. For one thing, the art work is magnificent. At some points, especially early on, it looked less like Secret Avengers and more like Incognito, the most welcome of changes in the whole wide world - not because the art was bad before but because this art is fantastic - and it read like that book, too. I'll never get over Steve Rogers' butch talk and this issue has plenty of it. It's also got intrigue, secret histories and a bit of fun-house reflection of Marvel's own history.
The whole origins sequence in which they stand around discussing where this Nick Fury came from - including the succession of anonymous, uniformed henchmen they run through like some Marvel flip book produced by the guys who make The Venture Bros. - is a wonderful and only somewhat slightly tongue-in-cheek homage to the whole idea of villains and henchmen and evil organizations that do things like try to turn oceans into marshmallow creme, etc. Swapped bodies, lost memories, retrained identities and a lovingly showcased set of stories of a single combatant taking down whole armies on his own are the sort of classic adventure elements that brought many of us to comics in the first place. Using that candy-coating makes it easy to accept what is on its own a completely - and enjoyably - absurd idea in the first place.
It's got added value as an effectively subtle prosecution of so much of what comes out of the Comics Publisher Meta-Plot Machine as people try to maintain continuity across decades as experienced by the same characters, too. These are people whose weeks contain more action than most people's lifetimes and they've got decades made of those weeks stacked behind them like cordwood. In the cases of many of these characters, publishers and creators and writers and artists have written themselves into corners they eventually find impossible to escape; characters get rebooted all the time to try to keep them viable given everything that gets tacked onto them over long years of publication. When they don't get rebooted they wind up so burdened by the weight of their backstory that it becomes impossible to synthesize their entire history into one character or one career - which is precisely what Grant Morrison is trying to address, after all, in The Return of Bruce Wayne.
In this case, Brubaker is taking those decades of storylines about criminal cults with dozens of apparently low-skill frontliners being mown down by super-agents and anthropomorphizing the whole idea. The history of many characters' stewardship is that one writer after another would realize abruptly that they had created or inherited a narrative monster, a character that could again never be made realistic or believable or challenging if all that history were necessarily attached. Brubaker, it seems to me, is in some ways pointing that out, perhaps very lightly satirizing it, perhaps raising a toast in those characters' honor, by using that sort of rigmarole to create a literal monster: a super-agent with no real history or life or past beyond the combat and investigative experiences of the role ostensibly being played by a person in similar instances.
It makes fascinating reading and - best of all - it makes for fun. This is just a straight-up good, enjoyable, weird issue that made me really look forward to issue #6 - out next week - in a way previous issues have not. We have one of the more sympathetic and mysterious antagonists(?) I've encountered in a long time, one responsible for and central to a mystery befitting a book with a title like Secret Avengers, and a compelling set of heroes to investigate it. I am shocked that a book so weighted with Marvel history could at the same time seem like such an original idea.
Klarion
Posted to Review on 20 October 2010
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