Review: Secret Avengers #10
I picked up the latest Secret Avengers yesterday and, unlike my usual lagged-behind-the-publication-calendar style, immediately read it. I love this series, in part because it feels like this is Ed Brubaker's sandbox more than any other book. Sure, I mostly know him for crime comics (and crime TV tweeting, because the guy loves him some crime dramas) but this book, more than Criminal or Incognito or any other, feels to me like Brubaker getting to play dress-up in the attic of imagination. It's also a really satisfying superhero adventure comic that hasn't let itself get swallowed up in metaplot. I can read an issue, enjoy it as escapist fiction and move on sans baggage. Even so, it has moments that sing out and deliver goosebumps as the great, long arc of Marvel Comics' narrative history is revisited in tiny ways.
Hit the jump for more of what I liked about this issue!
There is a lot for me to like here. For one thing, I am totally about Steve Rogers instead of Bucky. Steve is the real Captain America, for my money, and getting to see him use both the brains and the brawn of a super soldier and super strategist and tactician is extremely satisfying. Using a fight they know they won't win as a way to sneak Moon Knight into the Shadow Council is a pretty clever idea and one that I plan, quite frankly, to steal for my next infiltration in a D&D game. (Speaking of D&D, Rogers' 3.0-style Diving Charge is pretty sweet.) The thing that really thrilled me in this issue, though, was seeing that shield. I don't remember if they explained that previously or not, but seeing a temporary Captain America shield - almost ethereal, almost ghostly - pop out gave me goosebumps. It's a powerful visual icon and it works.
Another thing for me to love? Moon Knight. I can't quit him. I don't even know why I love him so much. Well, OK, I do: he's like the campy Batman. When one considers how campy Batman already is, we are talking ultra-camp. I love him so much. How does he manage to wear his entire outfit, including his cape, under a full Shadow Council thug uniform? I don't know and I never will and I'll never care. Moon Knight is a crazy bad-ass whiny dissolute rich guy psycho fanatic of a dead cult with a queeny best friend. It's like they wrote it just for me.
A third thing for me to love: teamwork. Steve Rogers is the king of pulling a team together, and this issue features scenes of a team of gifted, active heroes working together to achieve a shared goal. One would think that happens all the time in super-team comics of this variety but narratives find the cheap melodrama of intra-team rivalries so much easier of a crutch that it feels, to me, like we hardly ever get to just kick back and enjoy the action. This comic absolutely delivers that, letting different characters employ the real differences between them in order to accomplish a mission as a united whole. Little hearts all over the place. I'm going to tell you right now that I don't even know who the Prince of Orphans is, that I'm pretty sure that gallery of Avengers on the title page is different every month and that I don't care. This is a book that values teamwork as a narrative tool and I am grateful for that.
Finally, can I get an amen for some '70s shirtless kung fu mastery? The stories of Shang-Chi - his narrative as a character and his history as a Marvel property - are fascinating to me in that fun, retro, slightly silly, slightly campy way. The whole narrative of his father trying to use Shang-Chi to restore his own youth is a classic call-back to that character's original run in the '70s, which I haven't read but of which I have read. The story of how Marvel adapted and developed a licensed property so effectively that Shang-Chi became this long-running character, both more-or-less original and still kind of a Bruce Lee ripoff, is just a fascinating study of how a story can grow and change and take on a life of its own through the acquisition of bits and pieces in the hands of different caretakers. It shows that great characters, if you'll allow me an agricultural metaphor, are less the flowers and more the flower bed in which ideas are planted; that their output come to fruition in ways that surprise as different gardeners come to care for that segment of narrative potential.
To some degree it's transparent that Marvel is using this book as part of its overall strategy of reminding readers, and consumers of pop culture in general, about the existence of some of their oldest properties in preparation for film adaptations - John Steele will surely figure in Captain America somehow, a bunch of these characters are sure to show up in Avengers and even Shang-Chi is a property that's in development for a potential Ang Lee treatment - but a great writer can find a way to do good things with any idea, even bad ones, even ones invented by the marketing department. I don't think anything about Secret Avengers is a bad idea, don't get me wrong, but I do think that it's a testament to Brubaker's writing that he can be handed characters who have had little if anything to do in modern storylines, or who have been reintroduced only to flounder badly, and work them into something as much fun to read as Secret Avengers consistently is.
Klarion
Posted to Review on 24 February 2011
· Comments (6)
Other stuff like this: Ed Brubaker, Secret Avengers
Completely agree with you, really like this book. I knew I would buy it for no other reason than they included Valkyrie, one of my favorites from back in the day. I've always liked her as sort of the Marvel version of Wonder Woman.
Steve Rogers shines as the true leading icon of the entire Marvel U in Brubaker's hands which is exactly as it should be. Inspiring without being an intolerably uptight boy scout, the characters want to follow him and want to bring their A game for him. This is the thing that Superman is supposed to be in DCU, but hasn't been for some time (for sure, he isn't now-- I still hold out hope for the Straczynski run, but it has been super inconsistent and has featured some shockingly bad art).
No problem with Deodato's art, especially SR in his sparring trunks. Brawny and heroic is exactly how I like SR. Salute!
> SR in his sparring trunks
Let me simply say that the scene, a few issues ago, when he was all shirtless and getting a rubdown? Oh, hell yes.
I do love that I'm constantly enjoying this title despite the fact that I'm very unacquainted with most of the characters.
Honestly, ougeoman, I don't know who half the team are. It's so fun that it doesn't bother me, though.
This is my favorite Avengers book. Steve Rogers is great. Since Marvel's license to use Fu Manchu has lapsed, the character could be folded into the Yellow Claw, as if the oriental master criminal has gone by various names during his life.
Since Marvel's license to use Fu Manchu has lapsed, the character could be folded into the Yellow Claw, as if the oriental master criminal has gone by various names during his life.
They certainly don't seem opposed to at least suggesting Fu Manchu, given the most recent storyline. I think it's only natural that a story involving Shang-Chi involve the near-duplication of some other, older character.