Welcome everyone to our first double sized issue of We’re No. 1! The double issue, a common phenomena in comics, is making its debut here largely because I was out of town last week, but didn’t want our faithful readers to miss out on the best of the new stories in comics.
A highlight from last week, featuring the most disturbing cover art in recent memory, is the super natural thriller Colder #1. A little bit of a horror tale and a touch of a modern mystery, it features a young man named Declan, who for reasons unknown has been spending his time in a local asylum, right up until it catches fire. Declan in rescued in super natural fashion by the mysterious Nimble Jack, a barefooted, wildly coiffed devil in human form, who claims eternal hunger and mysteriously tells Declan that he will get “colder”. Surviving in a near catatonic state, with a body temperature of 47 degrees, is regarded as a medical marvel for over 60 years, when Nimble Jack, as murderous as he is mysterious, reappears to awaken him. A chiller of a book, it features fantastic art by Juan Ferreyra.
Boom! Studios brings the highly promoted girl-power bonanza Freelancers #1, but sadly drops the ball pretty heavily here. A story of two orphan girls raised in a kung-fu monastery (why they were here and not in a traditional orphanage is unexplained) Freelancers has potential to be a great example of strong women against the world, but misses badly. The art by Joshua Covey is too farcical in style to take the comic very seriously, and I felt like I was waiting for jokes that never came. The women themselves, Cassie and Val, are best friends turned “freelancers”, essentially soldiers of fortune, but are down on their financial luck. It turns out they are living a sordid life with far too much honor, and thus missing out on the paychecks their martial arts skills might normally afford them. Ultimately, this book is too goofy to be believable, and feels like a good premise blown by poor execution.
When it comes to solid indie story-telling, Image Comics does it again, bringing us an original tale of pure sci-fi with Storm Dogs #1. There’s plenty to admire in this tale of intergalactic investigators who travel to a desolate mining planet on the galactic frontier to get to the bottom of some mysterious deaths. These hard scrabble galactic police are members of the ruling Union and users of the intergalactic psychic internet known as “The Weave”. The diverse bunch includes strong right hand woman Siam, the muscle of the group, and a grieving forensic scientist Jared Hofman, whose relationship with his boyfriend cannot handle the longest of long distances, apparently. The characters, despite their fantastic surroundings, are all too human, with very real fears and issues, and this book makes for solid reading, blending sci-fi and crime procedural drama well with a real human element.
With little redeeming social value, Marvel’s Deadpool #1 doesn’t bother to be anything more than good fun. Wade Wilson, the wisecracking ninja-mercenary with advanced healing powers, takes center stage again in a world where only he seems to know he’s an actor. Here, Deadpool is recruited by S.H.I.E.L.D. to take on the angry rampaging spirits and reanimated corpses of America’s former Commanders-in-Chief, resurrected by long forgotten Marvel villain Madman to “fix our country.” Since no one in the public eye wants to send in Captain America to take out an evil reanimated Abe Lincoln, the good guys must send in everyone’s favorite bad guy to wipe the floor of the White House with these now villainous VIP’s. The jokes here are non-stop, and this is Deadpool at his campy deadpan best.
A few other highlights from last week: Marvel continues sprucing up it’s mainstream universe with it’s MarvelNOW! titles, giving us a new story run with Iron Man #1. Tony Stark is back with an all new version of his powerful Iron Man Armor, with art it would be great to see in the upcoming third film. (Not likely.) There is something compelling about the Iron Man suit rendered in Black and Gold, and Tony Stark inside it is more honorable than usual, defending the world against an outbreak of Extremis, a former technology he used in his suits that’s now a mutated super-human virus loose on the planet.
Valiant Comics continues a reboot of its best known characters with Shadowman #1, telling the tale of a supernatural hero with voodoo abilities, combating demons and the living dead. Here, the reboot features the son of the original Shadowman, assuming his father’s role with very little knowledge of who his father actually was, and is a solid human story of an orphaned adults struggle with identity, while at the same time being a pretty weak super-hero story. DC expands the Before Watchmen Universe with Moloch #1, the origin story of the often mentioned but rarely seen villain of the Minutemen’s past exploits. It’s the first of two parts, and it’s a predictable tale of a misused ugly duckling that sheds little light (of value) on the Watchmen universe. Lastly, Dynamite Comics presents Battlefields #1, a straight up war comic of the Korean War, featuring the British tank brigades and their struggles to defeat the Chinese in 1951. Battlefields is well illustrated, and tells a bleak story about a war largely overlooked in history, but the lettering, featuring detailed accents of its Irish, Scottish and English characters, is so difficult to get through it renders the book ultimately boring.
That brings us to this week, with fewer offerings overall, and sadly, fewer #1’s worth note. Marvel is the biggest player in the game this week, extending it’s run of MarvelNOW! #1’s with four new offerings. All-New X-Men #1 is perhaps the best of the bunch, if for no other reason than being the most understandable. After the riotous events of Marvel’s year long massive Avengers vs. X-Men crossover event, it seems they just can’t stop picking up the pieces. The X-Men themselves are fractured into more groups than ever before, each pursuing Charles Xavier’s dream as best they understand it. Sadly, the heir apparent, Scott Summers aka Cyclops, has gone off the rails on an agenda most of his fellow mutants have difficulty believing in. Their solution? The one that seems to work best both for them, and for the residents of the Star Trek universe: time travel. Hank McCoy decides to travel back to the days when the X-Men first began and bring the young inexperienced team of original X-Men forward into the present. This will almost certainly confuse readers rather than attract new ones, as MarvelNOW! hopes to accomplish, but the story is at least compelling and the art is solid here as well.
The least understandable issue from Marvel this month is probably the next best offering, precisely because it is so strange. X-Men Legacy #1 takes on a character often passed over throughout the years, Charles Xavier’s son David. Known as Legion due to the nearly limitless split personalities afflicting his tortured and extremely powerful mind, David has built within himself a prison for the villains of his tortured mind, and when they stage a prison break, David’s nearly limitless mutant power are in very real danger of destroying the dream his father created. With David finally out on his own, how will he follow in his father’s footsteps, and what role will his father’s acolytes, The X-Men, play in his life? This story is ridiculously all over the place, but in a way that makes a certain amount of sense when you consider the point of view from which it’s told. It’s got great potential, as long as it stays at least a tiny bit focused.
Marvel revamps two more of its classics with lesser results in The Fantastic Four #1 and Thor, God of Thunder #1. While Thor might have more of a following these days due to Marvel’s successful movie franchises, the tired first family of comics The Fantastic Four didn’t fare so well in their film debut, and are in desperate need of some shaking up. The ever-elastic patriarch of the Richards clan, Reed Richards, decides to take his family – which has grown beyond the Four themselves and includes several adopted special individuals from across the universe, as well as his own two immensely super-powerful offspring Franklin and Valeria – on an interstellar space-time field trip. This first issue largely serves as a vehicle to remove the Fantastic Four from the Marvel Universe as a whole, and set them on a sort of Swiss Family Richards adventure through the cosmos, with predictably ominous results. The tale is a bit wild, as is the style of the man taking the reins of the book. Matt Fraction is the writer behind similar other-worldy, stories such as Marvel’s The Defenders, Cassonova, and one of my all time personal favorite comics, Rex Mantooth: Kung Fu Gorilla, so he’s comfortable at the helm of interstellar adventure that is barely grounded in reality, and that seems to be where the Richards family is headed.
Thor, meanwhile, is taking a new direction in his latest adventure, wandering away from being a hero in the Marvel Universe and embracing, literally, being a god. It turns out he’s a very human god, and content to know there are others like him in the universe. In fact, he seems to be the one to have the rest of the gods’ backs, especially as they are being murdered over millenia. The mysterious new villain, Gorr the God Butcher, is behind it all, and yet we never meet him in this book. What we do get is a Thor we’e not encountered before, one who is willing to wander the cosmos and ascend the heights of Asgard itself to protect not the lowliest of humans, but his fellow immortal beings. This one is all fantasy and magic, and light fun without much depth.
The stark realism of life is, thankfully, also available this week with two new solid #1’s from Image Comics and IDW. Chasing the Dead #1 is the first issue of the comic retelling of Joe Schreiber’s horror novel. Adapted by Matthew Scot and Tim Westland, with art by Dietrich Smith, this one has a realistic horror feel on par with the best of Stephen King. As children, Phillip and Susan had a monstrous encounter with the child killer known as The Harvester. Although they survived, they also kept their tale of terror a secret. Years later, the horror returns to the adult Sue, whose daughter is abducted in the dead of night. Sue is driven into the frigid winter darkness by a killer’s voice on the phone, confronting the demons of her past to save her daughter. This is a horror comic of the highest order, with very little gore but lots of real scares.
The last of this week’s #1’s is perhaps the strangest, environmentally sensitive comic I’ve come across yet. Great Pacific #1 is the story of Chas Worthington, a ridiculously wealthy playboy and heir to the Worthington Energy company throne. In the spirit of the best of comics billionaire playboys, Chas has more women than he can handle and spends his life adventuring around the globe, all the while alienating the nefarious members of the board who are determined to squeeze him out of the company and out of their way. Chas, however, is different. He’s lost his father, but hasn’t decided to don a cape and cowl or a suit of super armor. Chas has decided to literally clean up the planet, focusing his sights on the floating plastic land mass known as the Great Pacific Gyre. An actual environmental disaster that is largely under-reported, the Great Pacific trash mass is comprised of largely plastics discarded into the oceans, gathered by natural currents into a huge plastic flotilla of junk. Chas, who is both driven, devious, and smarter than your average bear, has a plan to eliminate this waste that is (and this is the most real world thing to possibly ever occur in comics) profitable. He knows he’ll never get the powers that be on board with his wild idea, unless they see the dollar sign behind it, and he sets off on a wild adventure after faking his death to prove his point. Part eco-friendly Batman and part Robinson Crusoe of Garbage, Great Pacific is an ambitiously original story that holds promise, and while the premise took a while to set up, this one looks to hold both solid adventure and a legitimate message as well.
Whew! What a double issue. I hope everyone enjoys it, and makes it out to their local comic shops to pick up the latest releases. Thanks for being patient, and happy reading!
