Young Avengers Catch-Up: Siege: Young Avengers #1 (2010)

This one-shot by writer Sean McKeever, pencil artist Mahmud A. Asrar and inkers Scott Hanna and Victor Olazaba was a brief check-in type story tied to Marvel's completely nonsensical event series Siege, a bizarrely written story by chief Marvel Universe architect Brian Michael Bendis that, as I've previously noted, doesn't make a lick of sense on its own.

The event was climax of the "Dark Reign" period of the Marvel Universe, in which former Green Goblin Norman Osborn has donned a red, white and blue Iron Man suit to become Iron Patriot and lead his own team of Avengers made up of villains-posing-as heroes and his own SHIELD-like government agency HAMMER. For reasons never explained, Osborn decides he needs to conquer Asgard, which he attacks in defiance of the his boss President Barack Obama, and ends up in an all-the-heroes vs. all-the-villains fight on the floating city of Norse-derived Kirby space-gods.

The Young Avengers special was apparently intended as a part of a suite of one-shots, as its cover is part of a single, multi-part image by Marko Djurdjevic, and it gets collected along with four more one-shots in Siege: Battlefield, which is where I found and read it. (We'll look at those other comics in a bit).

One rather admirable aspect of writer Allen Heinberg and artist Jim Cheung's creation of the Young Avengers characters is how many aspects of the wider Marvel Universe he was able to tie into the various characters, as it makes them incredibly easy to plug into just about every Marvel event series imaginable. This event, for example, revolves around Asgard, and one of the Young Avengers characters was inspired by Thor to kinda sorta pose as a Thor-like sidekick at the outset, even going so far as to go by the name Asgardian (Changed later, of course, to "Wiccan," which can't so easily be corrupted into "ass-guardian").

The plot consists entirely of what the various team members are doing during the Everyone Vs. Everyone fight on Asgard, specifically after the part of the battle (which was not a siege) where The Sentry knocked the floating city down.

Wiccan and Hulkling, whose magic and gross green veiny pterodactyl wings spared them from the crash, find The Wrecking Crew trying to super-loot the ruins for Asgardian treasure, and fight them. Patriot and Hawkeye, meanwhile, are trapped in the rubble and fighting for survival, ala Red Arrow and Vixen in that one Meltzer issue of Justice League of America, ala Nicolas Cage and The Guy Who Wasn't Nicolas Cage in World Trade Center. And Speed runs around looking for survivors in the rubble. No sign of Stature and Vision.

It's a fairly well constructed fight comic, with each of the three character or character groups going through a distinct arc in which they reach a point of hopelessness and than rally, the issue ending with a splash page of Speed leading the charge to have them rejoin the fight.

It's completely inessential of course, but then, that's what it was supposed to be all along, the answer to a question a certain sub-set of Marvel readers might have wanted to know the answer to (Hey, what were the Young Avengers doing during the Battle of Asgard?), and a bone thrown to the would-be Young Avengers audience awaiting the return of the characters creators/re-creators to finish up their story.

The artwork is quite impressive and, in certain panels, looks like the work of Cheung (particularly on a re-flip-through. If Marvel had decided to go forward with a Young Avengers monthly sans Heinberg and Cheung in 2010, this would have been a fine creative team to do so with.

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As I said, this issue was collected in Siege: Battlefield, which contained a handful of Siege one-shots, connected only by their interlocking cover images and the fact that they had something or other to do with Siege. These are they...

Siege: Loki #1 by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie

This particular creative team is of particular note for this particular series of reviews, as these are the guys who will go on to create the next volume of a Young Avengers ongoing series, the one that sparked this endeavor on my part.

The star is Loki, part of Osborn's cabal of villains secretly running the "Dark Reign", who is here restored to his original, male form, after having spent much of the previous "Dark Reign" cycle in the form of a buxom woman, for reasons I never understood (It happened in an issue of a Thor comic I didn't read, I imagine).

In the Gillen/McKelvie Young Avengers, he appears in the form of a little kid. I think they should probably keep him male and grown-up, personally because a) McKelvie draws him so well and b) all the ladies I know who dug the Avengers movie  really seemed to like sexy Tom Hiddleston's sexy Loki.

Their story is set before and behind the scenes of the battle that occurs in Siege,basically showing Loki as a wicked and clever manipulator moving in a world of Marvel's evil power players—we see him taking a call from Doctor Doom and meeting with Mephisto and Hel, for example—to get what he wants, which here seems to be the destruction of Asgard and release from his destined place in Hel's hell (which may be spelled "Hel").

It's pretty great stuff, light on the superhero business (Osborn appears on one page) and heavy on the mythological and, tonally, it felt like an early issue of a pre-Vertigo Vertigo series: Mature storytelling devoted to mythology and fantasy extrapolated from old-school trashy super-comics which were themselves inspired by classical mythology. While reading, I kept thinking this creative team would probably do a knock-out Doctor Strange series.

I can't say enough good things about McKelvie's clean, smooth, pristine, perfectly-acted artwork: That guy's the best. This is by far the best-looking chapter of the book.

Props go to the pair also for their five-panel sequence involving Loki and Osborn. That's the first time that it was made clear to me that it was Loki speaking to Osborn through his Green Goblin mask, as his Green Goblin persona, in an effort to convince Osborn to attack Asgard because that's what Loki wants him to do. In a lot of the other "Dark Reign" and Siege related comics I've read, this isn't at all clear, and Osborn is usually presented as either a complete lunatic attacking Asgard just-because, or being talked into it by Loki, who doesn't really offer any compelling reason to convince him to do so. Here, it seems the compelling reason is that Osborn thinks his dominant if buried persona is telling him to do so.

Siege: Spider-Man #1 by Brian Reed and Marco Santucci

Spider-Man and Ms. Marvel fight Venom, who, at the time, was former Scorpion Mac Gargan in the alien symbiote suit, who spent the majority of "Dark Reign" (and the Bendis-written series Dark Avengers) disguised as Spider-Man.

That, obviously, annoyed Spider-Man.

This issue, then, is devoted to the climax of their fight over that particular conflict, with the pair tumbling out of the still airborne Asgard to the city below (Broxton), where Ms. Marvel swoops in to give Spidey an assist and fly him back up to Asgard so he can participate in the events of Siege.

It's a decent enough story and the art is similarly decent. It is about as pure a fight comic as you can get without excising the dialogue, which hear consists mainly of Spider-Man quips and Venom's chatter about eating people.

The most striking and memorable image is a panel in which Ms. Marvel separates Venom from Gargan by sticking her hand down the former's throat and yanking the naked latter out its mouth.

Siege: Captain America #1 by Christos N. Gage and Federico Dallocchio

The artwork on this one made it very hard for me to read. It was clear enough that it was easily legible, I just didn't like looking at it. Very photo-reference-y, with poses and renderings that look, if not traced from photos, then at least rigorously imitating images of real people, with costumes and fantastic action set atop of them.

It's all very awkward looking, as in a terribly uninspired two-page splash page of a bunch of heroes fighting a bunch of villains. One of the Captains America, in this image, appears to be both simultaneously kicking Taskmaster's shield and firing his gun at the shield, and seems badly in danger of literally shooting himself. Also, Dr. Fate seems to be there, for some reason.

Gage deviates from the all-fighting, all-the-time mandate that dominates most of these stories by introducing a family of civilians on the outskirts of the conflict, who provide an element of extra danger for the Captains, as well as some folks to be inspired by them.

Then current Captain America James "Bucky" Barnes and returned-to-life former Captain America Steve Rogers are participating in the big fight on Asgard and, after Sentry knocks it down, they find themselves fighting Razorfist, perhaps the least believable of all of Marvel's many fantastical villains (He's the guy who has had both of his hands replaced with huge, razor-sharp blades, and his costume consists of a sort of skin-tight ski mask with ear holes that I can't imagine how he puts on—dude must have an intern to dress him. (Also, Razorfist...? Dude can't make a fist, as he doesn't have hands).

The Captains beat the shit out of him, and then run back to the crossover story. See a pattern forming? These are kind of fun in how straightforward they are, as the majority of them are little narrative cul de sacs, where the characters leave the events of Siege, run through the conflict of a single issue tie-in, and then return to the events of Siege, usually declaring, "Well, that's the end of our one-shot tie-in; back to the main series!" (I'm paraphrasing; here it's actually "Let's go... ...We're needed."

This one's followed by Siege: Young Avengers.

Siege: Secret Warriors #1 by Jonathan Hickman and Alessandro Vitti

This series, Secret Warriors, is a kinda sorta years-later spin-off of that weird Bendis-written Secret War miniseries that truly kicked off his Avengers and Marvel Universe writing, and ended with one of the worst and laziest issues of a comic book I've ever read.

The premise of Secret Warriors was that an off-the-grid Nick Fury was leading his own team of secret superheroes, all of whom eschewed costumes in favor of classic SHIELD uniforms, for maximum boring-looking character design. I never read any of it, but Marvel might have tempted me to read the first issue had they instead titled it Nick Fury and his Howling Secret Warriors (I'm a big fan of howling).

So did you read Siege...? If not, there's this one gross-looking panel where Sentry grabs Ares the god of war and rips him vertically in half, just like She-Hulk did to Vision in "Avengers Disassembled," except Ares isn't a robot, so there's a bunch of gore and viscera in the panel (Bendis wrote both scenes, so he's not stealing from another writer, just repeating himself).

Well, on of the Secret Warriors is Phobos, the son of Ares (who is also a little kid). The issue opens with him watching a bank of monitors in which panels from Siege appear, including the gross one of his dad getting torn in half.

While Nick Fury joins Captain America for the assault on Asgard, Phobos flashes back to hanging out with his dad, then picks up a couple of swords, enters the White House through a secret passage, and silently slaughters Secret Service agents throughout the issue in order to, as he finally explains once President Barack Obama is safely aboard Marine One and flying towards safety, "to deliver a message."

The message isn't metaphorical, but literal though, as the last panel of the issue sees him sitting down at Obama's desk, the Oval Office littered with dead agents, to write a letter:

It's not every day that a human finds himself responsible for the death of a god and then on that very same day escapes facing another...

But before you wash your hands of my father's blood, I would encourage you to reflect on what brought us to this point: You sacrificed honor for expediency. You traded intent for quick action. You were wrong...and we all suffered for it.

It's a pretty weird comic. At least when Garth Ennis had The Punisher threaten to kill President George W. Bush, he did so without killing a bunch of innocent guys, and the president was a little more directly tied to the crime.

Obama's guilt for the death of Ares is fairly indirect, in that he put Osborn in charge of the superheroes, Osborn hired Sentry and Ares and Osborn ordered them both to attack Asgard, where Ares rebelled against Osborn and got torn in half. I realize the buck stops with the president and all, but Siege made it pretty clear that Osborn had "gone rogue" and was acting against the will of the president and, um, the entire United States government when he attacked Asgard, acting on the advice of his Green Goblin mask/other personality/Loki.I'm not a fan of the art in this one, although there's nothing really wrong with it. The style just didn't do much for me. There is a pretty neat panel of Obama sitting behind a desk, his face in shadow, his hands calmly folded in front of him, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff lined up behind him and a small army of gun-toting Secret Service agents between them and the reader. It's maybe the clearest image of Obama-as-supervillain I've seen in a comic book.

You know, between Bush's handling of the events of Civil War, "The Initiative" and Secret Invasion and Obama's handling of "Dark Reign" and Siege, as horrible as the choices these guys make in our universe might so often seem, they're both a hell of a lot better than their 616 counterparts...

Young Avengers Catch-up: Dark Reign: Young Avengers (2009)

As the pre-colon part of the title indicates, this five-issue miniseries by writer Paul Cornell, pencil artist Mark Brooks and a quartet of inkers was part of Marvel's "Dark Reign"...which wasn't a story, event or crossover so much as it was a status quo (akin to "The Initiative"), accompanied by a branding effort that placed "Dark Reign" banners atop all of the participating books and featured content somehow related to the new status quo that was in place between event/crossover stories Secret Invasion and Siege.

That status quo? Due to his inability to prevent a mass infiltration of earth by shape-shifting aliens, Tony "Iron Man" Stark was demoted from his post-Civil War job as Boss Of All Superheroes, a job that instead went to former supervillain Norman "The Green Goblin" Osborn, a convicted multiple-murderer and crazy person. With a villain now running the show, almost all of the superheroes are defying the government's registration act, and Osborn is promoting villains to serve as heroes. He had his own Avengers, for example, which consisted almost entirely of villains wearing hero costumes.

Cornell wrote a miniseries about Osborn's "dark" X-Men team, and here he checks in with the Young Avengers team, setting up a "dark" version of them comprised of teenagers who have the names and in some cases powers of Masters of Evil, echoing the way then-New Avengers/Dark Avengers writer Brian Michael Bendis created an Avengers team of villains posing as heroes ("Thunderbolting," is the verb, I think) and setting the real Young Avengers against them, ideologically (to start) as well as physically.

These new Young Avengers are The Enchantress, an Asgardian-themed character with magical powers who often uses "Thee" wrong; Big Zero, a white supremacist with the Stature-like power of growing to gigantic proportions (and a cool haircut); Egghead, an android character presumably around to give The Vision someone to fight; The Executioner, a gun-wielding vigilante who models himself after The Punisher; Melter, the costume-less would-be leader with the power to melt stuff; and Coat-of-Arms, the actual leader who wears a special coat that gives her two extra set of arms (get it?!) and is pursuing superheroics as an art project. She's an artist who is seeking performance as a type of social experiment to see what it means to be a superhero or a supervillain in a time when The Green Goblin is the chief good guy.

She's also probably the most interesting of the new (I think they're new; they're all new to me) characters, and a way for Cornell to rather easily insert meta-narrative into an otherwise schedule hole-filling fight comic and make it about something.

I think he succeeds rather well. He gives each of the new characters a story arc of differing levels of creativity and relevance, each has a personality and each wrestles with moral alignment questions in different ways and comes to different conclusions (If "wrestle" isn't too strong a word, as Big Zero is a racist at beginning and end, and she programs her boyfriend android to be more and more racist and all-around bad).

As for the original Young Avengers, they find themselves in the exact same position the actual Avengers were when the Young Avengers first debuted (in Young Avengers). They see a group of strange kids using their name, and they must decide whether they're okay with that and what to do—what they can do if they're not. So they fight. Then talk. Then team-up to see what these new guys are made of. Then decide who if any of them they want to cherry-pick for their own team, where they can train them. And, of course, they fight some more.

Oh, and then the Dark (grown-up) Avengers show up, so they can fight everyone too.

Overall, it's another impressive performance from Cornell, turning out a remarkably enjoyable story with strong, new characters that fulfills all of its obligations (lost of superheroes, lots of fights, "Dark Reign" content) while still managing to make a coherent, somewhat independent whole.

Brooks' work is fairly strong, too. I don't care for many—any, actually—of the new characters' looks (with the possible exception of Big Zero's haircut, and Coat's coat), but Brooks sells them admirably, and renders all of the Marvel characters perfectly well while managing to tell the story with the art. (The only parts I didn't care for? A dropped-in photo background of a street scene for the big splash page introducing the new Young Avengers, and a weird page in the third issue that's divided into five tall, skinny vertical panels in which Executioner and Hawkeye are weirdly positioned and angled for all five, barely-changing panels).

The climactic battle is a lot of fun, as Osborn (as Iron Patriot) brings Daken-as-Wolverine and Bullseye-as-Hawkeye to fight the Young Avengers alongside the Young Dark Avengers, and, surprisingly, the Young Avengers whip their asses, even ejecting The Sentry from the fight. That aspect of the battle could have used a little better resolution, given that Osborn and two of his more phsycho-killer-y teammates are allowed to leave when they're at the Young Avengers' mercy, but the entire fifth issue is a nice escalation of stakes, with everyone screaming at one another about what it means to be an Avenger, and Cornell even manages to tuck the new characters away for possible future use ("Some of them will do the right thing," Patriot says, "Either that, or we'll end up fighting them.")

There's also a pretty nice moment where Patriot gets to tell off Osborn—

—and sock him in the iron jaw, Captain America-on-Hitler style.

(Shame Brooks positioned the punch differently, though).

There's a pretty good use of a George Michael song in here, too. I had never heard "Shoot The Dog" and had to look it up on YouTube to listen to it and better understand a scene or two in this comic. I felt my my cultural horizons expand.

Review: Dark X-Men

I'm not quite sure I understand how exactly this particular comic book mini-series would have worked, or if it worked as it was originally published in 2010, as part of the big, Marvel Universe shared mega-narrative of the time.

This was the post-Secret Invasion, pre-Siege era in which the president of the United States had decided that former supervillain and mentally-ill convicted murderer Norman Osborn should replace Tony "Iron Man" Stark as the Marvel United States of America's official Boss of All The Superheroes, apparently based on the fact that Osborn managed to shoot the queen of an invading alien army in the head before Iron Man could shoot her in the head. That's how presidential appointments work, in Marvel's United States. There, Donald Rumsfeld was made Bush's Secretary of Defense based solely on the fact that he was the first candidate for the job to score a head-shot during a supervillain attack on Bush/Cheney campaign headquarters during the 2000 campaign.

Anyway, the state of the X-Men at this point in Marvel recent history was a little weird–they were magically whittled down to just 200 mutants, and most of them moved onto a little island off the coast of San Francisco that they declared the sovereign nation of Utopia, which is just asking for trouble (I woulda went with "San FranXo").

Osborn, being a villain, hired a bunch of villains to dress up as The Avengers in a book called Dark Avengers, using them as his own personal version of the Marvel Universe's premier super-team. This is Dark X-Men, and the premise is therefore quite similar—Osborn-approved bad mutants masquerading as good mutants—but since the X-Men play such a different role in Marvel society, there doesn't really seem to be any reason for Osborn to need/want a team of his own.

That is, if the Avengers are the police of the Marvel Universe, the X-Men are more like vigilantes. If the Avengers are the armed forces, the X-Men are freedom fighters or a terrorist cell.

So I had a hard time wrapping my head around this book's very existence, and thus really appreciate what a decent job writer Paul Cornell did of making a self-contained, super-people drama out of it, one more focused on a collection of bad, broken people trying to meet their own goals. Also, he kinda sorta makes it all about Osborn, rather than The X-Men (Dark, Uncanny, Astonishing, Legacy-having or otherwise), so that it seems to be a thread of the the whole "Dark Reign" tapestry of post-Secret Invasion, pre-Siege Marvel stories.

His X-Men, seen on the cover as depicted by former Astonishing X-Men artist Simone Bianchi, are Mimic (who actually looks like original X-Man Angel), Dark Beast (who is apparently just like regular Beast, but evil), Mystique (who shape-shifts to resemble Jean Grey when in public) and Omega (who I think is maybe from an "Alpha Flight" story, and was maybe introduced in that one Brian Michael Bendis issue of an Avengers comic which spent some eight pages, mostly splash pages, visually describing a town in Alaska blowing up or something).

Cornell, working with his Captain Britain and MI:13 partner Leonard Kirk (and Jay Leisten, who inked 3/5ths of the book) introduces the characters in each issue with a little box listing their name and a song title to describe them, which is either clever/cute or annoying, depending on if you get the references, and/or care to think about the ways in which Nathan Grey, the shirtless mutant messiah who used to star in a book called X-Man is like a particular Rolling Stones song).

Cornell portrays Mimic and Omega as basically decent but screwed-up people trying to do the right thing more often than the wrong thing, but aren't quite in control of their enormous powers and lacking something upstairs or in their hearts. The Dark Beast is an unrepentant psychopath, although there's a kinda clever gimmick to the way Cornell rights him, as post-human sentient who regards human beings the way too many human beings regard animals (the blatancy of his name and appearance form nice, bombastic underlines and exclamation points).

In the course of their duties as Osborn's own personal mutant-focused super-team, they stumble upon Grey, whose backstory I don't know/get at all, but apparently he's some kind of pure energy, nigh-omnipotent future mutant with the potential to do a lot of good for the world, including the bad-to-worse members of the "Dark X-Men," and he attempts to do it by hijacking Norman Osborn's brain, which leads to a weird little adventure inside Osborn's mind involving the title characters, Grey, Osborn and The Green Goblin.

It's a down ending of course, because it's part of a mega-narrative with the word "Dark" right there in the branding, and because the happy ending has to be saved for the Brian Michael Bendis conceived and executed Siege storyline that undoes this status quo, but it's a decent character study of Osborn and, to a lesser extent, the minor characters given a spotlight in the title.

The real stars though are Cornell, whose writing is sharp, clever and imaginative, and Kirk, whose art is smooth, clear and clean, building settings and characters that feel organically linked and occasionally calling to mind the superhero art of Stuart Immonen.

I don't really like X-Men comics, and I don't really know much of anything about any of the characters running around the pages of this book, but I kinda liked this anyway, which I assume is thanks to the great care and craft that went into making it, and Cornell and Kirk's ability to take apathy-inducing source material and make something interesting out of it.

Review: Dark Reign: Fantastic Four

Now this, this is more like it.

Dark Reign: Fantastic Four was a five-issue miniseries of the sort Marvel started doing during Secret Invasion, and DC has since followed suit with during Blackest Night: Short miniseries tied in to the events of the big event series in order to leave the franchises’ main titles free to keep doing whatever it was they were doing.

During this series, what Fantastic Four was doing was hosting the end of Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s short run, which was fairly divorced from the month-to-month continuity of the greater Marvel universe line of books.

Dark Reign: Fantastic Four was also written by Jonathan Hickman, who would go on to take over the main FF title after Millar departed, so this is essentially the start of Hickman’s run.

I was honestly a little surprised to see the collection at the library, as I must have missed its announcement (or forgotten all about it), in the deluge of Dark Reign titles. The premise of the Dark Reign branding, that villain Norman Osborn and his cronies have taken over the U.S. government’s management and policing of Marvel’s superheroes, doesn’t seem to have obvious implications for the FF, which have been rather divorced from the storyline (and Marvel Universe politics) in general thus far…perhaps in large part because Millar’s writing of the title has been off doing its own thing for so long, and FF has never really fallen into Dark Reign mastermind Brian Michael Bendis’ portfolio.

Hickman didn’t even go with the most obvious FF tie-in, the presence of archenemy Doctor Doom and on-again-off-again frenemy Namor among Osborn’s “Cabal.”

He did find an interesting, even natural way to tie the FF into Dark Reign, through Reed Richards. Since the superhero “civil war” in Civil War which (somehow not entirely clear to me) lead to the villains-in-charge status quo was in large part Reed’s fault, Hickman has Reed decide to figure out where exactly his grand plans went wrong. How could the smartest super-genius in the universe have been that wrong about something, after all? Reed does so in a very Fantastic Four kind of way, by building a machine that processes alternate realities, so he can see how the Reeds in parallel dimensions addressed the challenges, isolate the problem, and then fix everything.

Something goes slightly wrong though, when Osborn and his army bust in to schedule a meeting with the FF, and Johnny, Thing and Sue find themselves living and fighting through multiple realities. What this means is we see get to see different versions of the trio and other Marvel heroes in different genres—war, western, pirate, medieval, space-faring sci-fi and so on.

Much of this is of the good-crazy sort of comics insanity, like “Black Susan” Storm in a high noon showdown with The Beyonder, or “The Man In White.” Or like the monocle-wearing Chamberlain Grimm declaring, “Milday, ‘tis the clobbering hour.” Or Venom-possessed Skrulls on a rampage.

Pencil artist Sean Chen and inker Lorenzo Gurriero provide the visuals, and they’re incredibly deft juggling the rather wild shifts in genre. No matter the setting, the characters look consistent, and the costuming, props and geography look right. It’s really handsome-looking work, and very refreshing after the strained realism of Hitch’s work on the same characters.

Hickman does a pretty great job of juggling conflicts, with the Thing and company’s wild adventures essentially providing action and comedy relief to Reed’s oblivious pondering, and the children left alone to face the invading Osborn and HAMMER agents. It all comes together quite effectively at the climax, although it is perhaps the twelfth time or so I’ve seen Osborn do something so ridiculously, comically evil in a fairly public setting that one has to work really hard to continue to suspend disbelief hard enough to take Marvel’s event cycle seriously. (Here, he personally shoots his gun at a couple of little kids in the headquarters of the world’s most famous and trustworthy superheroes…Reed Richards built an alternate-reality viewer, but there’s no security cameras in The Baxter Building?)

Another Hickman-written, Dark Reign-related story is included in this volume, an Adi Granov-illustrated eight-page short story that is little more than a tour of Dr. Doom’s day-dreaming about dealing with the rest of the cabal. I’m not a big fan of Granov’s slick, painted-looking style, but this is an awfully small dose of it. It’s fine as a short, grim joke character sketch of a story, the biggest revelation being that Dr. Doom totally wants to fuck Loki-in-a-lady-body. Weird.

Twenty more-or-less random thoughts that occurred to me while reading The List

1.) It's just called The List, not Dark Reign: The List. I thought that was a little weird, given that the individual special all shipped with overly complicated titles, like Dark Reign: The List—The Avengers, Dark Reign: The List—Wolverine and so on. They put the words "The List" in what looks like some kind of Dark Reign font, though.


2.) I honestly can't tell you how much I hate this cover:
Not because I'm bashful about expressing my hatred for it, but simply because I can't quantify that hate. It's a lot of hate though.

Here we see five random Marvel characters more or less milling around in various half-assed poses, a list of names hovering behind them (Please note: That is not actually Norman Osborn's list, which is eight items long and shown a couple of times throughout the course of the book.) Also note that Wolverine, who is barely even in the book (despite having his name on one of the specials collected), is wearing the wrong costume, and The Punisher seems even more off-model, forgetting to put his gloves on.


3.) The book is pretty much a perfect sampler platter of the Marvel Universe circa 2009. Here's the creative roster, for example: Brian Michael Bendis, Andy Diggle, Matt Fraction, Jonathan Hickman, Rick Remender, Greg Pak, Jason Aaron, Dan Slott, Marko Djurdjevic, Billy Tan, Alan Davis, Ed McGuinness, John Romita Jr., Ben Oliver, Esad Ribic, Adam Kubert and others. Additionally, many of the characters are in modern, assuredly short-lived iterations (The X-Men are on their little island Utopia, Daken is running around as Wolverine, Bruce Banner can't turn into the Hulk, and is mentoring his son Skaar, etc). Some stories are better than others, of course, and there are a variety of art styles, but overall it's not a bad way to check in with the Marvel Universe as it currently stands.


4.) Marvel just recently released a book entitled Brian Michael Bendis: 10 Years at Marvel, celebrating the anniversary of the company's most successful and influential writer. So you know Bendis has been at this—making comics in general, making Marvel comics specifically—for a really, really long time now. So I was amused to see the first two pages of his Avengers special:
As long as Bendis has been writing these damn things, he still doesn't seem to have been able to figure out an effective way to put one of his very Bendisian conversations into a comic book page layout. That, or Ares is standing on one leg throughout that conversation for some reason.


5.) Fun fact: Lexapro is the brand name for the drug Escitalopram, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, which is used primarily for the treatment of depression (although it is also often prescribed for anxiety disorders). I'm neither a doctor nor a psychiatrist, but as far as I know, it's not prescribed to paranoid schizophrenics. Spider-Man seems to be making a joke about Clint Barton/Hawkeye/Ronin II being paranoid, so Lexapro is a weird one to go with.


6.) Barton/Hawkeye/Ronin totally wants to kill Norman Osborn, for reasons not entirely clear to me based on this single story (He refers to the X-Men's little island as "a concentration camp," which doesn't seem much different then when they were confined to the Xavier mansion post-House of M, and is a lot less concentration camp-like than, say, Guantanamo Bay...did Hawkeye wanna kill Tony Stark or or Maria Hill or any U.S. presidents...?).

Some of the Avengers argue with Barton how killing is wrong. This story is written by the same man who wrote Secret Invasion, in which Barton advocated genocide against the Skrulls and killed a whole bunch of them himself. Everyone in the room with him in this scene were A-OK with killing Skrulls. I just don't get the moral compasses of Bendis' Avenger characters at all, as they're always changing without explanation, like a compass in a movie where the characters enter into some kind of screwy energy field or something, and the needle spins at random.

That said, while I understand the premise of "Dark Reign," the whys of it have never made any sense to me. Osborn was publicly known as a serial killer, and his redemptive act and the reason for his popularity in Secret Invasion was simply shooting the about-to-be-killed-anyway Skrull queen in the head before Wolverine could chop her head off or one of the other dozen heroes about to kill her killed her. If Secret Invasion was merely a miniseries devoted to making Osborn the new-new Nick Fury, Bendis really should have spent more time on him in the series, and shown him actually doing things that would make a reasonable case of his succeeding where Tony Stark failed (or, I don't know, maybe he just did a deal with Mephisto or Loki, and they changed Marvel continuity for him...maybe that will be part of Siege).

Wow, I got off topic real fast there, didn't I...?


7.) Norman Osborn kills 107 people in an explosion to send a message to Daredevil. That's a whole lot of civilians to just kind of kill randomly for pretty much no reason. The Daredevil story is the second one in the book, and it's the first of several times in which Osborn attempts to take out someone on his list, doesn't quite do it, and then just moves on. There's a frustrating amount of non-status quo changing, for a series all about an almost all-powerful Osborn attempting to change the status quo.


8.) I don't care for Billy Tan's artwork much. He draws one big, beefy Daredevil.


9.) I was dreading the Secret Warriors chapter, as I had little-to-no interest in the characters after meeting them in Secret Invasion, but it turned out to be a Nick Fury solo story, and, thanks to Hickman and McGuinness a pretty damn good one.


10.) I like how Fury breaks into Avengers Tower to get at Osborn, which Barton just did a few chapters ago, and he manages to do so much more effectively. It may just be a coincidence—not sure how much each writer knew about the other writers' plots—but the effect is a demonstration of how awesome Nick Fury is (and/or how relatively lame Barton is, I guess).


11.) Fury's own list is awesome, as is the fact that he has it all written down on a piece of paper and ready to show to Osborn, just in case the subject of lists comes up when they meet.


12.) I really like the way McGuinness draws Ares in his helmet:


13.) McGuinness does a lovely job of drawing Osborn making Green Goblin faces without his mask, quite effectively demonstrating that even though Osborn is supposedly reformed and in control, he's still essentially a crazy supervillain (Other writers usually demonstrate this by having Osborn yelling at himself or something a little more obvious). Poor show on the repeating image there though, McGuinness!

14.) I can't add anything of value to Abhay Khosla's discussion of the X-Men special, which I hope you've all read by now.

Although it is a pretty frustrating story. Osborn goes to the trouble of creating a weapon specifically designed to kill Namor, because Namor betrayed him by leaving his evil cabal (And how did that work, exactly? Osborn had a secret weapon behind a door to keep his reluctant allies in line, one so scary they couldn't quit. Yet Namor, Emma Frost and Doctor Doom have all since quit. Did they reveal what that weapon was? Did Osborn just never use it? If the Sentry's on his side, why not just have the Sentry beat these traitors up?). So Osborn has this monster weapon kill Atlanteans ("Hundreds are dead, if not thousands," Namor reports), and the monster ultimately attacks Namor and the X-Men. They kill it, and then Namor throws its severed head at Osborn and glowers at him.

And that's the end of that. Osborn lets Namor go, Namor leaves without trying to kill Osborn (despite the whole "hundreds are dead, if not thousands" thing).

That's pretty weird, isn't it? It's like the two enemies saw they only had a few pages left in that particular issue, and decided they would finish this later...maybe in a Siege book.


15.) Hey, if they ever get around to a Namor movie, I wonder if they'll be able to use the blue-skinned Atlanteans, or if moviegoers will just accuse them of biting off Avatar?



16.) I wonder if some of these stories will be re-collected elsewhere, perhaps grouped with the ongoing titles whose characters they feature. The Punisher issue, for example, is a pretty pivotal moment for the character, and what comes next in his own Marvel Universe book.


17.) This was my first exposure to the Bruce Banner/Skaar team. It seemed like a neat twist on the Banner/Hulk dynamic, with both personalities physically present at the same time and interacting with one another. I also liked how Pak played Banner as a sort of MacGyver-esque superhero (Has there been a Skaar, Hercules, Banner and Amadeus Cho team-up yet?). That said, I hated the art on this chapter, and I didn't understand the conflict or the resolution. I think Osborn "won," but I didn't understand how, or the goals of the participants.


18.) The Punisher story stood out as being one in which there is a clear winner and a clear loser. The Punisher gets throoughly killed in a way that's rare in superhero comics, with Daken literally slicing him into little pieces and leaving them as a bloody pile, removing any and all suspicion that The Punisher could somehow survive (Well, he does of course...the very next storyline in his personal monthly title was called, um, "FrankenCastle," and featured him as a Frankenstein's monster). I knew it was coming, and it was still something of a shock to see The Punisher finally get killed.

The more I thought about it though, the more unfortunate the issue seemed, like a bit of a lost opportunity. Marvel's only going to get so many chances to kill off The Punisher after all, and it would have been nice if he had a better death than being killed in a one-on-one fight with Wolverine's mohawk and tattoo-having son Daken. The Punisher's fought and beat and/or escaped from pretty much every superhero in The Marvel Universe multiple times by now, right? And it's Daken who finishes him off? It might have been more satisfying to see him run a gauntlet of Dark Avengers before Daken chopped him up, if not having a more unbeatable Avenger like Ares do him in.

This is another story that repeats something from earlier in the collection, in this case a fight with Daken. In the first chapter, we saw Barton take on and/or defeat most of the Dark Avengers—including Daken—before Ares ultimately captured him. If Hawkeye can take Daken and Daken can kill The Punisher, does that mean Hawkeye can wipe the floor with The Punisher? That doesn't quite sound right, does it...?


19.) Jason Aaron's Wolverine story is pretty fantastic. As I mentioned early, Wolvie just barely appears in it at all, and it's basically a team-up between the Grant Morrison-created Marvel Boy with the Grant Morrison-created Fantomex for a mission inside "The World," the Weapon-Plus factory from Morrison's New X-Men run. And surprise, surprise, Aaron writes both characters really, really well, making him one of the few people who can satisfyingly follow Morrison (Of course, this was only a single story, but it was still striking how much more closer to Morrison's Marvel Boy Aaron's was than, say, Bendis' first crack at the character was).

Maybe after Siege Bendis will retire from Marvel Universe-running, and they'll let Jason Aaron handle the gig for the next five or so year...?


20.) I was kind of shocked how good Adam Kubert's Spider-Man story was, particularly since the last time I saw his work it was pretty unimpressive. It's really too bad he can't keep a monthly schedule.

It's the metal battle armor that wears like a light cotton blend

I'm not sure what Norman "The Iron Patriot" Osborn's new re-painted Iron Man armor is made out of exactly, but it sure looks comfortable for metal battle armor. He can just sort of chill out around the base in it, lounging in his throne, crossing his legs, interweaving his fingers together...I always assumed those kinds of suits would be stiff and cumbersome, and would make sitting down at all a challenge.

I guess it just goes to show how little I know about state-of-the-art battle armor.

Behold—The kiddy table of evil!

Geez Norman Osborn, you're a big, powerful businessman type who's been running a federal superhero-busting organization for a couple of months, you just got a big, huge promotion to be in charge of The Avengers and the entire Fifty-State Initiative, and you decide to hold a super-secret meeting in the basement of Avengers Tower, a meeting with two highly irritable monarchs, the Norse god of mischief, the kingpin of super-crime and an X-Lady, and that's the table you decide to use?

Really? That's the best table you can supply for that particular meeting? My kitchen table is bigger and more stately than that. That looks like a piece of patio furniture.

Just look at poor Dr. Doom there. Dude is pissed to be seated at such a small table. He's like one second away from "Doom demands elbow room! Bah, Namor and Red Hood won't quit kicking Doom's feet under the table!"

This isn't a very auspicious beginning to your dark reign, Osborn.

Aren't you taking this "Team of Rivals" thing a little too far, Mr. President-Elect?

Putting your vanquished political opponents like Hillary Clinton and Bill Richardson in your cabinet, and keeping a token Republican like Defense Secretary Robert Gates is one thing.

But making Norman "The Green Goblin" Osborn the Boss of All Superheroes? That really doesn't seem like a very good idea.