The Exiles return

Exiles is something of a special series to me. The original run started in 2001 and was part of Marvel's great turn of the millennium creative renaissance. It was my first experience of Judd Winick's writing and introduced me to two of my favourite comics artists: Mike McKone and J. Calafiore. I adored the series for its endless invention of not only interesting alternate versions of familiar and obscure characters but also the interesting situations they were injected into: alternate universes that needed something nudging back into order.

Hell, this was the series that even brought the best out of Chuck Austen whose other work for Marvel I was... significantly less fond of.

Oh, and it also did the Spider-Gwen thing years before Spider-Gwen was a thing. Exiles had a version of Mariko Yashida, in the “normal” Marvel Universe Wolverine's rather boring martyred true love, and reinvented by giving her her cousin Sunfire's powers and making her gay. The issue where she comes out to her teammate Morph remains, to this day, one of my favourite done-in-one character study issues up there Brian Michael Bendis' best one-shot Ultimate Spider-Man issues.

Her love interest, by the way, was a Mary Jane Watson who was Spider-Woman so more proto-Spider-Gwen there.

The series has been revived a couple of times. There was a not terribly exciting run by Jeff Parker that lasted all of six issues in 2009 and a pretty damn good revival of the concept as X-Treme X-Men in 2012 under Greg Pak. The later I highly recommend checking out, especially if you ever wondered why people are so fond of the Dazzler character.

The fun of the series has always been reinvention, which is probably why the Chris Claremont run and its odd decision only to feature versions of characters originally created by Claremont didn't sit well with me (though I did like that run's take on Mystique). Seeing the new line-up, especially an older Kamala Khan, really interests me. Plus Saladin Ahmed is attached as writer and this guy made me care about Black Bolt! I didn't think anyone could make me care about Black Bolt and he managed it.

Seeing what he has in store for Blink, Iron Lad and Kamala Khan is going to be a sight to see. 

Marvel, I think you have a problem

You see, after the grotesque screw-up that was Secret Empire, Marvel declared they were done with “event” stories for a while. I was all for this because, to be frank, comics are expensive and regularly expecting a niche audience of people with adult financial responsibilities to massively increase the amount of money they're giving you is bad business. Making that strategy the main way you introduce new series and concepts is a recipe for disaster.

Furthermore, the event model interrupts regular series' narratives for months on end, sometimes in pretty intrusive ways, like when Al Ewing's Ultimates series basically forgot its own premise for the durations of Civil War II and Secret Empire.

So this sounded like a pretty good idea to me.

Except...

Right now Avengers and Champions are having a crossover and after that the three Avengers titles are collapsing into a single weekly title for a sixteen week event (and I am still not clear on whether U.S.Avengers, my favourite Marvel title, is coming back afterwards); Amazing Spider-Man, which only just established a brand new status quo, is just starting a crossover with Venom; and, the X-Men books are heading towards Phoenix Resurrection sometime in the new year.

And this is Marvel trying to cut down on events that force their readers into additional purchases or, more realistically, into dropping smaller titles that are less prone to them like the late, lamented Unstoppable Wasp (lamented by me, damn it).

I think those guys have a problem. 

It's The End, But... Black Panther & The Crew

This has so much promise and there's a sad irony in the series premature finale dropping the same day as Secret Empire's extended ending.

I don't doubt that some time down the line Ta-Nehisi Coates might find room for these characters in the main Black Panther series (as he has before, especially Storm) but one can't help but wonder what this series might have achieved given more time.

There are few places in the world that feel so real even if you've never been there as New York. London, perhaps, and definitely Paris. New York is the setting of so many comics, movies, novels, documentaries... there's no escaping knowing some of its history and setting a story in that history gives it such resonance, especially when one of the authors (I don't know Harvey's biography, I'm afraid) happens to be a historian. Coates' and Harvey's Harlem is so vividly brought to life and the mixture of reality and Marvel Universe lore is expertly judged. Butch Guice's art helps, of course, but so much of it is delivered through the little details of language and character that I feel I have to give the lion's share of the credit to the authors.

Then there's the team that we barely got to know: Black Panther, Storm, Luke Cage, Misty Knight and Manifold. As I said before when reviewing earlier issues, one of the highlights for me was seeing Storm and Misty interact. I don't doubt they did back in the day, Misty was Jean Grey's roommate back during Chris Claremont's run on Uncanny X-Men, but I know of little if anything since. The two women worked so well together in this series and I don't see Marvel really finding much excuse for them to interact in the near future, even if Storm is now based in the city now the X-Men have started squatting in Central Park.

Then there's Manifold, veteran of the Secret Warriors and one of those characters that never got enough time to shine during his run with the Avengers. He was with the team for a whole two issues. It was interesting seeing him written with such affection for Harlem as an adopted home, not a terribly common angle in anything I've read set in there. Storm, similarly, comes to Harlem as an outsider, though she shouldn't be. She speaks of her connection to the place, her parents' home, the place she should have grown up in if they hadn't died in Africa leaving her stranded.

And it was all so damn interesting. The Harlem setting, the eclectic cast of characters interacting in unusual combinations, the whole historical perspective...

I promised myself this would be a positive one because this was such a good series. I don't want to rant about the injustice of its cancellation like I did with Unstoppable Wasp. Its a sad reality of the modern comicbook industry that good series like this with unique things to say are given too little advertising so they wither on the vine.

Who knows, though, maybe there's a chance we'll see this Crew sometime down the line. Worse ideas have seen revivals . I mean, there's a Ben Reilly ongoing right now...

On the imminent conclusion of Hydra!Cap

I have this horrible premonition. I have this awful feeling that we're going to get to Wednesday and the final issue of Secret Empire and Marvel is just going to announce that the series needs to run for another two issues.

Or four.

Or forever.

To be frank, given the exceptional ability Marvel has shown to fuck this thing up at every possible opportunity I would not put anything past them at this point. I would not put it past them to have changed the ending of the final issue so it turns out that the new Captain America (after Miles Morales shanks Steve with a steel rebar) is a clone of Robert E. Lee who fights his enemies by firing Confederate memorials at them out of a bazooka and Sam Wilson is reduced to his sidekick again except he can't fly anymore because of the massive shackles he has to wear at all times “because its important to remember our heritage”. At this point I only find this scenario moderately unlikely, though in part that just can be put down to the nature of comicbook narrative.

I want this done. I want Hydra!Steve gone. I want daemonically possessed hypersexualised Wanda over with so we can actually get some follow up on that excellent James Robinson solo series she had. I would very much like X-Men Blue to get back to its regularly scheduled programming instead of this odd divergence where Tian is suddenly back for some bloody reason and Emma Frost wants to bang teenage Cyclops.

Most all all, I want an end to this business of the Marvel Universe's moral centre being on the side of Nazis and that apparently being the natural state of history and the version where he was a good man who decided to stand up for others was a corruption who only existed because someone else essentially brainwashed him.

Oh, and whilst we're at it: what kind of dick gets their hands on a Cosmic Cube, rewrites the history of the Second World War to favour the Allies and leaves the sodding Holocaust in?

This event needs to end, it needs to die and reside in the lowest circle of Big Event Hell where it will replace the Clone Saga in the mouth of Satan himself. 

Kate Bishop IS Hawkeye

The next run of Hawkeye is going to be a Kate Bishop solo series!

There are few characters in comics I adore more than Kate Bishop. I always liked her, right back to her first appearance in Young Avengers. She had an interesting personality, she bounced well off the other members of the team (especially Eli), and I loved her design. Over the last couple of years, though, the character has really come into her own.

Mostly this can be credited to Matt Fraction and David Aja's Hawkeye run, which cast her first as Clint's long-suffering straight woman and then spun her off into her own storyline working solo in LA. Not to forget the maturing of the character in Kieron Gillen's Young Avengers which introduced her relationships with Noh Varr and America Chavez.

Oh, I do hope we get to see more of America Chavez in this ongoing. As much as I like her as the Ultimates' heavy hitter there's something delightful about how she bounces off Kate's... slightly reserved poshness.

Yes, I'm hoping for pay-off on the whole “Princess, you're not that straight” thing. Can you blame me? They're adorable together.

I am very much looking forward to this. 

Thor be a lady (Thor #1)

First impression: I love the new logo. I also like the design of the new Thor's costume because it really is just a mildly feminised version of the gentleman Thor's recent clothes. She has a metal breastplate (no laughing at the back there!) and that's about it. Most surprisingly? The areas of bare skin on the lady Thor are the same areas that were bare skin on the male version. No cleavage, no bare legs, no thong, no swimsuit: just the same bare arms and lower face. Hell, this costume might actually be more practical because it does include solid body armour over the chest and neck and a buckler over her offhand. When was the last time you saw a female “version” of a male hero whose costumed offered better physical protection?

Hell of a lot better than this one, certainly...

As to what the new Thor is like as a character... your guess is as good as mine. She appears in the last two pages to pick up the hammer and we get a full-page reveal of that new costume I just enthused about for a whole paragraph. I've tried not to spoiler myself here because I wanted a surprise but on the evidence of the issue I don't know who she is (unless she's Freyja, which is sort of implied at one stage).

This isn't to say the issue didn't interest me. Male Thor in his fallen form is interesting and the mystery of why he suddenly isn't worthy hasn't been addressed yet except to say that Odin and the Warriors Three can't lift the hammer either. There's also a coming power struggle between the All-Mothers and the recently returned Odin as they issue conflicting orders to their subjects.

Hopefully issue two will tell us who this new Thor is, either in the sense of her literal identity or just some mission statement of “I believe this and its why I got this cool hammer”.

I do sort of hope its Freyja, though, especially after how Odin treated her as a subordinate in this issue. Gender swapping heroes like this is ultimately about lending extra weight (read: marketing power) to female characters in a traditionally male space. As much as recent retcons courtesy of Keiron Gillen claim sexuality isn't an issue amongst Asgardians we can't get around the fact that gender is otherwise Odin's treatment of Freyja and Sif's entire character arc make no sense. Given all that I can see the worth in Freyja turning her rejection, which I'll bet the rest of Asgard reinforces now the “true king” has returned, into a singleminded drive to prove her worthiness through the most direct route available: proving it to Odin using the only incontrovertible test divinely mandated by Odin.