Fear Itself 1 & The Home Front 1

Three comics in, and I am very irritated by this Fear Itself event. The prologue set up the Red Skull’s daughter, Sin, tracking some mighty weapon. In FI1 she gets it, and it’s like Don Blake getting Mjolnir: she becomes some ancient scary Asgardian god (of fear, I suppose). Odin immediately runs away, taking all of his Asgardians with him. Oh, and Sin meets some old guy, an alternate or evil Odin type by the look of it, and summons something or other. This is a double-length issue, so 66 or whatever pages in, and we still don’t actually know what is going on, but just keep getting “OMG Odin is scared and look the Watcher is hanging around so just imagine how big and exciting this is!!!!” stuff thrown at us.

Fear Itself: The Home Front 1, which is apparently also a 7-issue mini-series, presumably published alongside FI, is even more annoying. It has four stories: Speedball is still hated for his mistake that kicked off the Civil War story (does this have something to do with the FI story?); the Agents of Atlas have a lead on some nazis (I guess this will link in with Sin, but it doesn’t yet); J Jonah Jameson still blames superheroes for everything; and we get a lengthy look at the town near which Asgard was, but the gods have now all left. So hatred towards Speedball, the Nazis of course are always full of hate, as is JJJ in a different way: is this the usual linking of fear and hate? If so, some of the fear that leads to it would have been worth showing. By the way, don’t be fooled by the dreary cover showing Cap, Iron Man, Thor and so on: Cap’s face is on a TV set in the background of one panel, but that’s your lot.

So that’s content: I am annoyed with Marvel too as a publisher. In none of the three comics I have read so far is there any clue as to how many comics they will want me to read to follow this story – yes, seven of FI, 7 of THF (though there is nothing here to imply that this is necessary or even valuable), but is that it or will there be 452543625 issues of every other Marvel comic tying into this too? I was expecting a checklist or at least a coming soon ad for the earliest linked issues. Perhaps there really aren’t any, but if that were the case I’d have expected some bigger stars in THF, so I doubt it. Another minor irritant and stupidity: surely there is no one who would buy THF but not the main title; so why run the same backup preview (of Planet Red Hulk, which has no detectable connection with the FI stuff, and sounds like an annoying retread) in both? A dumb waste on Marvel’s part.

So I’m pissed off with the content and the publishing practices, but is it any good? Well FI is well crafted, even if I am questioning the story decisions. Fraction can write dialogue, even if the Thor-Odin confrontations would seem implausibly contrived and forced in the ’60s let alone now (and Odin seems even less all-wise than he normally does, which is going some)(and Thor seems to talk very differently nowadays, but that may be my being out of touch). To be fair he also does all of the “OMG this is gonna be big” stuff with some panache and impact – I’d be impressed if we were getting anything of the actual bigness by now, rather than just a stream of promos for it. I’m not sure how much the pacing is down to Fraction and how much to Immonen, but we do end up with some crowded scenes and pages (two spreads of Thor attacking Odin have 18 panels where Kirby-style big panels were surely wanted) and other parts seem like padding (one page is just four panels zooming in from space to Manhattan, where there is no space or cosmic stuff happening).

Whoever’s fault the weird pacing is, I like Immonen. He can genuinely draw, and he has a good sense of drama, and his (if they are his) character designs are reasonably strong and well introduced. He does well on making the quieter pages compelling, and gives us some appealing special effects here and there.

The Home Front is far worse in craft terms: Christos Gage does a nicely balanced job on the varied feelings towards Speedball, but Mike Mayhew’s art has the style and all the dynamic energy of those stiffly-posed fumetti, photo stories, we used to see in teen mags. Peter Milligan does his best with the dull Agents of Atlas, focussing on their leader Jimmy Woo, and while artist Elia Bonetti is less photo-referencey than Mayhew, he’s no more exciting and is terribly clumsy at composition. Chaykin’s Jameson one-page may as well not exist (has he really lost all of his old talent?). Jim McCann evokes the Oklahoma town near Asgard with some sharpness, but artist Pepe Larraz is a total fuck-up: the big dramatic moment is when someone gets angry at having to wait for ages for a seat at a diner; as well as showing no sign of having decided how the diner is structured, unforgiveable when all seven pages are set there, the last glimpse of seats before the blow-up show a whole section, room for half a dozen or so, as totally empty, making a nonsense of the centre of the story. Let’s also blame editor Lauren Sankovitch here, as that should have been spotted and fixed. But the worst thing is that we are forced to guess at possible links to the main storyline here – it’s not completely clear that there are any, across all four stories.

If I knew I only had to read another six issues of the main book, by two good creators, I would stick with that. Not knowing, plus all the other irritations detailed above, mean I am currently inclined towards abandoning it here.