Fear Itself: Book of the Skull

Fear Itself is Marvel’s big crossover event for the next few or several months – I can’t tell you how many months or how many comics you’ll have to read to make sense of it, because to my surprise there is no checklist included with this. Perhaps they don’t want to scare us off. This first comic in the story is also by a different writer from the main series (that’s to be Matt Fraction), which also surprises me.

It calls itself a prologue, and that is indeed what it is. I am a big admirer of Brubaker, and the dialogue here is superb throughout (he handles tense conversations magnificently), most of it between Sin, the Red Skull’s daughter, and Baron Zemo, excavating an old base of the Skull’s to revive his greatest failure, which turns out to be a very Hellboy-style attempt to call down some demonic thing to help the Nazis. Fortunately the Skull could not work out how to activate or use the thing summoned, or even exactly what it was.

We get guest shots from Namor, Cap and Bucky (appropriate to throw in a few stars in a comic heralding a big crossover) in flashback to the WWII part, which also features Baron Strucker and a monster that reminded me very much of Superman’s killer Doomsday. Trouble is, by the end of this, all I know is that the Skull’s daughter now knows where this artefact is, but no clue as to what it is or why it will be important, except a) the house ads suggest some sort of god of fear (we’ve seen one or two of those before, though), and b) the artefact looks a bit Asgardian, and all three of the Fear Itself house ads feature Thor (one with Loki, one with Odin, one with some Avengers), so I guess there is a connection there. I’m not aware of any Norse god of fear, but I am no expert.

It’s a bit unsatisfactory as a first instalment. Nothing wrong with Brubaker’s execution of the plot at all, though the monster combat is very generic, but as a prologue, it rather fails to convey any sense of the looming threat, it just tells us there is one. It felt like it needed a few more pages to make good on that claim, at least to some small degree, something to make a reader think “oh wow, I have to follow this!”

The art is solid if generic throughout, a bit like a healthier-looking Leinil Yu: more shadows and darkness than you would expect. Eaton & Morales do the Skull very well, though they make Bucky look too hefty and old, and Namor is also too muscular. The layouts are often poor – both ordinary and a bit clumsy, but it works efficiently enough. I should mention the cover too, where Marko Djurdjevic shows an Alex Ross tendency towards making costumes look like ordinary cloth (entirely inappropriately for Cap’s chain mail), but provides a genuinely striking and scary Skull, which is probably what is needed for this prologue.