Heroes for Hire 1

I confess that I didn’t buy this: it came as a free bonus with Avengers 10, which strikes me as a good way to promote something where you have some faith in its quality but fear it might not find its audience.

They’re pretty much right to have some faith in it, I think. It elegantly presents its cast (though the identity of Control will be completely obvious to old readers) through a chain of assignments given to them: Black Widow and the Falcon take down a shipment of some nasty new drug; Moon Knight hits the warehouse from which the shipment came; then when they identify the person behind it, Elektra is sent to his home, where she presumably kills him. There’s also a mysterious lurker in a couple of scenes – Paladin, if I remember rightly, about whom I don’t recall very much. All the characters are defined pretty well, though it isn’t clear why they are taking assignments from Control at all. Also, her “are you for hire tonight?” opening when contacting them sounds like she is trying to book a hooker rather than a superhero.

The events here aren’t particularly exciting – a bunch of drug dealers don’t make inspiring or original enemies, but it’s a tidy intro, and there is a huge and genuinely surprising twist at the end. It’s kind of hard to imagine how the writers plan to make sense of it, but I’m quite interested in finding out. If you go back to the Dan Abnett interview we ran here, you’ll see Dan saying how much he likes such WTF moments, and that he has them worked out rationally, so there is some reason to hope this one will come to seem logical and even necessary, hard as that is to picture at the moment.

The art’s okay – solidly drawn, glossily inked – though I think the viewpoint needed to be a little further back on several panels, as the figures take up too much of the space to make much sense of what they are up to. I do like the fact that the black characters look like black people – too often they are made to look like white people coloured differently and with curly black hair.

I was heading towards tepid on this, thinking it was efficient and well crafted but uninspiring, with a bunch of characters I didn’t have huge interest in, until the final page, a genuinely jaw-dropping revelation, and that’s enough to make me want to pick up the next issue, which is in the end what a first issue is supposed to achieve.