Vengeance 1

I’m a highly intelligent person who has read fucking thousands of Marvel comics over the years, so I don’t often find I read a comic mostly centring on existing characters and end up with not the slightest idea what is going on. I hope this isn’t my own fault – I do like my comics complicated and challenging and demanding at times, and take second place to no one in my love of for instance Final Crisis, which is about as anti-spoonfeeding a comic as I can think of offhand from the Big Two.

Okay, let’s give you some elements of this – spoilers all the way, I’m afraid, but I am hardly giving away the story, since Casey isn’t. Some old guy decides he needs to take action – no clue who, or what action, or why. A guy and two girls hook up in a nightclub. In 1944, Hitler commissions the Red Skull to destroy some sort of Russian eugenics programme. Some superpowered teenagers break into an unstaffed underground base and let someone out from a cell – he looks like a teen In-Betweener, unlikely as that is. This lot of kids turn out to be some sort of secret new Teen Brigade, apparently. Magneto breaks in on the threesome, apparently because he objects to such sexual sinning, not an aspect of his personality I’ve noticed before, and gets the shit kicked out of him by the boy, who later is shown to be with the Teen Brigade group – he tells them who they are in a clumsy but kind of welcome but of exposition, something this is generally very low on. Some ex-SHIELD guy is trying to recruit Kyle Richmond, ex-Nighthawk, to do with something about someone selling classified intel of some sort to someone else (honestly, I’m not trying to obscure matters here). We get a couple of panels of the team of a new Nighthawk, She-Hulk and Krang dealing with a creature that looks a lot like Dragon Man. There are some more individual panels with figures I don’t recognise, including a new king of Latveria, clearly not Doctor Doom. Then the Teen Brigade woman and her rescued prisoner are menaced by some Gigerish aliens (not the Brood, I think) in the final panel.

Where the vengeance comes from I’ve no idea, nor how the many parts connect, or what sort of story this is going to be. From the Magneto cover, I thought maybe he was the vengeful one, but that doesn’t seem to be the case, which is kind of a relief since as far as I know he’s a good guy today. The cover also has a line of dialogue on it, but I don’t know who is saying it or about what, so no new info there either, though it’s effective enough as a come-on.

There are good things here too, I should add – the dialogue is mostly sharp and even intriguing, with enough suggestion of real intelligence to tempt me to read on in the hope of the story being really good. I really like some of the artwork too – bits reminded me of a diverse bunch of artists I really like, such as Brendan McCarthy and Marc Hempel. It’s really nicely laid out too, again looking sharp and modern but getting action and atmosphere across, helped by excellent colouring from Brad Simpson. Dragotta mostly does expression pretty well too, in face and body, but there are parts where it looked very like he had studied Jim Starlin’s art for anatomy, which is about as bad an exemplar as you could get. Apart from the hopeless confusion I feel about the story, this is a good comic, and although my second paragraph might reasonably give everyone the impression that I want nothing more to do with it, I like other aspects enough that I’m tempted to persist with moderate optimism that it might pull together into something very good. If anyone has any advance info about what the story is about, or managed to make more sense of this first issue than I did, I’ll be interested to hear more.

(Ignore this if you want no personal info about me: Except in fact this is a six-issue series, and I have terminal cancer and am extremely unlikely to be around for that long, so maybe trying to follow it is pointless. It’s a shame I have to think this way, and clearly no reflection on the comic.)