by Daniel Erenberg

Comic books will never be understood by mainstream audiences, and it’s all the fault of the comic book companies. Here, Marvel have a wonderful new book, written by the interesting indie creator Jonathan Hickman, doing his first mainstream comic book work, co-plotted by superstar writer Brian Michael Bendis and penciled beautifully by rising star Stefano Caselli. But, if a single non-obsessive, ordinary human being were to pick up this book, they’d be completely lost. I can barely explain the origin of this comic without getting dead-eyed stares from laymen.

Secret Warriors, as a concept, was introduced last summer during the big Secret Invasion crossover event. Its main cast was seen getting recruited by former S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury in two random issues of Mighty Avengers, a Bendis-written Avengers book. The main characters of that comic were not in these two issues. It was just sort of taken over by the Secret Warriors characters for a couple months while the Avengers were fighting the alien Skrulls in Secret Invasion. The concept of the book, which continues in the main title, whose first issue this is supposed to be a review of, is that Nick Fury, on the run from the United States Government and with a completely disintegrated trust in the men in power, recruits a new team using what are called Caterpillar Files—basically a database of young, powered individuals yet to be snatched up by the government. Bendis created all of these new characters and set them up masterfully in the Mighty Avengers issues in which they were introduced. Hickman manages to continue that trend here. He’s an untested writer that Marvel has already shown their confidence in, having assigned him the post of Fantastic Four writer, following Mark Millar’s best-selling run on the book. We’re gonna see a lot more of this guy and that is most definitely a good thing. His character work is spot-on. You can really hear the different voices of these characters rattling off the page. He also handles the brief action sequence arguably better than Bendis would have if he were scripting here.

If this issue was actually the third issue of the ongoing series, following those two Bendis-scripted issues of Mighty Avengers, this could be an accessible, exciting read. I would be recommending the shit out of this to everyone who would listen. Unfortunately, if you aren’t a Mighty Avengers reader, you’re probably not gonna understand what the hell is going on in this thing. And that’s a shame, because Marvel has something really great here.

A-

Tags: bendis secret warriors marvel nick fury
February 11, 2009 at 12:23am ∞