Retro Review

That was the only thought I had while reading the final, anti-climactic issue of Marvel’s Secret Invasion limited series, the backbone to the sprawling cross-over event that’s taken up most of 2008. This issue should have been a fast-paced, dramatic climax to the story. Instead, it was flat and rather dry, and the blame must land squarely on the shoulders of the writer, Brian Michael Bendis, and the editor, Tom Brevoort. Both have delivered great work at other times and even on other issues of this title, but they faltered on this the crucial issue of the company’s event of the year.

Did neither of them think that having the action narrated as past events would weaken the impact of what we were reading? Every page of the climactic scenes of the story has caption boxes with dialog between two characters who are discussing the events as having happened some time ago. The first dialog caption, which is on a double-page spread of heroes, villains and Skrulls trapped in a vortex, reads “The battle in New York was fierce”, and right there, it distances us from what’s going on. It also breaks a cardinal rule of comic story-telling: don’t tell the readers in words what you are already showing them in images. 

Beyond distancing the reader from what is happening and being somewhat unnecessary, the captions with this dialog get in the way of the art in places, making it difficult to enjoy the action. 

The climax of the story itself is sadly predictable: who wins, who loses, who dies, and how some of those characters will probably be resurrected later is no surprise to any long-time comic reader. There are a couple of surprises in store, but since these are mainly to set up the next big cross-over event, they are not necessarily welcome. Too much time is spent setting Dark Reign up, and not enough time on giving Secret Invasion the action-packed and emotional ending it should have had. Overall, a very disappointing finish to a series that started out promisingly, and another lesson to me that I should just not bother with the big crossovers any more.

Some characters are created to die. Their creators never intend them to live on past a certain point in the story: once they serve their dramatic purpose, they exit the stage, generally never to return. In the first two posts in this series, I dealt with characters dying to provide motivation to the hero, but there are of course other reasons for characters to die soon after being introduced, other roles for those who are about to die to play.

The rest of this post contains spoilers for the Phalanx Covenant: Generation Next storyline running through Uncanny X-Men #316 and 317, and X-Men #36 and 37.

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The Random Review is late this week, and Created to Die was late too: I seem to be running late with everything, which I blame on my first autumn cold. I was even a day late getting in to look at the new comics, which usually means some of the low-selling titles are gone. However, this week, I was in luck, as none of the good stuff had sold out.

 For people in the US, new comic book day is Wednesday every week, but here in Europe, depending on the city, it may be a weekly, bi-weekly or even monthly affair. The excellent store in Dusseldorf, Nic’s Comics, gets its shipments every second week, so forgive me if some of these issues are last week’s news to you.
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After 20 excellent issues, series creator Peter B. Gillis left Strikeforce: Morituri, to be replaced by James D. Hudnall, who would see the story of the Morituri to its conclusion. Brent Anderson also departed, and after a couple of fill-in artists (Huw Thomas and John Calimee), Mark Bagley, now best known for his long run on Ultimate Spider-Man, took over as the regular artist. With the new creative team came a change in the status quo and the style, and by its cancellation in mid-1989, it had become a very different book.

 The rest of this review contains some spoilers.

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