Secret Six, v. 1: Friends in Low Places

Collects: Secret Six v. 3 #1-6 and DC Sneak Peek: Secret Six #1 (2014-5)

Released: February 2016 (DC)

Format: 144 pages / color / $14.99 / ISBN: 9781401254858

What is this?: A new Secret Six! Five criminals and a PI are hunted by the mysterious Mockingbird, who wants some information from him. Who is he, and what does he want?

The culprits: Writer Gail Simone and artists Ken Lashley, Dale Eaglesham, and Tom Derenick

It has to be natural to make comparisons when you’re reading a title that has been recently rebooted, like Secret Six, v. 1: Friends in Low Places.

I’ve read most of writer Gail Simone’s run on Secret Six — the final volume, Caution to the Wind, will come out next month — and it’s hard not to compare Friends to that run. Frankly, it was hard for me not to mix-up the two different versions of the team. I’m not sure whether the source of that disorientation is the reboot or the book itself — but I’m leaning toward Friends.

In Friends, four villains (Catman; the newest Ventriloquist; Strix, a Talon from the Court of Owls; and new character Porcelain), a superpowered teenager (Black Alice), and a private investigator (Big Shot) are tormented and hunted by Mockingbird. Why? Mockingbird is coy about the reason, imprisoning them and asking, “What is the Secret?” They escape (without answering) and form a team of sorts.

Mockingbird claims to be an arch-criminal, but his plans are haphazard at best. He’s looking for a stolen diamond, but he doesn’t ask about the gem. He’s trying to protect his identity, sure, but he’s dealing with criminals, a teenager, and a private investigator; he’s asking for “the Secret,” yet it’s hard to imagine a more secretive yet stubborn group. Everything is a secret with them. Mockingbird sends a team, led by Scandal Savage, to track and fight the new Six, although it’s unclear what he hopes to achieve. He and Scandal hope the Six will be re-imprisoned, but Mockingbird has a mole in the group, which he uses almost immediately after the fight to draw the team into a … trap, of sorts. (The trap is he threatens to blow everybody up, including his putative fiancée and himself, if he doesn’t get what he wants. I’m not sure why it’s effective.)

It doesn’t help that Scandal’s team doesn’t seem interested in fighting the Six, despite Mockingbird threatening to use hostages against the Scandal. Nor does it help that the team — Scandal, Silver Banshee, and Ragdoll — were all members of the pre-reboot incarnation of the Secret Six. During the entire fight, part of me was bothered that those three were fighting against Catman.

The fight scenes don’t raise the stakes; instead, they seem to lower them. The scrap between the Six and Scandal’s team is frequently amusing, but no one’s heart seems to be in it, and Scandal unilaterally ends the fight by walking away. (She also doesn’t seem interested in the obvious next move of joining forces against Mockingbird.) The final fight between the Six and Mockingbird’s forces is desultory at best; Strix takes out Mockingbird’s men in a few panels, and the rest of the fight is the team reluctantly turning on Mockingbird’s mole despite having more effective options other than fighting among themselves. Perhaps this is intentional; the Six have no tactician, and they’re mostly people whose first and last recourse is fighting. It doesn’t make the book entertaining to read, though.

The art doesn’t help the fight scenes. Ken Lashley’s work on the Six’s escape from Mockingbird in the second issue is a few chaotic panels followed by a declaration of victory, while Tom Derenick’s art for the final fight lacks dynamism. Derenick tries to give a demonstration of Strix’s fighting style on a single page, but the horizontal layout makes the fight into a sidescroller, with that old video-game logic: antagonists come out of nowhere, they could possibly spawn forever, a character might not be something you can fight, and the fight ends arbitrarily. The battle in #3, which takes place in Big Shot’s suburban home, is much better, but it’s played for laughs, and there’s always a sense everything is being held back.

In the first two issues we should ideally be meeting the team and seeing how the members relate to one another. However, those issues feel disorganized; the first issue is mostly about Catman, how he was captured by Mockingbird and how poorly he fares in captivity. (His actions when he meets the rest of the Six in #1 have little to do with how he relates to them later on.) Issue #2 has many flashbacks to Catman’s captivity — no, not this captivity, but the captivity before that, the one we didn’t know had occurred. The double captivity is confusing, and the lack of issue labels doesn’t help; since the book includes a “Sneak Peek” issue, and I assumed one of the first two issues was that issue — something loosely connected to the regular series but that might not match up well to its continuity. Getting captured twice by Mockingbird makes Catman look like a chump, but the focus on Catman in these issues gives the impression Secret Six will be Catman and the Kitties Five, something the rest of Friends doesn’t dispel.

The book does have a lot of things going for it. Simone’s sense of humor is still appealing, and with a few less faults, that humor might have won me over. The other characters are types, but entertaining ones. Big Shot is the straitlaced suburbanite, unwilling to curse (or to have others curse) around ladies. The Ventriloquist is a Norma Desmond-type, believing the spotlight will find her and her dummy, the seemingly sentient Ferdie. Strix is silent, phonetically writing all her communications on a pad of paper and completely unable to guess what is socially acceptable. The “writing on paper” gag becomes impractical many times — who would let her write during combat? — but I’m willing to accept it for now. More concerning is that Strix is identified as a Talon for the Court of Owls, but neither “Talon” nor “Court of Owls” is explained. I know what they are, but a footnote would have been nice. I don’t think DC does footnotes any more, though.

Big Shot’s relationship toward Black Alice quickly becomes paternal. It’s reminiscent of the relationship between Scandal Savage and Bane in the previous volume of Secret Six, but that’s all it is: an echo, a parallel, an allusion. The relationship differs in many important ways: Big Shot and Alice are relatively nice people, which Scandal and Bane were not; Alice is young enough and Big Shot not so controlling that the relationship doesn’t have any creepy overtones; and most importantly, Alice enjoys Big Shot’s protectiveness. Their scenes together are sweet.

Porcelain is an afterthought. We learn the character’s basic powers — making hard matter brittle — and we’re told the character is trans to some degree, shifting from presenting a female to male persona to the world. We never discover if that’s a normal, real-world transition or if it is something in Porcelain’s powers. It hardly matters, since we see Porcelain as male only for a brief moment in issue #3. Unlike the others, we learn little of Porcelain’s personality. In the big fight scene, Porcelain is knocked out between issues #5 and 6, as if either Simone or Derenick had forgotten Porcelain was unaccounted for at the end of #5 but didn’t want to spend the necessary time showing what happened.

As revealed by my comments above, I’m not enamored of the art. Lashley draws the first two issues plus a few pages of the third. His work is atmospheric, but it lacks the detail needed to plant long-term hints; it’s hard to tell, for instance, that the singer on the first page of #1 is the same character who hits Catman with a taser a few pages later. Derenick (parts of #3 and #5, and #6) and Dale Eaglesham (Sneak Peek, #4, and part of #5) have much clearer styles. Their work is complementary, similar enough that I sometimes miss the handoff between them. I enjoy the clear lines and clear action both of them supply, but as I noted before, their fight scenes lack a certain vitality. I can’t decide whether that’s because the fights are written as pro forma, or if the art is the reason the fights seem so lackluster.

Friends is a disappointing book, but it’s not without promise. I’ll probably pick up the next volume, but I may not pre-order it. (I’m assuming the DC Universe didn’t re-reboot before the next six issues were released.)

Rating: (2 of 5)

Alpha Flight: The Complete Series by Pak and Van Lente

Collects: Alpha Flight #0.1, 1-8 (2011-2)

Released: May 2012 (Marvel)

Format: 208 pages / color / $29.99 / ISBN: 9780785162834

What is this?: The original Alpha Flight team is back, battling a government seemingly gone mad and a traitor from within.

The culprits: Writers Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente and artists Dale Eaglesham and Ben Oliver

I wanted to like Alpha Flight: The Complete Series. I like Alpha Flight, as a team. The writers, Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente, have produced books I’ve liked, such as their Incredible Hercules run. And in this series, Pak and Van Lente reunite Alpha Flight’s classic lineup in its own book for the first time since the John Byrne run.

But it’s tough to recreate greatness a quarter century on. The characters, creators, and readership have all changed. The title changed a great deal after Byrne left, with writers such as Bill Mantlo, James Hudnall, and Simon Furman guiding Alpha Flight for more than 100 issues. After the original series ended, Alpha Flight was relaunched twice: a Steven Seagle / Duncan Rouleau conspiracy story and a critically lambasted Scott Lobdell run. What “Alpha Flight” means changed, so much so we forget the original lineup existed for single issue. Characters have been killed, brought back to life, and killed again. In fact, the last time I checked, everyone starring in this book was dead. Marrina had been dead for decades, killed in Avengers in 1986. Northstar was killed by Wolverine as cheap carnage in 2005’s Enemy of the State. The rest died between panels because Brian Bendis said so.

Unfortunately, there’s no explanation of how Guardian, Vindicator, Sasquatch, Shaman, or Marrina came back to life. (Puck says he escaped from Hell, which at least acknowledges that he died.) Maybe it has something to do with the Fear Itself crossover, which manifests itself in this book as people running around with anime-sized hammers. A little research reveals the Chaos War storyline allowed the team to return, but The Complete Series doesn’t explain the link or mention either crossover. And even invoking Chaos War doesn’t explain how dead liaison / traitor Gary Cody had time to build a political career. And hey — did you know Guardian and Vindicator had a kid? It’s true! And they lost custody to Heather’s cousin? Also — apparently — true. Is it too much to ask for footnotes so I know Pak and Van Lente have created and what they have been saddled with? I don’t think so. Footnotes are your friend. They’re everyone’s friend, and I missed them very much in The Complete Series.

Pak and Van Lente mix the old with the new, which sounds like a good idea but is troublesome in practice. Alpha Flight’s arbitrariness is the main problem with the series. The characters seem to return from the dead for no reason, their personalities plucked from someplace in their histories. The writers have brought some characters back to their roots, regressing them. Sasquatch flirts with Aurora, who still battles her multiple personalities. Despite years with Alpha Flight and time with the X-Men, Northstar is still not a joiner. Puck is still exuberant, although he’s a bit mad now. Snowbird is still slightly imperious and slightly distant, and Shaman is still Shaman. But Marrina is recast into a violent, moody teenager coming to grips with her alien nature. Sasquatch loses his powers, and when he reacquires them, he has a Hulk-like personality. The Purple Girl has grown into the Purple Woman, taken fashion cues from Carmen Sandiego, and become a terrorist.

This mix of progression and regression is bothersome. Aurora, Northstar, and Sasquatch have lost years of development by returning to their factory-new states. It feels like the writers are casting around for a hook for these characters and settling on what’s been done before. Marrina’s new personality is a distraction. As a new character, she might have been entertaining; however, the contrast with who she was is jarring, especially since readers did not see the transition between personalities. And Shaman and Snowbird are both characters who should have something to say to Guardian about the loss of a child, but neither do; this seems less a lost opportunity and more of Van Lente and Pak casting aside or forgetting who Shaman and Snowbird are.

The villains’ plot — which involves mind control — does not help matters, especially given how extreme some of the actions Vindicator takes while controlled are. Aurora, switching between personalities and loyalties on a whim, exemplifies the lack of a core these characters have. Even the familiar characters feel off. Characters can only be remolded so much before they lose the shapes we liked, and I think that’s the case here.

The plot, which involves a Canadian government being controlled by the Master of the World, doesn’t feel like an Alpha Flight plot. Or — to be more accurate — if feels like a generic superhero plot that was roughly customized for Alpha Flight. The government takeover feels too over the top, with mass arrests of the opposition party and the press stretching credibility. The Master is an excellent choice for a foe, but he rarely feels engaged with the heroes, and his end goal — creating a race of humans who will conquer the universe — is power mad but delightfully without a point. Why conquer the universe? You might as well ask why he’s using a Wendigo as an operative. Because it’s something to do, I suppose; it’s always tough to keep busy when you’re immortal.

I enjoyed Dale Eaglesham’s art. It is attractive, and the characters are expressive without comically mugging. His illustration of the Master’s origins, drawn in a child’s style to convey that it is being told to Vindicator and Guardian’s daughter, is especially endearing. I’m not wild about Marrina’s new and occasionally mutating costume, but it’s not like her old costume — a one-piece swimsuit — was worth saving. I’m less enamored of Ben Oliver’s work on #0.1, although that may be the colorist’s fault — the painted-style colors makes everything look flat.

It’s ironic that Pak and Van Lente’s back-to-basics approach gives Alpha Flight an unsettling unfamiliarity. But the writers’ blithe attempts to take the team back to its beginnings leaves me at a loss; are these the characters I’ve enjoyed reading about? By the end I have to say no, even if they have the same names and appearances.

Rating: (1.5 of 5)

Batman: No Man's Land, v. 1

Collects: Batman #563-4; Batman: Shadow of the Bat #83-4; Detective Comics #730-1; Legends of the Dark Knight #116 (1999)

Released: September 1999 (DC)

Format: 200 pages / color / $17.99 / ISBN: 1563895641

When I first heard the idea of the No Man’s Land crossover in the Batman titles in the late ‘90s, I thought it was ridiculous. The premise was this: Because of disasters in Gotham City, the federal government evacuates the willing, then declares the city off limits to the rest of the world. Those inside Gotham can’t leave; aid from outside can’t get in. The city has to fend for itself.

Preposterous. Much too heavy for me to suspend my disbelief from.

Then came Katrina, and suddenly, No Man’s Land didn’t seem quite so ridiculous.

Batman: No Man’s Land, v. 1 starts 93 days into the crisis, with gangs taking control of the streets and marking their territories with graffiti. Batman hasn’t been seen since the beginning of No Man’s Land, and the only force for order is the “Blue Boys,” the remainder of the Gotham City Police Department, although they operate in many ways like another street gang (less brutally, but with territory and tagging).

The book is divided into stories: “No Law and a New Order” and “Fear of Faith.” In the first, written by Bob Gale, the Blue Boys are on the march, securing the southern end of Gotham from the gangs who rule it. But this is the bad, new Gotham, so their tactics now include inciting street wars among their rivals. Much of the conflict is between Commissioner Gordon and one of his officers, Pettit; Gordon wants to use the minimum of force necessary, while Pettit wants to use force to make hollow-pointed emphasis of their effectiveness to the gangbangers they face. The moral arguments are intriguing, and the scene of poverty and barter is written bold. Batgirl and Batman make their return, with Batman taking on the Ventriloquist, one of his old villains, and breaking his gang.

“Fear of Faith” is a Scarecrow story written by Devin Grayson, in which he infiltrates a church that has managed to carve a small, non-aligned safehold. But the Scarecrow tries to exploit the fears of those around him, causing the priest in charge to let the Penguin violate his neutrality; things escalate from there. Unfortunately, the Scarecrow isn’t completely convincing in his machinations: he has no goal, and he wants only to study the workings of fear in the laboratory of the new Gotham. But the narrative boxes don’t quite persuade the reader that this is compelling in any way.

The book avoids the multiple artists that often mar crossovers. The first story has art by Alex Maleev, who’s a good hand with realism, and as he showed later in Daredevil, a good choice for street-level heroics. If this had been published later, DC might ruin his art with crappy coloring, but here the result is appropriately dark and gritty. Dale Eaglesham, who drew “Fear of Faith,” has a smoother line and cleaner look that isn’t quite as appropriate, but it tells the story, for the most part. (The bald, self-scarred False Faces are almost impossible to differentiate.)

Early in the book, Oracle — the information broker to superheroes and daughter of Commissioner Gordon — provides a map of the new Gotham. It’s fun to see all the names of old and influential Batman creators appear on the map as pieces of Gotham geography,³ but the map is meant to show turf boundaries. This, it’s not so good at. With so many groups, there are not enough colors, and there are some obvious mistakes. The structure of the geography makes the police involvement in the finale of “Fear of Faith” slightly problematic, as they had to cross enemy territory to get to the final showdown.

Overall, very entertaining and very promising. Its ambition carries it for the moment, but future volumes have to deliver on the premise.

Rating: (4 of 5)