Captain Marvel, v. 1: In Pursuit of Flight

Collects: Captain Marvel #1-6 (2012)

Released: January 2013 (Marvel)

Format: 136 pages / color / $14.99 / ISBN: 9780785165491

What is this?: Carol Danvers takes a new codename, gets a new haircut and costume, and becomes unstuck in time.

The culprits: Writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and artists Dexter Soy and Emma Rios

I really wanted to like Kelly Sue DeConnick’s new Captain Marvel series, but unfortunately, Captain Marvel, v. 1: In Pursuit of Flight underwhelmed me.

Flight starts with Carol Danvers selecting a bland new direction for her career: she adopts a more flattering costume and a less flattering haircut, and she lets Captain America push her into choosing the Captain Marvel name over her previous nom de costume, “Ms. Marvel.” Her great pleasure / motivation now is flight, which makes sense for an ex-USAF officer. But trying to instill wonder in the most mundane of superhero powers is a difficult sell.

With that setup, of course the action in Flight revolves around a random time-travel plot. To be fair, DeConnick ties time travel into the flight theme by using Captain Marvel’s aviatrix hero’s airplane as a time machine, but the time displacement still comes out of nowhere.

Captain Marvel ends up in Peru in 1943, fighting alongside women pilots without planes vs. the Japanese, who are flying Kree ships. The women have been in South America longer than Captain Marvel, but they are as confused as she is about how they got there. And even thought they haven’t traveled in time, why shouldn’t they be confused? They are fighting the Japanese, who are flying Kree ships, in Peru. The reader doesn’t learn until issue #4 that the women of Banshee Squadron were flying a non-combat mission from California to Hawaii before they randomly appeared in Peru. Peru makes some sense, as Captain Marvel’s hero flew her plane there on a famous flight. But other than being female flyers, the Banshee Squadron has nothing to do with Captain Marvel or her plane. World War II has nothing to do with Captain Marvel either. But it all makes sense when the reason for the random time travel is revealed as …

Carol’s hero, Helen Cobb, using a piece of the Kree psyche-magnetron, the “wishing machine” that gave Carol her powers.

Hunh. Well, it explains the Kree ships. The rest still feels as if it were assembled using darts and a blindfold. However, the last two issues proceed more sensibly, as Captain Marvel finds herself alongside Helen at NASA, training for the space program along with other women.

The scattershot plot elements do the book no favors. The supporting characters aren’t helpful either. Helen’s all brass, without any attributes to recommend her to the reader. Carol checks in on Tracy Burke, a cancer patient who used to work for Carol at Woman Magazine, but their current relationship is unexplored, and Tracy is prickly at best. The women of Banshee Squadron are better, but they fall into archetypes: the tough leader, the gung-ho fighter, the innocent … their gender is novel, though. I suppose that’s the point: they are soldiers first, or humans. A few more pages devoted to the characters would have been nice; the seven-page fight sequence at the beginning feels like an indulgence.

The art does not help Flight at all. It’s not often I say, “Thank God for the Emma Rios art” — in fact, before Flight I had said it never times — but I was overjoyed when she took over for #5 and 6. Not that I enjoy her wispy-thin line, spindly figures, and generally manga-influenced art — I don’t — but compared to Dexter Soy, she’s wonderful. Soy, who drew #1-4, gives the reader a muddled world filled with blocky, stiff characters. His line is so thick I wouldn't be surprised if he used a paint brush to ink himself. The muddy palette used by the colorist — not explicitly named but by implication Soy — does not make anything more attractive or recognizable. (Jordie Bellaw, the colorist for #5-6, lightens the colors slightly but still favors browns and dark colors.) Soy doesn’t do himself any favors with the Banshee Squadron; one is drawn firing an enormous machine gun that would knock Sgt. Fury on his keister, and another has blonde pigtails and wears her uniform to expose her midriff and cleavage.

So: plot, characters, protagonist, and art are all lacking. None are awful — well, Soy’s art is. But the entire package is, as I said, underwhelming. Skip this Flight.

Rating: (1.5 of 5)

Young Allies, v. 1

Collects: Young Allies #1-6, Firestar (v. 2) #1, and the Gravity story from Age of Heroes #2 (2010-1)

Released: February 2011 (Marvel)

Format: 192 pages / color / $24.99 / ISBN: 9780785148685

What is this?: A bunch of young heroes loosely collaborate to battle the Bastards of Evil.

The culprits: Writer Sean McKeever and artists David Baldeón and Emma Rios

I was tempted, given my recent glowing review of Nomad, to give Young Allies a 4-of-5 rating and call it a day. After all, it has the same writer (Sean McKeever), the same artist (David Baldeón), and features one of the same characters (the eponymous Nomad). But unfortunately, Young Allies is not the unqualified success that Nomad was.

Young Allies is not quite a team book; as McKeever points out in his afterword, which serves as an epitaph for the series, the book was supposed to be an ensemble piece. A non-team, if you will. It was a way, according to McKeever, to set this book apart from other books. But ensemble books have to work hard to establish their own character, and in a book with Firestar, Nomad, Araña, Gravity, and a new Toro, there aren’t enough strong characters or interesting interactions to give the book a strong identity. Team-up books and books with rotating casts are hard sells these days without a strong brand identity. Even back when comics sold hundreds of thousands of copies per issue, the Defenders (the original non-team) survived on its strong central characters, endearing yet slightly creepy weirdness, and inertia. Young Allies has none of that. Maybe McKeever could have made it work; I would have liked to have seen him try. But none of these characters gave the series the oomph it needed.

The name didn’t help. The heroes aren’t officially ever called the “Young Allies,” but McKeever works hard in #5 to get the name to stick: Captain America compares the youngsters to the Young Allies he knew in World War II, and Nomad mentions founding a Young Allies team on her homeworld. And there is a bit of sense to it; the book does have a Toro and a (former) Bucky, just like the original Young Allies. But then you wonder what the rest of the group has to do with a team name that last had an ongoing series in 1946. Araña, who becomes Spider-Girl by the end of the book, is present because she’s friends with Nomad, but Firestar and Gravity … they have nothing to do with the Young Allies concept or even Toro, Nomad, or Spider-Girl. They’re in their own plotline, and it almost feels like they’re in their own book.

That’s the problem with Young Allies, I think. In Nomad, McKeever showed he had a handle on teenagers and high school, and in Gravity, he did a good job with a newbie college hero. But if Buffy the Vampire Slayer taught us anything, it’s that the problems (and metaphors) of high school aren’t the same as the problems (and metaphors) of college. Nomad and Araña, high schoolers both, feel like the central characters of the book. Certainly Nomad is the pivot the Young Allies name is supposed to turn on. But the problems and feel of this book is more collegiate, more Peter Parker in college than Peter Parker in high school. It doesn’t have that structure, that feeling of constriction that high school has. All the kids have freedom, which would play to Gravity and Firestar’s setup rather than the high schoolers’. But Firestar’s too wrapped up in her own problems of identity and recovering from cancer to add much to the ensemble, and Gravity’s sudden infatuation with Firestar (and his deep-seated desire for heroism) keep him from being very interesting.

I had trouble figuring out Gravity’s status quo at the beginning of the book. I’ve read his previous appearances in his own mini, Beyond!, and Fantastic Four: The New Fantastic Four. Still, I couldn’t figure out why he was in Wisconsin again at the beginning of the story (because McKeever, I suppose) or what his relationship status with Lauren, the girlfriend who meant so much to him in Gravity and Beyond!, was. Nor was I clear about when Araña and Nomad became crimefighting partners, although that was less important. The disappointing thing is that there are summaries of Gravity’s, Nomad’s, and Araña’s histories included in the book; unfortunately, they are at the end, where they aren’t obviously useful. If you want readers to know about the characters they’re going to be reading about, background information needs to be up front. The Firestar one-shot does a good job of setting up her status quo, though — so well the character background at the beginning of the issue is almost redundant. Almost. It’s still appreciated, although issue numbers would have been nice in all of the character summaries.

So, to sum up: McKeever has given us a book with an unclear and not quite compelling hook, with characters who aren’t quite strong enough to support a book. What does he do well, then?

The villains — the Bastards of Evil. Even beyond the name, they stand out. Second-generation supervillains with a different sensibility than their parents, the Bastards are easily the highlights of the book, and I wouldn’t mind seeing these characters (or the concept) brought back in some other seires. The bastards are just as prone to grandiose grandstanding as their forebears, but they are Internet savvy and have daddy issues. The Bastards are teens, and McKeever gives them the casual cruelty of teens — stereotypically so, at times. Their attitude toward technology and the world set them far enough apart from the rest of Marvel’s villains to give them a feeling of uniqueness and makes them a good foil for the Young Allies.

I praised David Baldeón’s work in Nomad, and it’s much the same here. The feel is a little different, though; for some reason, his art works better in a high-school book than with the freedom the characters in Young Allies possess. Perhaps it’s because the similarity of his facial types emphasized the conformity of high school in Nomad. Perhaps it’s because his characters have a restrained sexuality, which works well with high school students but not so well with Emma Frost — or college students, really. (My God — I can’t believe I’m complaining about a lack of cheesecake. This is a very sad day for me.) Still, he’s an excellent artist, able to handle conversation and action easily. I wasn’t blown away by his designs for the Bastards, but since he’s working from their parents’ design, I wasn’t expecting to be. I was disappointed that he contributed none of the covers, which were each in a very different style than his interiors. I really didn’t like Emma Rios’s art for the Firestar one-shot, but that might be my prejudice against manga-influenced art. Or it could be the faces — no matter how strong an artist’s storytelling chops are, looking at weird faces on every page eventually wears away the pleasure centers of my brain. It’s a problem with Frank Quitely for me, and Angelica’s widely set, dead eyes are the problem here.

I want to like Young Allies, but after setting aside the Bastards of Evil, I’m left with a feeling of absence, sensing a lack rather than a presence. Perhaps my expectations were too high. Perhaps the book is missing a heart, something that will take its not unpleasing parts and make them into a satisfying whole. Whatever the reason, though, Young Allies falls short.

Rating: (2 of 5)

Strange: The Doctor Is Out!

Collects: Strange #1-4 (2010)

Released: April 2010 (Marvel)

Format: 96 pages / color / $14.99 / ISBN: 9780785144250

What is this?: Stephen Strange, stripped of most of his magical might, muddles his way through the arcane world and meets a natural adept named Casey

The culprits: Writer Mark Waid and artist Emma Rios

I have a compulsion to buy new Dr. Strange material. I don’t know why; I’m often disappointed. (According to the ads inside the front cover, I managed to miss the Staczynski Strange mini somehow. Huh.) Anyway, this time the compulsion led me to Strange: The Doctor Is Out!.

Written by the veteran and reliable Mark Waid, Strange follows the former Sorcerer Supreme as he adjusts to not having (much) magic at his command. But while putting out a crisis, he runs into Casey, a plucky teenager girl who’s a natural adept. You can see where this is going — no, no, this isn’t a Clea situation.

The pacing on this four-issue miniseries feels off. The first issue has Strange and Casey meeting and solving a crisis; Casey has to find him again in #2, which is followed by a satire of children’s beauty pageants in #3, and then a cataclysm in #4. (Isn’t that always the way? First Little Miss contests, then the magical apocalypse.) The beginning dwells too long on a plot that hardly needs to be given a quarter of the page total, and at the end, Silver Dagger comes out of nowhere to be a minor annoyance rather than the more serious threat the character deserves. The magical crisis in #4 seems all out of proportion to what came before it; it ramps up the tension from, say, a 4 to 11 and expects readers to go along with it. It doesn’t work, though; it takes more than a thinly veiled Wall Street malfeasance reference for me to believe all of magic is in such danger that Shaky Hands McStrange has to perform surgery on Eternity.

Along with being powerless, Strange seems brainless at times. With souls on the line in a baseball game vs. demons, Shaky decides to bat instead of a professional hitter. Strange doesn’t consider that giving an enchanted item and teaching a spell to a natural adept might have consequences if he isn’t there to guide her. He decides he’s the best candidate to operate on Eternity, despite his coordination and magical problems. He’s even outwitted by a not very subtle demon. That last wouldn’t be a problem alone, but combined with the others, it doesn’t make Strange look good.

There are a lot of different ways this could have gone that would have been better. I like the character of Casey, and I liked her interactions with Strange. A more down-to-Earth series, with Strange teaching her and dealing with her problems, would have been excellent. Or having Casey help Strange deal with his new status quo — without allies or magic — might have been entertaining. Instead, it’s a lot of fireworks and not enough character.

As I mentioned in my review of Runways: Homeschooling, I’m not much for manga-influenced artists, and Emma Rios is no exception. Again, that’s a personal preference. But there are times when Rios’s storytelling is muddled — I’m a baseball fan, and I can’t tell what’s going on in the 2 ½ pages following the dropped third strike in #1, for instance. Rios’s design for Strange seems a bit stereotypical for manga / anime; I’m sure I’ve seen something very similar to Strange’s appearance on the title page in some anime, but it’s just escaping me. The glasses, hair, and fashion for Casey seem a bit stereotypical as well, although it’s as much an American stereotype as anything. On the other hand, Rios’s demons are creative and much more horrifying that the Technicolor goblins Marvel has used in the past, and those demons are a major part of the book.

Still, unless you’re a big fan of Rios’s work, there’s no reason to get Strange —unless Casey becomes an important character somewhere down the line.

Rating: (1.5 of 5)