X-Men / SWORD: No Time to Breathe

Collects: SWORD #1-5 (2010)

Released: June 2010 (Marvel)

Format: 128 pages / color / $15.99 / ISBN: 9780785140764

What is this?: Abigail Brand runs SWORD, an organization on a station floating high above the Earth to keep the planet safe from aliens (and aliens safe from Earth).

The culprits: Writer Kieron Gillen and penciler Steve Sanders

X-Men / SWORD: No Time to Breathe was a last minute fill in for this week’s review. After my local library / librarian left me in the lurch, I looked through my reading list and selected SWORD to fill in the gap.

I had no recollection of ever reading any of writer Kieron Gillen’s other work, but after consulting my records, I remembered having previously enjoyed his work in the smashup TPB Dark Avengers: Ares. Gillen wrote the three-issue Dark Avengers: Ares miniseries, and I had been impressed by both the book’s violence and mythological feel and the characters’ depth and psychopathy.

SWORD is also a violent book, but not in the same way as Ares. Whereas Ares was the violence of war and the men who can’t keep themselves from fighting, SWORD’s violence is expressed as an action-filled space opera. There are coups, a bounty hunter, counterrevolutions, abductions, a fire-breathing space dragon, attempted genocides, battles for a space station, eye trauma, prison breaks, and several cases of explosive decompression, along with a few standard superhero type fights. Add that to a thief, romance, hard drinking (the dragon again), a ne’er-do-well brother, and a sense of humor that manages to fill the little space not devoted to the plot, and it becomes obvious No Time to Breathe is not just a subtitle but a warning to readers: this plot moves at a near-relativistic pace, and you better be ready for it.

Yes, that’s a bit of hyperbole, but there really are four different plot threads unspooling through SWORD, and there’s not enough time slow the pace. It becomes a little offputting when read all at once, although I can imagine that in monthly form it was a treat. This is certainly no decompression-fest,⁵³ and the humor gives Gillen a chance to put some distractions into the story, if not giving readers a break from the pace.

Gillen’s characters are fun, and he has the advantage of being having mostly a blank slate. Beast, of course, has almost a half century behind him, but if you remember he’s light hearted, smart, athletic, and a decent scientist (by Marvel standards), you’ll be OK. (There was a reason he was one of Scott Lobdell’s favorites when he wrote X-Men.) Agent Brand hadn’t been established as much more than a half-alien hardass, and Lockheed … well, this isn’t quite the Lockheed we’ve read about before, with the alien dragon suffering from depression at the loss of Kitty Pryde. Death’s Head has a history in the Marvel Universe, but since he appeared mostly in Transformers and Marvel UK, most readers don’t know it. And Henry Peter Gyrich is a bureaucratic butthead. …

… OK, most of the lead cast is established to some degree. Most of the rest are one-note aliens or SWORD staffers. However, there is one standout character: Unit, a robot that SWORD keeps locked up as if he were a cybernetic version of Hannibal Lecter. He seems to have those sort of deep insights that Lecter had into his jailers, even the ones he hasn’t met. Unit is kept locked up under the most stringent conditions SWORD has; he’s the product of a civilization that wanted to make the universe perfect and were willing to do awful things to achieve the goal. Unit’s creators have been destroyed, but Unit is still playing a long game to finish his creators’ plan. And that’s what’s creepy about Unit; his insights are annoying, but his ability to look dozens of steps ahead to wait for and create the perfect chance to accomplish what his creators could not is chilling.

I haven’t read anything by penciler Steven Sanders, but I enjoyed his work in SWORD. It took me a while to get used to his Agent Brand — the sunglasses were not quite what I was used to, and she was a bit top heavy — and the new post-Grant Morrison design of the Beast always strikes me as wrong (as it does cover artist John Cassaday — the shape of the Beast’s skull on the cover looks nothing like it does in the interior artwork, where it more closely resembles the many long-faced aliens). But I got used it, and by the end, I had to admit it was a neat trick for Sanders to match the plot’s extremely brisk pace and Gillen’s sense of humor.

It’s a shame that SWORD didn’t last longer, although it’s not a surprise. The TPB tries to weld “X-Men” onto the title, but it’s not an X-book — yes, Beast is a lead / supporting character in the book, as is Kitty Pryde’s dragon Lockheed, and Cyclops, Emma Frost, Warlock, and what I believe is Doug Ramsey make cameos, but that’s not enough. It’s a book with a sense of humor and a largely unknown cast of characters set outside New York / major team books’ circle, written by a man best known for an indy / non-superhero book (Phonogram) and penciled by an artist without much name recognition. Yes, Gillen has become a major writer for Marvel — his Thor run was roughly concurrent with SWORD’s run, and now he’s writing Generation Hope and Uncanny X-Men — but at the time, this was a recipe for low sales and early cancellation. And that’s exactly what happened.

Rating: (4.5 of 5)

Dark Avengers: Ares

Collects: Ares: God of War #1-5, Dark Avengers: Ares #1-3 (2006, 2009-10)

Released: March 2010 (Marvel)

Format: 192 pages / color / $24.99 / ISBN: 9780785144069

What is this?: In Ares, the God of War’s son is kidnapped by the Japanese god of death, and Ares and the Olympians fight to get him back (and for their lives); in Dark Avengers: Ares, Norman Osborn asks Ares to train an elite cadre.

The culprits: Michael Avon Oeming and Travel Foreman for Ares, Kieron Gillen and Manuel Garcia for Dark Avengers: Ares

Dark Avengers: Ares is an odd collection.

The reason for its publication is the recent Dark Avengers: Ares miniseries. At three issues, it isn’t long enough to support a trade paperback by itself. This gave Marvel three options:

1. Add in an older reprint or two, such as Thor #129, Ares’s first Marvel appearance;
2. Add other Dark Avengers material; or
3. Add more recent Ares material.

Obviously, the third option is what Marvel chose, an interesting choice because the Michael Avon Oeming / Travel Foreman Ares: God of War miniseries had been reprinted about 3 ½ years ago. Admittedly, it is out of print, but there are plenty of stories Marvel doesn’t bother keeping in print, so I’m not sure why that miniseries rated special treatment. Because the other options weren’t as appealing as keeping Oeming happy, I suppose. On the other hand, Amazon lists the first option as the book’s content.

Anyway. My comments about God of War — a whole lot of fighting that isn’t as interesting as the first few pages, with Ares and his son in the real world — still stand, and there’s no purpose going over them again. But what about the new material?

In the Marvel Universe, Norman Osborn is running HAMMER, a replacement for SHIELD, and he gets the amusing idea to have Ares mold an elite fighting unit. So Ares picks out four HAMMER soldiers and has a go at it … starting with shooting at them. The first lesson he teaches them ends with them tossing grenades at him. This is not a kindly, cuddly group, and Ares is not R. Lee Ermey, using words as weapons. Ares always uses weapons as weapons.

The plot is short, filling the final two issues of the mini (after one issue of setup). Hera tells Ares his son is being held in an abandoned SHIELD base; Ares leads his men in, assuming the son is Alexander, from the Oeming / Foreman mini. Instead, it’s another, demonic-looking son, resurrected from Hades by Hera to take his father’s place. Writer Kieron Gillen gets major points for re-using a real but obscure story from Greek myth in addition to some better-known tales as details for this story. It gives a real feeling of Ares being part of an old story carried into modern times. (I’m not sure why that is and why it doesn’t feel like some Silver-Age shoehorning. But it does.)

It’s an enjoyable but violent read. Gillen spreads the almost gleeful fighting throughout the books, and he has a real feel for his characters — all of whom are a bit psychopathic, although none of them can touch Ares himself. Gillen also manages to get across Ares’s mercurial nature: none of his soldiers can ever be sure whether they are going to suffer physical retribution for a comment or action, but there’s no doubt Ares is trying to teach something with his strange methods.

Despite Manuel Garcia’s many credits, this is the first thing I’ve seen from him other than his pencils from Wisdom: Rudiments of Wisdom. I liked that work quite a bit, but for this series, Garcia has a darker, scratchier style. (Different inkers, perhaps?) It fits the dark and dirty tone of the series, but sometimes it makes it difficult to tell the human protagonists apart. Also, this sort of style makes everyone look like they have scars; in this case, they probably do, but it’s difficult to tell the scars from the stylistic marks. In any case, I had no trouble following the action (other than the aforementioned resemblance between characters), and I really like the skeletons in Hydra uniforms visuals.

The Dark Avengers: Ares series if fun, brutal, and short, like the best of human lives. It certainly elevates the material from God of War, which is mainly brutal.

Rating: (3 of 5)