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)

X-Men Forever, v. 2: The Secret History of the Sentinels

Collects: X-Men Forever #6-10 (2009)

Released: March 2010 (Marvel)

Format: 120 pages / color / $16.99 / ISBN: 9780785136804

What is this?: Before they bury Wolverine, the X-Men dig deeper into the conspiracy against them and find Sentinels.

The culprits: Writer Chris Claremont and artists Paul Smith and Steve Scott

Whatever goodwill I had for X-Men Forever led me to buy X-Men Forever, v. 2: The Secret History of the Sentinels. After the newness of the concept of writer Chris Claremont’s elaborate What If? series (featuring the X-Men) wore off, what would be left?

The answer — as if you needed to be told — is writer Chris Claremont.

Claremont’s distinctive dialogue and cadences overwhelm everything else in Secret History. If this were a decade ago, when Claremont was returning the X-titles and this might do any good, an intervention would be in order, with his colleagues and editors showing him how his verbal tics and word balloons were hurting those around him. Given that an intervention is out of the question, Claremont needs someone to do something similar to what former Marvel editor Christopher Priest said his assistant, Maddie / Adam Blaustein, did with Peter David — winnow down his excesses while leaving the essential, appealing essence of the writer. Isn’t that what an editor is for? Perhaps not. In any event, it’s not worth the effort now; Claremont is who he is, his work is what it is, and almost everyone knows how he or she feels about that.

For those of you playing Claremont cliché bingo, using Secret History, I will serve as caller: Baseball. Vintage plane fetishism. X-Men cleaning up the wreckage of one of their fights. Obtrusive military slang. Danger Room malfunction. Bad accent (Gambit only, oddly, even though Nightcrawler and Cannonball are in this book). “Best at what I do” (non-Wolverine division). If you did not win, best of luck next time; I’m sure the “mind control” square on your card is certain to be covered next time.

The story involves the return of the Sentinels, as you would guess form the title. With Nick Fury part of the book’s cast, Claremont makes the dramatic choice to tie the Trask family, who created the Sentinels, to the Nazis. This seems unnecessary but ultimately harmless, but Claremont links a couple of other characters to World War II and the Fury’s old commando group: SHIELD agents Daisy Dugan and Tommy Juniper, the latter explicitly the great-nephew of Howler casualty Junior Juniper. If this were a SHIELD book, these generational links would be a great idea. But this isn’t a SHIELD book; it’s an X-Men book. And the X-Men are firmly tied to the beginning of Marvel’s ten-year (or twelve-year or fifteen-year) timeline. Delving into their past tends to lead into Xavier, Juggernaut, or Magneto stories, areas that have long since been overmined.

On the other hand, the X-Men do have one character with whom the theme of family does work: Cyclops, who ironically started as an orphan. The book’s most affecting scene is its final one, two pages of Cyclops flying to Alaska to visit his grandparents, father, and son in Alaska. Scott reuniting with his son, Nathan, and their interaction feels real and is touching because of that.

That last issue is the best in Secret History. In #10, the X-Men hold a funeral for Wolverine, who died all the way back in #1. It’s not a perfect issue, God knows — unrestrained by action, Claremont's word balloons overrun everything, like a sort of verbal kudzu. But given that the action in the rest of the book is nothing to remember, something different is welcome. The issue gives everyone a chance to take stock and reflect. The New Mutants, Excalibur, Fantastic Four, and an abbreviated Avengers team show up, as do various X-Men hangers-on and ex-X-Men. It feels like an important event without being too clichéd or overwrought; the funeral itself takes only two pages, with Cyclops giving the eulogy.

The rest of the volume is forgettable, at best. Issue #6 is an embarrassment of X-clichés, with the X-Men playing baseball among wreckage in the Danger Room, which as a matter of course malfunctions. The next three issues feature a battle against a Trask and her Sentinels, ending with a particularly anticlimactic fight that Jean Grey ends by throwing a tantrum.

The subplots are ignorable. Claremont tries to interest readers in a conspiracy vs. the X-Men, but it’s not working. “Continuum” is a dull name, there’s no hint of what exactly the group’s agenda or grief with the X-Men is, and revealing one of the conspiracy's heads is the newly introduced mother of another newly introduced character is underwhelming. The flashbacks — Logan teaming up with Fury’s Howling Commandos in World War II and Bolivar Trask showing his family his Sentinel works — are old hat and dull. The only interesting subplot involves the child Storm, who is trying to figure out what she is and where she should go; this actually gives Gambit a bit of relevance, since he serves as Storm’s hedonistic counsel against the moralistic X-Men. Forge and lil’ Storm’s reactions toward each other at Wolverine’s funeral is a nice touch.

The art is fine. Paul Smith draws #6 and #10, and he’s exactly the type of artist you’d expect Marvel to assign to Claremont’s nostalgia title. Smith worked with Claremont on Uncanny X-Men #165-70 and 172-5, including most of the issues from the classic X-Men: From the Ashes storyline. Smith’s art has changed over 30 years, of course, and at times it looks like it’s taken on some characteristics of fellow Claremont collaborator Rick Leonardi’s work. On the other hand, Steve Scott isn’t a classic Marvel artist, and the bulk of his work for the company comes on the Marvel Adventures line. He’s a good choice for that, as his line is clean and his characters are bright and attractive, easy to tell apart. It’s not a distinctive style, though, which might have been what Marvel was aiming for; if you’re reading Claremont in the 21st century, do you really want something to distract you from Claremont’s plot and words? No, you do not; Claremont’s the feature here.

Secret History isn’t bad; its sin is larger. This book is just not that interesting, and the greatest emotion it arouses in me is occasional annoyance. Some will feel the warm flush of nostalgia when they read Secret History, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m well insulated against that warmth, however, and I think most readers are as well.

Rating: (1.5 of 5)