Writers
Charles Soule
Ryan Stegman
Artists
Steve McNiven
Jay Leisten
Ryan Lee
Brandon Peterson
Colorist
Justin Ponsor
James Campbell
Marvel is adamantly trying to push the Inhumans as their premiere X-Men team, even stealing the adjective from their former property. Frankly, who could blame them with the Inhuman film coming in-house from Marvel studios as part of phase three. Marvel is even trying to rival the amount of Inhuman and X-Men titles being published with the introduction of this second ongoing known as Uncanny Inhumans with Steve McNiven artwork to boot. The publisher is even gearing up for a third title with Attilan Rising. Of course all of these stories are written by the one-man work horse known as Charles Soule – so hopefully each will be fulfilling a different sort of niche within the stable of Marvel Comics.
Soule starts his story in Portugal with a group of locals taking out the cocoons of the Inhumans. This story starts to diverge from Inhuman (the previous ongoing) when Black Bolt takes center stage. Anybody that needs to test the mettle of the writing from Soule need look no further than the scene with Black Bolt and Medusa in this issue. It’s the kind of confrontation that I have been waiting for during an extended period of time. For those that may be new to the Inhumans, Black Bolt is mute. Therefore, the hero needs to say a lot with his own actions. Soule and McNiven come up with numerous ways for their leading man to interact with their surroundings. Soule even introduces a fascinating new way for Black Bolt to interact with his environment within this tale. He perfectly utilizes the changing nature of the Marvel Universe to start showing the new Inhumans team start to change to their environment.
On a side note, I’m looking forward to the way that the comics will reflect the recent events of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. into the continuity. With so many Inhumans starting to spread their wings amongst that show, it’s fantastic to see the two starting to intersect with each other. It also seems that reading Soule’s Inhuman will enhance your understanding of this story as well. The new characters in the back-up tale are heroes from that series, but there is a deeper tie between Uncanny Inhumans and Inhuman that will likely bleed back into this story eventually. There’s a lot of crossover between these various properties, but it’s still up to the reader to decide whether or not they are interested enough to follow every little piece of the Inhuman lore.
Something should be noted regarding how Soule seems to so perfectly be able to write for McNiven. He pairs down the dialogue, and plays up the big expansive moments as such. This is good cinematic comics that would be excellent to give readers who are also trying to get a read into who the Inhumans are. This all seems especially appropriate right now as we are at the very cusp of Secret Wars, which this issue tackles head-on. McNiven’s art has a special sort of poignancy within this tale as well – noting the bleak interactions of Black Bolt and others.
The storyline written by Ryan Stegman and drawn by Ryan Lee is a good way to expand on the franchise, sort of teasing readers what they missed in Inhuman. The tale includes a few extremely notable characters for those with a watchful eye!
Inhuman is the book centered around the Royal Inhuman family that I’ve been waiting for. Black Bolt and Medusa are the Kate and William of the Marvel Universe even if they are a little…Inhuman!
The Valentines State’s first comic con of the year wrapped up over the romantic weekend. Jimmy Jay, Amazing Arizona Comic Con organizer, didn’t let a hallmark holiday get in the way of putting on his three-day annual comic book convention on Friday, Feb. 13 through Sunday, Feb. 15. The event kicked off with an intimate panel with Spawn Creator Todd McFarlane and the New York Times best selling Batman artist, Greg Capullo. They signed someone’s baby.
Capullo was a selfie machine and gave the fans what they wanted. God bless him.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to attend the event until the last day because I was under the weather. Sunday was not uneventful to say the least. The line of eager con goers to buy their tickets around noon on the last day is always a good sign. The con was located at the south Phoenix Convention Center building.
Flash, Superman, and Captain Marvel. Photo by Henry Barajas.
The event hosted approximately 89 exhibitors and 144 creatives in artist alley. Jay expects that he beat last year’s attendance record of 25,000, but didn’t have the final numbers.There was a laundry list of legends like Steve McNiven, George Perez, Adam Kubert, Mark Bagley, Kevin Eastman, Herb Trimpe, and Steve Epting. Sadly, there weren’t any female guests of honor except Nei Raffino. I hope there’s a little more diversity in next year’s line-up. All the guests seemed to have done well and appreciated the hospitality. One of the guests said he was amazed by the talent that were invited, and the response from the fans was overwhelming. The only “Hollywood” characters that had a big presence were the Power Ranger actors, but they seemed like real sweethearts and approachable folks. None of them seemed like cold-blooded-killers.
Deadpool aka Rob Liefeld Panel. Photo by Henry Barajas.
With recent Deadpool news, you could have nicknamed his con “Deadpool Con” with all the prints and cosplayers at AACC. Deadpool creator, Rob Liefeld, was on cloud nine and loving all the support from the fans. His Sunday panel was standing room only. Liefeld jumped off the stage, broke the fourth wall, and started taking questions from the audience by handing them the microphone individually. This is Rob’s fifth AACC appearance and doesn’t intend on missing a single show as long as it doesn’t land on a government holiday.
Wasp. Photo by Henry Barajas.
Some of the lower level, lesser known comic book creators might have been a little overshadowed, according to some of the folks behind their booths. A majority of the unknown creators I spoke with didn’t make the profit they were hoping for, but networking with some of their favorite creators made up for the loss. Some of the creators that exhibited at the Phoenix Comicon Fan Fest that that took place in December were glad they did both shows. It seems that Fan Fest was strategically planned to compete with the AACC, but Jay says it didn’t affect him. There’s a silent con war going on and both sides are pretty classy about it.
Another complaint that I heard from the artists was how loud the announcements were echoing through the intercom. It was hard to have a conversation while panel reminders were being announced.
Harley Quinn. Photo by Henry Barajas.
Still, there were a few bumps at the event. I have never had a negative experience at this show until now. Mike Olivares, Tucson Comic –Con director, was assisting Travis Hanson at his booth, so I went over to talk to Olivares about the upcoming Tucson Con and small press expo he’s organizing in the spring. While we were discussing the good old days, I noticed a large canvas with Bruce Timm’s artwork on it; obviously, it was not an original, and there was a $200 price tag.
Bruce Timm art printed on a canvas with a $200 price tag.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. Instead of going the traditional route, take some pictures and post it on Bleeding Cool, I decided to question the people at the booth about this canvas. There were four guys sitting at the table selling prints that featured everyone’s favorite super heroes (Batman, Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America, ect.) by various artists in the Philippines, according to Aaron Luevanos. The table was labeled HeroicFineArt.com #816. I asked them if that Timm piece was an original. One of them said no. The next logical question was: Does Bruce Timm know you’re printing his art on a canvas and charging $200? Luevanos and the group said that it was taken from a Timm original (apparently, they owned the original art) that was back in Texas. I asked how does that give them the right to print his art on a canvas and sell it for $200 just because they have the original. I couldn’t get a clear answer, so I had to walk away because I didn’t want to cause a scene.
Here’s some fan art that was for sale at the HeroicFineArt.com #816 booth.
Eventually, I came back (after letting off some steam) to get some names. Luevanos handed me his phone so I can talk to his attorney, Cesar Garcia, read on the iPhone screen, about the matter. The counselor asked me what was going on so I told him I was merely asking his client why is he selling art at his table that isn’t his, the lawyer said he had nothing to say, so I handed the phone back to Luevanos.
Yes. The same Aaron Luevanos that owns Capital City Comic Con. The same Capital City Comic Con that had that “Everything’s bigger in Austin!” Powergirl campaign everyone loved so much. Not.
Luevanos said he wasn’t selling the piece and it was his friend, Mark William. William took the blame and said he owned the art. Apparently, Luevanos had no idea it was there because he left his booth for five hours. I was baffled because I now know this guy runs a con and he was all of a sudden unaware the piece was at HIS booth. Some spectators said I was too hard on the guy and I was being a “hard ass.” I disagreed and pointed out that an artist the next row over caught a colorist that swiped his art and was selling the piece —recolored— in the same row when the con started, according to Olivares and Jay. Luevanos decided to remove Timm’s artwork from display to shut me up, and to avoid getting his lawyer involved.
We shook hands, eventually.
I left to thank Jay for the press pass and explain what happened. Jay asked one of his managers to escort me to the booth and point out where this happened so they can take care of it. Luevanos was more upset at this point and said I was harassing him. But I was just trying to make sure I did my due diligence so this wasn’t a complete shock to Jay and his con staff. I couldn’t take much more of Luevanos, so I left the con and headed back to Tucson. I’m confident that Jay and his staff resolved the matter, and I’m sure I’ll be hearing from Luevanos’ “legal counsel.”
I won’t let this altercation define my AACC experience. Phoenix is a big city and could use the con war/competition. Gives everyone another reason to cosplay visit Phoenix in the winter. The high was 85 degrees for crying out loud.
Not content to resurrect Secret Wars, their most successful mega-event ever, Marvel just sent out a Civil Wars teaser image showing Iron Man and Captain America once again battling for the soul of Spider-Man, as he was in the 2005 Civil War event. The cover image is by Adi Granov.
Civil War the original event was written by
Mark Millar and drawn by
Steve McNiven. It ran for seven issues from 2006-7 and had the tagline “Whose side are you on?” It was the waning years of the Bush administration and Milar’s story played into the still fresh wound of 9/11 with a story in which Iron Man and Captain America took different sides on the eternal debate over freedom vs safety. The book was well written and had a larger subtext that just who was fighting who and really tied into the Zeitgiest. Perhaps by no coincidence it remains the
ONLY event book which still sells in collected edition form (at this very moment it’s
Marvel’s #6 book on Amazon.)
In the original, Spidey switched sides from Iron Man, who favored the Superhero Registration Act, to Cap, who believed such an act violated our civil liberties. Spider-Man was given an Iron Spidey costume however which reappears on this teaser.
Bringing back old concepts to boost sales isn’t exactly the most creative or reassuring move on Marvel’s part, but you always knew the villain or hero would come back even if they looked dead; these day’s its the story concepts that come back.
PS: a number of people have been wondering if the original Civil Wars storyline would show up in the Marvel Cinematic U. A site called Movie Pilot lays out the pros and cons for that.
Everyone’s a little puzzled by the strange choice of number on this issue, somewhere between a #0 traditional origin story and a #1 launch of what’s rumored to be a major contributor to the Marvel Universe this year and beyond in the lead up to the 2014 film release of GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY. If this issue is more than just an origin story for Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord, then we can assume some of the elements of a wider arc of action for the series are already being drawn up in the narrative, however much of a prequel it may be to the galactic sweep ahead.
The long, sporadic, but often well-received publication history of GUARDIANS makes it ripe for a return, and whatever readers were expecting, they are bound to be struck by the energy of #0.1 and the disorienting sense that they are, in fact, looking at something refreshingly new. Writer Brian Michael Bendis is so well-versed in crafting origin stories that the surprise is not how well he knows how to introduce a character’s early days, but that he manages to do it so succinctly, given his history of expanding origin stories well into established story-lines (take, for example, his ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN which stretched Peter Parker’s transformation into Spider-Man to span 7 issues).
His experience handling origins has clearly given Bendis an edge in handling a short-form version while maintaining the humanizing qualities in his characters that he’s also known for. Steve McNiven’s pencils are easily a match, though, for Bendis’ writing skills in the sense that his pauses to convey motion, his almost minimalist panels, and nearly constant emphasis on facial expressions to express emotion give the reader instant recognition of the importance of key moments without creating drag. John Dell’s inks give the comic an even more fluid feeling with hardly a static line and Justin Ponsor’s choice of color sets a kind of tonal theme a reader might expect not only from Marvel Comics but from Marvel meets sci-fi: intense earthly sunlight and shadow blended with slick, luminous technology. Bendis has said that he read lots of sci-fi leading up to his work on GUARDIANS, looking for things that inspired him the most, but it’s a fair guess that the entire team have drawn from their own impressions of the best elements of an alluring sci-fi tale.
[Spoilers for issue #0.1 ahead!]
Trust Bendis to bring in quirky dialogue to contrast with ethereal galactic realities, one of those humanizing elements that renders his characters appealing. Peter’s mother bitching into a cell-phone opens the story, and the deluge of questions and commentary she launches at the space-ship crash victim from Spartax helps establish the conflicting world views that will no doubt impact Peter’s life. The rapidly-developing romance between the two, the predictable departure of a man on a mission in wartime still has a grounded feel due in part to Meredith’s satirical but emotional responses. When she’s told she can keep J’Son’s gun, she comments to herself (and the reader) “How romantic”. One of the simplest panels, and one that makes you forget that this is a story that’s been told before, is one in which Meredith, despondent at J’Son’s departure, says simply “Take me with you”. McNiven’s use of expression strikes home easily; she already has the look of someone abandoned, a victim, in her own way, of war.
Peter’s life with his mother “22 miles from anything and anyone” at age 10, reading comic books and ditching math homework, contains plenty of the formulaic elements (partly due to Bendis’ influence on comic tradition already) of the misunderstood kid soon-to-be-hero mythos, but again, Bendis and McNiven always manage to catch the reader’s attention and distract from easy identification of familiar elements. Racism, sexism, bullying all come to the fore within a few panels of introducing Peter’s school life. The eruption of violence is part of a wider pattern, of course, as the little wars that Peter fights, significant in human terms, mirror the bigger wars to come. The second half of issue #0.1, however, makes the first half seem like a pleasant diversion as the plot moves rapidly into unexpected violence and the trauma usually associated with hero origins. McNiven proves that he’s up to the challenge of presenting shocking violence in a painfully memorable way depicting the murder of Meredith by Badoon hitmen, forcing Peter into the role of a rifle-toting avenger.
Cue another hero motif, the discovery of a super-powered weapon, but rather than gloss over what comes next, Bendis settles in for a moment on Peter’s experiences waking up in a hospital, his bizarre narrative reconstructed by doctors and child psychologists into something banal: a gas-leak that destroyed his home and the alien gun a favorite “space-toy”. Readers are included in the brash hospital lights and the jarring conflict between realities yet again, all increasing a sense of Peter’s reality and giving readers an opportunity to understand his future actions by experiencing where he’s been before. But the psychologists do get one thing right: he’s an unfortunate and fortunate soul. He’s been left with nothing unless he chooses, as his older self reflects to Tony Stark, to “find a way off Planet Earth”.
The jump between the hospital scene with Peter, age 10, to Star-Lord, age 30 is visually transferred by McNiven repeating a nearly identical angled view of the mysterious space-gun, and rather ingeniously tied into a scene of immediate action by Bendis’ revelation that Quill is telling his own life-story to Tony Stark onboard a space-ship. It’s a light-speed jump into the thick of GUARDIANS territory, and a pay-off for devoted fans to “see” for the first time in this new incarnation, some of Star-Lord’s Guardians team, albeit in silent roles, as well as McNiven’s new design for their costumes. It’s interesting to note that Stark, apparently, has been questioning Quill’s motives for fighting the Badoon, and that readers, in turn have been included in this explanation of motivation. It’s “exactly” what Stark “wanted to know”, mirroring a reader’s need to understand, even in short form, what makes Quill tick. Stark is not only satisfied by this explanation, but he’s “all in”. It’s tempting to read this as a prod to fans, hinting that they, too, should be on board with the up and coming revelations of the comic now that they feel they know Quill pretty well.
Does it work? If there’s any swagger or attitude in the comic, it’s reserved for Stark (appropriately). The seriousness of Quill’s origin story, the moments that readers have not only been told, but experienced along with Meredith and Peter, are fairly difficult to dismiss as “just another sci-fi hero story”. Bendis’ writing makes such a dismissal not only difficult but uncomfortable to imagine, but in combination with McNiven’s artwork, the story is almost daring you not to care about an orphan on a cosmic vendetta.
Whatever liberties the creative team may take in bringing a new version of GUARDIANS to the page, the earnestness they convey reminds readers of one more feature of sci-fi hero stories: anything can happen next. That’s why it’s so important to get origin stories right, to get even a small amount of personal history pinned down for the hero to form the jumping off point into such vast potential. GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY #0.1, which makes it a little surprising that retailers may have ordered fewer than needed of this introductory issue. If the current GUARDIANS creative team brings as much craftsmanship to the rest of the series, you’ll be glad to have jumped in at #0.1 to get to know THIS version of Peter Quill and his world (and not to have to scramble for back issues later).
Title: GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY #0.1/Publisher: Marvel Comics/Creative Team: Brian Michael Bendis, Writer, Steve McNiven, Penciler, John Dell, Inker, Justin Ponsor, Colors, VC’s Cory Petit, Letterer.
Hannah Means-Shannon writes and blogs about comics for TRIP CITY and Sequart.org and is currently working on books about Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore for Sequart. She is @hannahmenzies on Twitter and hannahmenziesblog on WordPress.
Looking forward to reading this; I’ve really been liking how he’s opened up the Inhumans world in the first title.
Nope. No thank you. I’m not buying it.
It’s too little too late. If people had been honest about the IP issues concerning real X-Men from the get-go it would have been different, I could have bailed and spared myself early. Instead I had years of hassle to put up with as Marvel slowly became Avengers Inc. and nobody was really saying why.
Just to be clear, for the past decade or so, I’ve seen every book I care about–nearly everything BUT Avengers Inc.–get trampled on and plot-hammered to death, because of IP issues between Sony and Fox, versus Marvel, passive-aggression over the movies.
I’ve had enough. Sorry.
What does any of that have to do with this book about the Inhumans? How dare they write a book about this group of characters! They’ve only been around for 50 years!
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