Jamaal Thomas of Funnybook Babylon had some thoughts that we couldn’t fit into our Talking Shop post, but I didn’t want to leave them on the cutting room floor. He made some good points, and here’s your chance to check them out below. Keep an eye on PCS over the next few weeks for even more SI coverage.
The book was quite good, and went in some surprising directions. Bendis did a great job of revealing shocking surprises (everything you thought you knew was wrong!), and introducing new, compelling mysteries for the future. What’s more, he did in a way that would be satisfying to long-term and novice readers. If you’ve been reading Marvel Comics for the last twenty years (reluctantly raises hand), the plot fits in perfectly with established continuity and character. At the same time, he doesn’t overly rely on the distant past when building this story. The Skrulls who are the villains of this piece are not the same ones who have plagued the Avengers and Fantastic Four for the last forty years, so you don’t have to really know how they lost their ability to shape change, or how they got that power back.
However, I would still argue that one would have to be familiar with Bendis’ previous work (his run on New Avengers, the Secret War and Illuminati miniseries), and I would imagine some other books as the series progresses (Silent War, Namor, etc.) to fully appreciate the story that Bendis is telling. I would actually go further than that and say that one isn’t fully reading the story he is telling without following the subplots in the titles named above. I think it’s the equivalent of watching the second half of a film and claiming to have watched the entire film. The only reason that people don’t commonly think this way is because of the nature of the comic book marketplace, which encourages consumption in periodical form rather than ‘graphic novel form’. I’m sympathetic to the needs of the marketplace, and the imperative that publishers feel to put out books in this format, but until I get a financial stake in the business, any notion of ‘accessibility’ is somewhat beside the point to me.
Getting to the theme of the story, I must admit that I’ve always been skeptical of claims that any super hero comic book resonates with modern-day events. Every time Pedro sends me a link to some mainstream interview where the interviewer or the creator claims that “this is just like Issue ‘X’”, I roll my eyes. But what impressed me the most about the issue was how deftly Bendis drew parallels to the War on Terror. The Skrulls, like our antagonists in the Middle East, have had many low-level conflicts with Marvel heroes for decades. Because we always figured that human ingenuity and pluck would always prevail, we never took them very seriously. As a part of that, we never felt any need to learn anything about their history, culture, or ethnic divisions. We caricatured their strangeness, and interpreted all of their qualities through the prism of our own experience. They were just like people, you see, but with lizard - like skin. They changed shape, sure, but we minimized their non-human qualities. What struck me most about the first issue was how foreign they seemed. This wasn’t a futuristic version of humanity, but something completely alien. This idea was really reinforced by Yu’s brilliant art and the repetition of the “He loves you” phrase. It’s amazing because it’s utterly confusing. Almost like the confusion that people have about those would massacre innocents in the name of God. Who did not accept the “end of history.”
I don’t have the time now, but someone can write an entire essay about the similarities between post-Cold War America and post-Civil War Marvel U. Or between Francis Fukuyama and Tony Stark.
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