PrettyFakes

In his excellent discussion of Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction’s Immortal Iron Fist over at nifty new comics blog Thought Balloonists, Charles Hatfield describes the possible limits of invention in the series like so:

Of course it goes without saying that these new territories won’t be radically new; the rules of work-for-hire and the geography of the Marvel Universe both militate against ex nihilo creation. To me, that’s the real problem with comparing Immortal with 60s-vintage Marvel. What young hopefuls today are going to pour heart and soul into stuff they can’t own? And how persistently can they take up the machete and hack out some new space in such a crowded world?

Another good case study for Hatfield’s question might be Matt Fraction and Barry Kitson’s The Order, a Marvel book whose highest profile character is Pepper Potts. You know, Tony Stark’s secretary. Used to be married to Happy Hogan? You could certainly make the case that The Order isn’t exactly an “ex nihilo creation”—it takes place in the mainstream Marvel Universe, Iron Man pops up from time to time, and Namor shows up to do some classic-style aquatic antagonizing in recent issues. But the stars are new characters—and indeed, there’s a major roster turnover in the very first issue, one which plays into one of the book’s main themes, that of the relationship between celebrity and responsibility, so that the stars we think we’re getting to know end up not being the mainstays of the book. The concept itself is fresh: the team’s backers have perfected a method of giving anyone who wants them superpowers. The catch? The powers expire after one year, and the short-term superheroes have to sign up for a tour on California’s official government-sponsored super-team.

It’s a deceptively simple premise which allows Fraction to bring together a diverse array of character types without complicated plot mechanics. None of the characters are cast from the familiar Marvel mold—“I got hit with a radioactive brick! I will call myself . . . The Mason! But: I must never let anyone know of my powers, lest my union card be revoked! Also my sister is dying or something, I don’t know.”—yet they are sufficiently grounded in reality that they fit neatly into the classic Marvel ideal of the “world outside your window.” Of course Fraction, being Fraction, mixes the character development and soap opera elements of the series with a heaping helping of the high-concept pop-culture pastiche that he’s becoming known for. (I’m not sure pastiche is quite the right term, actually, suggestive as it is of depthlessness, but that’s a discussion for another post.) So, for instance, in issue 3, we learn about how speedster Calamity’s dreams of baseball stardom were dashed by a drunk driver, and about hammer-wielding metro-psychic Mulholland Black’s fear of failure—but we also see the team fight cyborg hobo zombies. Combined with Barry Kitson’s classic art, it’s a winning formula—or at least it should be.

I’ve sung the praises of The Order before (here, with particular attention to Kitson’s art, and here), and the latest issue (#7) gives me no reason to change my tune. (Spoilerish things to follow, maybe.) Paradoxically, for an issue concerned with the threat of San Francisco’s mass destruction, this feels like a quiet issue—quiet, but intense. At first I thought it was odd to feature Namor, this issue’s antagoinst, as the interviewee, since there are still central cast members whose stories we haven’t gotten yet; but it quickly becomes clear that the focus isn’t really on Namor but on his interviewer, team leader Henry “Anthem” Hellrung, and in particular on his self-doubt and hesitancy in his “hero” role. Henry is, after all, an alcoholic, washed-up actor whose only prior claim to fame was having played Tony Stark on TV, so it’s no surprise that he’d feel the sting when Namor refers to him as a “tourist” and a “debutante” who is “playing dress-up as a superhero.” (Fraction writes great Namor dialogue, by the way: arrogant without being buffoonish.) But as Henry suggests, Namor’s own identity—and not just as a hero—is equally ambiguous; the resolution of their battle of wills turns on Henry threatening to expose Namor’s vengeful-monarch act as a disingenuous bit of political theater.

My only complaint is that for a series with so many simmering subplots, this issue spends a bit too much time on double-page flashbacks to Namor’s earlier days—his first appearances as a “terrorist,” his “hero” era as an Axis-smasher, and his “super-villain” period as a sometime ally of Doctor Doom. These are pretty to look at and clearly serve a thematic purpose, but I might have liked to have checked in with Supernaut and Aralune or to have seen more development of the relationship between Heavy, Veda, and Calamity during their attempts to evacuate the city and fend off looters. (There’s a nice moment in one of the evacuation scenes where Calamity shoves a man with a baseball bat—he could be a looter, he could be a store-owner protecting his property— through a plate-glass window, and the man asks, “What the hell kind of super-hero are you?” Connections such as that one to the issues of the primary conflict between Namor and Henry keep the evac scenes from straying too far into the generic.)

Of course, my urgency about seeing these threads tied up has to do with the disappointing news announced earlier this week: the book is being canceled as of issue 10. When I first heard about the cancellation, my first thought was about Christopher Priest’s excellent The Crew. Like The Order, The Crew was a team book starring new characters (or at least, with the exception of Jim Rhodes, characters so unfamiliar they might as well have been new); like The Order, The Crew took its time establishing its cast; like The Order, The Crew was characterized by complex, multi-layered plotting that often took more than an issue to pay off. Like The Order, The Crew was canceled before it ever had a chance to build any momentum.

(I wrote an appreciation for Priest’s Black Panther and The Crew a couple years ago, which you can read by clicking here.)

So I suppose my question is, why does Marvel keep green-lighting these sorts of books—books which clearly need time to build a fanbase—if they’re not going to give them that time? I don’t want to give the impression that I’m asking these questions while shaking my fist in a thunderstorm, cursing at the heavens in a fit of entitled-fanboy pique (it’s not a fit, exactly): Marvel has every right and indeed responsibility to protect their bottom line, and if they don’t feel The Order is going to help them do that, then it’s hard to argue they should keep it around. My question is, why give it a shot at all? I can’t imagine there was anything in the pitch that said “Todd McFarlane Spider-Man numbers” to anyone; were they expecting a bigger sales carry-over from Civil War? It should have been clear from the get-go that new characters + relatively dense narrative style = a root fire (to borrow Peter Hughes’s characterization of Get Lonely) of a comic rather than an inferno. Though I note that according to these figures, as of November The Order was selling under 30K a month—not great, but not significantly worse than ongoing series like She-Hulk, and much better than Criminal. Still, one assumes—and assuming motivation is likely a mistake here—that they gave the series the go-ahead knowing that it wouldn’t be a huge seller right out of the gate but also having faith that it would contribute something new to the MU. So ten issues seems a bit soon to pull the plug. The example of The Order brings us back to Charles Hatfield’s question: here we have a creator who is willing to create something new and potentially reinvigorating in the familiar confines of a corporate shared universe, and Marvel has said, at least in this instance, “no thanks.”

Ah well—3 more surely entertaining issues to go.

UPDATE: This parody cover pretty much says it all.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Comixx, Professor Fury. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.