It’s been just about 2 years since Marvel began its last line altering event, but while Siege’s effects are still present in the Marvel Universe, one of its more inspired tie-ins seems to have faded into the depths of many a longbox pretty quickly, and that’s pretty unfortunate.
Siege: Embedded did not come into being inside of a vacuum, and at the time was seemingly only a continuation of the “front line” style mini-series that had accompanied three of Marvel’s prior events. However, much like he started to do with Secret Invasion: Front Line, writer Brian Reed took a concept that very easy could have just been a feeder book off of a much bigger event and turned it into something with a much bigger personality than many would have expected from it.
Click on down for more on why this book should be given a second look.
Like I mentioned above, the journalistic companion mini-series to the large event that is, in and of itself, a companion mini-series to a publishing line is not a new concept. Since Civil War, the Front Line minis have been used to fill in some of the cracks and have been more or less a showcase to tell the story of how *insert B though Z list character* reacts to the potentially Earth shattering goings on of the main event. However, Reed took a different approach with this one and instead made this book, essentially, Siege: Ben Urich.
I say this because the book looked and felt much more like a Urich solo adventure that just happened to include some of the Siege story beats than a full on companion mini-series, and this left Reed with a LOT of storytelling opportunities. By tackling subjects such as journalistic integrity, getting old in an industry that is giving increasing value to the young and hip, slant and bias within mainstream journalism and spending an awful lot of time proving that old adage about pens and swords, the book contained so much more depth than the average tie-in mini-series while still more or less accomplishing its goal of being a tie-in mini-series. It is rare that such a comic succeeds on both of those levels, and every time I read it I am continually dumbfounded that it is actually an event tie-in. The very concept was elevated so much by this book, and yet most people forgot about it once Siege wrapped, if they even read it at all.
Accompanying the immensely solid story was the gorgeous art of Chris Samnee. There isn’t a whole lot that I can say about about Chris’ gorgeously stylized, classically tinged pencil work in this one, other than it provided even more fuel to the “this guy can literally draw anything and make it look good” fire. I say that with zero hesitation, I’ve seen this guy draw high stakes action, WW2 period war, low key romance featuring Gods and grim noir and every bit of it looked just as fantastic as what came before it. Very rarely can an artist’s work cross genre barriers like this, but Samnee’s slightly blocky, expressive, down-toned work is just about as close to universal quality as one can find in comics, and I absolutely love how high his star has risen over the last few years.
Ultimately though, this book is a quintessential diamond in the rough, and proves that as long as Marvel floods the market with profit raising event tie-ins, that eventually one will use the little sliver it is given to tell a magnificent tale, and you can’t ask for much more than that.
