Written by Matt Fraction
Illustrated by Stuart ImmonenThe blockbuster Marvel event of the year continues! Sin leads the most audacious attack on American soil the world has ever seen as global panic sets in and we fall sway to the power of fear itself. On Asgard, Loki hatches the scheme to end all schemes. And everywhere, the Serpent’s presence is felt…never moreso than when a major Marvel hero falls at his hands. The shock ending to end all shock endings…as the cycle of evil stretching millennia is at last completed.
It’s that time of the month again! You guessed it – an event comic is on the shelves! And this time we’ve got an event from both DC and Marvel in the same week! Oh my. Battle lines, prepare to be drawn.
For the past few weeks as we tweak some things on the site, I’ve been combining my reviews when they are relevant. However, not this week. This week I’m writing one intro for two separate reviews, removing the “compare and contrast” nature (for now), and simply discussing what is contained within a single book. Are the two big summer events from either company worth following?
Well, let’s find out. Take a look after the cut for some thoughts on Fear Itself #3. (As a note, a big spoiler is discussed.)
The Marvel event has a rather interesting and stoic history to it within the past decade alone. I’d say you’d be hard pressed to find a comic book fan who doesn’t really look to Brian Bendis as the man behind the current Marvel event status quo, with some help from everyone’s favorite funny man, Mark Millar. While it’s unfortunate, it’s impossible to not read a brand new event and not – on some level – compare it to what came before. It is, after all, our previous experiences that help shape our current beliefs and notions. It may be a tad bit unfair to press the new against the old, but that’s pretty much the nature of the beast.
With that in mind, we come to Fear Itself #3. Personally, I found the first issue of Fear Itself #1 to be a great over-sized issue that helped prime the series for what would hopefully be lots of big action, events, and storytelling as only Matt Fraction can tell. However, Fear Itself #2 ended up being a bit of a fluff piece, paling in comparison to the first issue, and #3 doesn’t do the series any additional favors. It turns out that Fear Itself #3 is the book where things happen, but it happens on such a scale and in such a way that for all intents and purposes it’s hard to invest or follow in.
Fear Itself #3 begins in mid-battle, with Captain America up against Sin, Red She-Hulk up against Hulk, and the Thing getting his hammer, with little bits and pieces of other battles in between. Fraction stated before the event began that Fear Itself was an epic happening on a global scale, and that is certainly true – Fear Itself, in scope, is gigantic. There is a lot happening throughout the entirety of the comic all over the world, and Fraction takes a scene with Steve Rogers and Maria Hill to illustrate this point. If you get the feeling that Fear Itself is jumping around a lot, that’s because it is.
The issue, however, is in the execution of said jumping. The difference between an event comic and any arc in any comic is the personal level of involvement. If you’re just reading a comic in your favorite book, you obviously get a select group of characters to follow as they fight villain x, y, or z. It’s easy to connect on your own to the details of the story. With the event comic, it’s different. Event comics are big, and have more ground to cover. While some writers certainly pick a group for their events and focus, a lot of the big and heavily promoted event comics have all been on a colossal scale that it’s sometimes easy to lose focus of whose story you’re reading.
Continued belowThat is discernibly the issue with Fear Itself; rather than take event cues from Bendis (who was always pretty good about picking particular heroes/groups of heroes and following them), Fraction appears to taking his event cues from someone more like Morrison and Final Crisis. Morrison’s Final Crisis was a gigantic DC masterpiece that covered every single possible spectrum of the DCU, which ended up being polarizing to some readers who couldn’t follow his madman hopping to different sects and incredibly rewarding to others who had been following every bit of tiny detail DC had (how many of you actually followed the Captain Carrot mini besides myself?). Fear Itself spends so much time cascading between little pieces of shorelines that you end up with one unfortunate situation: you either care, or you don’t.
There is no greater indication of this than the death of the second Captain America. Bucky appears in both the beginning and the closing of the comic as he battles against Sin and her Blitzkrieg USA attack. Within a few opening and closing pages, you get to see the beginning of his fight against her and his death (however much he really is dead, given that this is a comic and we are a skeptical lot) within a handful of pages. From a storytelling perspective, it’s a waste of a death. This isn’t something like the Death of Ultimate Spider-Man where we are building up to the importance of the heroic death; this is just a character getting axed as a footnote to a larger story. Within the context of the book, the death isn’t that powerful. However, there’s a caveat – this is an event book. To focus on Bucky for too long would have detracted from the other elements of the story, which are arguably just as if not more so important. It becomes an incredibly tricky tightrope to walk that ultimately results in whether you and you alone care enough about Bucky that his death means something to you. Once again, I compare to Morrison’s Final Crisis, in which Batman was the big death of the book – yet he only appeared briefly in the first and third issue for a page or so each before finally showing up at the end to kill Darkseid. From the perspective of someone just reading the event, the death isn’t really that important unless you know Batman and you care about Batman. The same applies here; if you care about Bucky, his death is going to hurt.
This is what Fear Itself #3 essentially is. It’s not a comic that demands your attention as much as the first issue did, but rather a comic that will resonate with you if you’re invested in the different elements. The Thing is chastised within the pages of the book by a nobody on the street, and if you read “3” or FF, then the scene will mean something to you. If you haven’t, then the scene probably doesn’t resonate. This is Fear Itself’s biggest drawback; instead of actually telling a fully insular story, it’s telling a story that reacts to what’s been going on in Marvel for a while now. If you are as big a fan of the Marvel Universe as I am, then great! Otherwise, you’re basically just reading an issue of the “main” book that reads a lot like a “tie-in” book, minus the scene where Thor returns to Midgard.
I also can’t help but note that some of the pre-release buzz about Fear Itself has been a tad misleading. We were initially led to believe that if we just read Fear Itself, we’d get the full story – yet the back of the comic tells us to go check out some of the tie-ins for the rest of certain stories. It feels a bit misleading. Granted, I will be reading a book like the Avengers regardless, but I shouldn’t have to read the finale to a fight scene that begins in Fear Itself in another title. Or rather, it shouldn’t be solicited that way.
Despite what seems like a rather lengthy list of complaints, I am enjoying Fear Itself. I can’t not be a fan of this creative team; they’re just too good to mess with. Stuart Immonen is an artistic powerhouse, and Fear Itself continues the trend of Marvel having some of the best (and – I hate to go there – most consistent) artists on their biggest books. There isn’t a title that Stuart Immonen could ever draw that I wouldn’t be interested in, especially with Laura Martin coloring. The two are just terrific together. Meanwhile, as much as Fraction’s story here is a tad too chaotic compared to what we’re used to in a Marvel event, there are some great scenes. I’m a rather big fan of Fraction’s work (even if it doesn’t seem that way right now), and Fraction can write quotable and memorable sequences as well as the other big Marvel Architects. Sin is probably the most interestingly written character within the entire book, and Fraction’s Asgardian writing is still rather entertaining. Fraction has a good voice for the Asgardians that is both proper and very much in command, as one would expect from characters that powerful. While he certainly loses points for the inconsistency between his portrayal of some characters here as opposed to their regular books (we just had an arc about the Bruce/Betty relationship – Incredible Hulks and Fear Itself don’t match up even remotely), if the book was boiled down to Asgardian politics and hammer throwing, it would be a decisively great title.
So let’s put it this way: an event comic is what you make of it. Most people are of the opinion that it’s the comic’s job to pull you in and engross you, and while that’s not wrong it’s also not true on every level. On some level, it’s up to you to set your level of involvement. If you never had any personal investment, that’s certainly not going to change now. If you’re a new reader trying to get into the Marvel Universe with Fear Itself, now definitely isn’t that great of a time to try it out (at least, not when you compare it to the infinitely accessible Civil War). That being said, as a whole this event hasn’t been bad. It’s probably going to read much better when it’s finished and collected in one volume and the final scope of the story has been revealed. However, so far on an issue to issue basis, it’s Stuart Immonen’s impeccable art that really makes the title worth buying.
Final Verdict: 6.0 – Browse
