Written by Warren Ellis
Illustrated by Jamie McKelvieRUN THE MISSION! DON’T GET SEEN! SAVE THE WORLD!
A secret city buried one mile under American soil is discovered through the leakage of Von Doom radiation — a type of energy emitted only by time-travel devices. So the Secret Avengers head underground to a weird metropolis forgotten about for decades, because a time machine in the wrong hands is the worst kind of WMD imaginable. Master storyteller Warren Ellis begins his tenure on Earth’s Mightiest Clandestine Super-Team, illustrated by Eagle Award-winning Jamie McKelvie.
Brubaker and Deodato are gone. Spencer and Eaton’s time is up. Now it is the time for Ellis, glorious Ellis, to conquer the pages of Secret Avengers with his mindgames and superhuman writing abilities!
Alright, enough pandering and pampering. We get it. Ellis is cool. So is McKelvie. Let’s talk about what matters most after the cut.
I would say – and I mean this with the greatest respect imaginable – that Warren Ellis has reached a point in his career where he is no longer trying to push comics in new directions with every issue he writes. Ellis has had a long and wonderful career full of noteworthy stories and runs that pick at the seams of what we accept as logical while he rearranges things for his purposes. He’s broken everything imaginable down and put it all back together again so many times, that at this point it seems there is only one real mantra being repeated with an Ellis comic: tell damn good and damn fun stories. It might not be what one would first think with a book featuring his name, but there’s certainly nothing wrong with that idea.
Now, when I say that I mean the above commentary with respect, I mean just that. While the modus operandi of his earlier work certainly offered up more commentary on the nature/ability of comicbook storytelling or the idea of superheroes, some of his most recent for-hire work seems more heavily reliant on the question of “what can I do with this?” Now we have books like Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis, seemingly operating as another madcap X-Men adventure of action and romance until the last second or so. It’s a more light-hearted tone and approach, yet still full of all the things that make an Ellis comic an Ellis comic in the first place: it thinks big, it plays big, and it goes home with no prisoners.
That’s why, in a situation like this with Secret Avengers (where one issue tells one story and then we move on), we essentially are being given the best version of Ellis imaginable boiled down to a singular stream. The latest issue of Secret Avengers features Beast, Commander Rogers (pre-Fear Itself, I suppose?), Black Widow and Moon Knight infiltrating an underground city that the Shadow Council controls, with Ellis picking up where Brubaker left off with his work on the Shadow Council. Rather than attempt to close up what Brubaker did, he’s simply elaborating on it in short focused bursts of what can only be described as the written equivalent of a rapid fire machine gun. It’s action-packed, it’s funny in all the right places, and it’s the kind of book that feels entirely worth the purchase from the first panel all the way through the last, which is possibly the best praise any comic being published can receive. And truthfully, if this issue is what we can expect from the rest of Warren Ellis’ run, then we’re in for quite a treat.
However, the slight trip-up is that Ellis is attempting to perform an old trick with a new dog. If you look again at Xenogenesis, there are a striking amount of smilarities to the plot and characters. We have the stoic leader (Cyclops vs. Rogers), we have the sassy woman-in-charge (Emma vs. Widow), we have the know-it-all (Beast vs. Beast), and we have the psychopathic action man (Wolverine vs. Moon Knight). We’re given impossible and entirely sci-fi heavy odds to be beaten (an invading army of Furies from a Ghost Box out to kill the Warpies vs. the Shadow Council using an underground city as a bomb via time travel and Doom Particles), as well as a last page that offers up an impossibly rhetorical moral question for the characters and reader (read the issue yourself to find out what). It’s oddly paint-by-numbers Ellis, but in any other writer’s hands it wouldn’t be nearly as affable a read, because it really doesn’t matter that we’ve basically seen this before. What matters is that it’s just so damn good anyway.
Continued belowIn a frequently featured argument within the Multiversity Offices, we often discuss the nature of spoilers and whether or not knowing what will happen will ruin a story, as well as the idea of “plot” vs. “execution” and which is more important. While I admit my opinion is the sole minority in the discussions, the winning thoughts on the matter will tell you that spoilers don’t ruin the story if the story is still good, and that it’s the execution that makes it so. In this case, Secret Avengers is a colossal win, because while you can tell what is going to happen before the issue is out, it’s still a damn amazing comic. This is a book that’s so entertaining it should easily rest on the top of any given pull pile. It’s a comic that elicited vocal reactions from myself as I read along, cheering the characters and marveling at the various executions. It’s a book that doesn’t do anything less than demand the full attention of the reader, and it’s the title’s unwillingness to relent from that that helps it succeed so greatly.
Obviously a good chunk of that is Warren Ellis himself, throwing out tons of fun and grandiose ideas of underground cities and time/space travel, but it’s the visual component attached that makes this such a stellar issue. With the current mandate of Secret Avengers calling for a new artist per issue, it certainly sets an unfair precedent to put Jamie McKelvie on the first issue. McKelvie’s scenery is quite astounding, with a very cinematic eye to the panels that helps make the book come to life. This isn’t the first time Ellis has worked with an artist who has taken a cinematic approach to sequential art, but the way that McKelvie draws characters in action and the action itself is certainly up there in quality with comic icons like Bryan Hitch (and the panel in which McKelvie illustrates Rogers firing his new gun full of tiny shields at the reader is a three-dimensional triumph).
However, I can’t help but make the same observation I’ve made in the past, which is that McKelvie’s character work doesn’t sync that well with the superhero world. McKelvie is most known for illustrating pop-based comics like Suburban Glamour and Phonogram, featuring club-hopping teens without superpowers, and it seems somewhat tough for him to lose that pop-based sensibility. It’s most notable in Steve Roger’s facial expressions throughout the book, which was really only missing a thought bubble reading, “I can’t believe Widow is playing this band on the car stereo”). This isn’t to say anything detracting of McKelvie’s talent; he’s still a great artist, and with colorist Matthew Wilson the story more than explodes off the page as a visual tour-de-force. It could just use a little less general posing from the cast.
Every complaint I might have about the book is a minor complaint at best, though, all coming from a place of nerdery that in the end doesn’t matter much. What entirely does matter is that this is without a doubt the best comic that I read this week. The combination of Ellis and McKelvie feels synchronized and compatible to the same tune of your favorite food with your favorite condiment (you just eat it right up). Everything rests on the execution, and the execution is gorgeous to behold. This is going to be a wonderful run.
Final Verdict: 9.0 – Buy
