Written by Warren Ellis
Illustrated by David AjaA can of matter the size of a football, mined from a broken universe, would be enough to turn the Earth into a sun. There are people, hidden from the view of the world, who would do that either to hold the planet to ransom — or just to die knowing they took everyone else with them. And right now there are just three people — Steve Rogers, The Black Widow and Shang-Chi — between us and total annihilation, trapped on a space station in the No-Zone…
When Warren Ellis’ run began at issue #16, I was rather excited and delighted at the product delivered. That issue brought Jamie McKelvie along for the ride, and last issue brought Kev Walker. This month brings David Aja, veteran of the magnificent Immortal Iron Fist, and Ellis is going to make him do some kung fu.
Let’s punch things in the face, after the jump.
As far as collaborative teams, there is generally an accepted but unspoken rule in comics: writers always need to write towards an artists strengths. It’s the same basic idea of a bass player playing to the beat of the drum — if you want the best finished product, you need to make sure your music is syncing. You can’t have a punk rock drummer and a reggae or hip hop bass player and expect them to just keenly work together because they have to (or vice versa, from experience); your punk drummer needs a punk bass player. So if you’re Warren Ellis, and you’re going to assemble a shifting creative team for a series of one-shots each dealing with issue-specific problems, you don’t call the punk bass player for your issue about transdimensional kung-fu. You call David freaking Aja, and you hit a home run before the script is turned in.
Warren Ellis has done an absolutely wonderful thing here. I was already an adamant fan of Secret Avengers before the books initial line-up changed from Brubaker and Deodato. What was a book about a covert ops team unraveling a top-secret conspiracy through various outrageous adventures has become a compartmentalized series of snatch-and-grabs. When Ellis completely changed the execution of the book, he opened it up for a grand opportunity to use the title less as a place to tell an ongoing story, but more to work with talent who have every reason to show off. That’s what each issue so far has been: Warren Ellis and his friends showing off and having fun, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t equate to some of the most enjoyable comics we get to read on a weekly basis.
This month’s issue finds Cap, Carter and Shang-Chi in a “new” “version” of the N-Zone, with the words new and version in quotations because it is not implicitly a new version of the N-Zone, but rather Warren Ellis taking an old concept and giving it new justification. Ellis had played around with the rules of the N-Zone before in Ultimate Fantastic Four where he got to completely reinvent the game, but in the 616 his opportunities to completely change an entire thought system with a line of dialogue are a tad more limited. That is, until this issue, where we learn that there are plenty of N-Zones in the multiverse, because an N-Zone is what happens when any given universe within the multiverse just doesn’t fully form. In other words, this is Ellis throwing out his patented brand of darkly cynical but brazenly creative science fiction ideas and letting our imaginations do the rest.
As the issue moves along, what we’re given is a hyperactive kung-fu version of an MC Escher painting. Escher often played at the idea of physical perception in his work (such as the very famous and quite relevant piece Relativity) in an effort to explore space and the eye’s given understanding of how reality functions. By deconstructing the laws of physics within his art with the stairs that can not conceivably exist in any form of real space, Escher gets to play a trick on the viewer of his work while they struggle to understand the given architecture. Now Ellis does as well; while Ellis is certainly no stranger to rearranging aspects of perceived space with his artists to challenge a reader’s viewpoint, with the help David Aja he now gets to do it on a completely new level within the comic book universe, quickly tripping the reader and then grinning maniacally as we are forced to play along.
Continued belowThe end result looks like this,
and it’s beautiful.
The wonderful thing about reading along with an Ellis book month after month is that, while this may not necessarily be true for his independent work as of late, his recent superhero work seems to have the modus operandi of challenging different elements about superheroes and how their stories work as opposed to just “telling a story.” I even noted in the issue of Secret Avengers #16 that his pattern is a bit obviously formulaic, but that never holds the book back from being wonderful. Sometimes it isn’t even to a grandiose degree; in Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis, for example, Ellis gave an over-the-top action comic that resulted in a subtle morality play that was actually commentary of current events in third world countries, once again using the “mutant” metaphor to its full extent. This wasn’t inherently new or groundbreaking, but it was poignant, and very much fitting into Ellis’ body of work.
Here in Secret Avengers, we have something else entirely — here we have Ellis writing a story for an artist to illustrate based around some fun and outlandish sci-fi notions, and Ellis is working with said artist to push aside stereotypical elements of linear storytelling. Look at the case of this issue with David Aja: the entire comic is tailor made for Aja, and it very clearly shows. From the Escher-esque setting to the breakdown of sequential/panel-based motion (which is, by the way, jaw dropping, and requires literally at least five minutes of straight gawking at the page to fully appreciate, minimum) all the way through to Aja’s use of deconstructed panels and sound effects as visual effects within the illustration, this is like Ellis forgot to get Aja a Christmas gift and instead gave him the comic book opportunity of a lifetime. Throw him in some high-flying kung-fu escapades, and ladies and gentlemen you have the gem of the week with this issue.
It might not be the obvious choice or even the most high-profile title of the week (which is quite shocking, really), but it has once again happened: Secret Avengers has stolen my heart, and with it all the awards.
To say that I currently adore the work being done on the book is to put it incredibly lightly. Warren Ellis has been working in this industry for a long enough time that I think it’s fair to say his days of long-form “epic” “game-changing” “career-defining” runs on ongoings and whatnot are done — we already have Planetary and Transmetropolitan filling up space in our longboxes and shelves; we’ve all read his work on the Stormwatch/Authority, Fell or Iron Man; we can all quote some of the more outrageous lines from his more recently popular work like Nextwave and Thunderbolts; I’ll go out on a limb and say that you probably went and saw Red, although that could’ve been to see Helen Mirren fire a sniper rifle. Ellis still does comics right now because he loves comics, both the reading and the writing of. If he didn’t, he’d probably just stop and focus on writing those novels he’s contracted to do. So as long as he’s sticking with us in comics and working on a title that gives him fairly limitless freedom in telling cracks-of-continuity off the wall stories, why not go the full monty? And when you have talent lined up to work with you like he has, then you run the mission, don’t get seen, and save the world.
Final Verdict: 9.5 – These cats are fast as lightning
