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Review: Secret Avengers #6

By | October 29th, 2010
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Secret Avengers #6
Words by Ed Brubaker
Arting by Mike Deodato Jr.

I’m going to be brutally honest right now, but this was the last issue of Secret Avengers I was planning to buy…the operative word of course being WAS. Now I’m not so sure. Let me explain myself for a second here though…like many of the writers on this site my pull list is quite large. So when the time came to triage it a little bit, the first thing that got looked at were the FOUR Avengers ongoing series on said pull. I knew I had to cut at least one and the only one I could, at the time, bare to cut was Secret Avengers. Despite the fact that I loved the concept (covert ops super heroes), the characters on the team (especially Ant-Man, Nova and Beast), the writer AND the artist, the first arc bored me to TEARS. I couldn’t follow the action, nor was I particularly invested in the storyline…it just seemed a little TOO high action, like the book was taking its role as the “secret dire threat” book a little TOO seriously, and it just fell flat in my opinion. By arc’s end, I just did not care…so too by the end of last month’s origin of Max Fury. Too self indulgent…too, well, mainstream comic-booky.

However, this issue brought the proceedings back down to Earth both literally and figuratively, and I enjoyed this issue far more than the last four. If I had to take a stab at the reasoning behind this, I would have to point my knife right at the phenomenon called the Brubaker Space Epic. This happened once before, with his sprawling 12 issue Rise and Fall of the Shi’ar Empire arc in Uncanny X-Men in 2006 which also, dur, bored me to tears. Simply put: Brubaker writes the best stories when his characters are in the shadows or the dirty city streets…when he tries to go all high concept space epic, I just can’t get into it. Some creators just aren’t fit for extreme, polished high action…Brubaker’s strengths, at least as far as I’m concerned, lie in the subtle, darkened world of espionage (which is funny since that was what this book was supposed to have been about anyway.)

So just how different is this arc shaping up to be when compared to last one? Simply put: its ninjatastic. Turning our attention to the far east and bringing not only Shang-Chi but also the much beloved (at least by me) Prince of Orphans into the book, we are thrust along with Steve Rogers and crew right into a high stakes drama as the villainous and still mostly mysterious Shadow Council successfully resurrect (or half-resurrect anyway) Shang’s immensely powerful dead father named…I kid you not…Fu Manchu. Once being rescued from his father’s ninja assassins by the eponymous Secret Avengers, they promptly find themselves right in the middle of a hornet’s nest full of those same ninjas. High concept this aint…and that is why it turns out so good.

Ed Brubaker will not reinvent the espionage comic wheel, and when he stops trying is when his best stories come out. If this arc turns into a deadly, high stakes far eastern, spaghetti-western-esque kung-fu romp I will be more than happy. Finally, kudos to Brubaker for bringing in the Prince of Orphans and thereby proving he has not forgotten the characters introduced during his and Fraction’s Iron Fist run…since lord knows everyone else did. Here’s to hoping we get a Fat Cobra appearance sometime soon!

On the art side, Mike Deodato continues his streak as one of the best sequential artists of the last decade. His smooth, hyper-realistic pencil work conveys the issue’s multiple hand-to-hand combat scenes perfectly, emulating the human body to a T as Brubaker’s characters bounce, flip and kick across the page. Deodato happens to be one of the few artists that can accurately convey true honest to God MOMENTUM with his pencils…and it comes across non-stop the entire issue, right up to the creepy as hell final page.

So, is this book getting dropped after all? That remains to be seen. The fact that I now sort of see the logic behind 3.99 single issues (thanks to the words of Peter David and Mark Waid at NYCC), that does not make me magically richer. However…if the coming issues stay this intense and darkly intriguing, I’d say this book is actually WORTH the expense.

Final Verdict: 8.7 – Buy


Joshua Mocle

Joshua Mocle is an educator, writer, audio spelunker and general enthusiast of things loud and fast. He is also a devout Canadian. He can often be found thinking about comics too much, pretending to know things about baseball and trying to convince the masses that pop-punk is still a legitimate genre. Stalk him out on twitter and thought grenade.

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