Written by Joe Casey
Illustrated by Nick DragottaTHE LIFE OF BULLSEYE HOLDS THE FATE OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE! But isn’t he already dead? That won’t stop the Young Masters from hunting down his legacy. Meanwhile, Ms. America and the Teen Brigade uncover a mystery dedicated towards throwing off the balance of Good and Evil on earth — a mystery that involves THE IN-BETWEENER!
The Teen Brigade! The Young Masters! The Last Defenders! The three-way collision that only the most unsocialized of Internet comic book nerds would salivate over! And it’s happening! Maybe! Just not yet. More after the jump.
Joe Casey writes some of the most entertaining material in superhero comics today. We both know that I’m talking about the backmatter columns in Butcher Baker, the Righteous Maker — but Vengeance isn’t bad either. If nothing else, it’s a continuance of Joe Casey’s favorite pet theme, which is to take the world of superheroes and shatter the myopic tunnel-vision of what he’s called “bad junk food” comics. Casey’s big agenda is almost always centered around the idea of superheroes changing the world — but not in the crass, dictator-punching Authority kind of way (not usually, at least). If you throw a stone into the lake, it ripples, and shoots up water, which then lands in splashes and droplets, each with their own ripples, and so on. Casey cares less about the stone than he does about the ripples, and that’s the territory Vengeance sits in comfortably.
“Comfort” may be a bit of a misnomer, though, as the second issue of Vengeance — the under-the-radar event comic by design — is mostly given over to chaos that threatens to tip-toe over into anarchy. At no point does anyone seem to know what’s going on beyond their own short-term goals, which has the potential for a wonderful tying-together of things, but can sometimes make for unclear reading. (Example: I think the recap page of #2 did a better job of explaining what happened in #1 than #1 itself did.) I’d hesitate to attribute this to info-density or some other buzzword, though, because really, this is a comic book where some assholes buy a house and then get beaten up by Lady Bullseye, and some other guys listen to an extra from “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” let loose the Babble Cosmic. Meanwhile, in 1944, things happened, and the Defenders are squabbling as they try to figure this whole thing out. Lots of things are happening, but they’re small things — but between the Teen Brigade, the Young Masters, and the Defenders, these are all small people, in the scheme of Marveldom. If there’s one thing Vengeance can’t be accused of, it’s playing dumb for the fanboy yokels; “you’re smart kids,” it whispers between panel borders. “You’ll figure it out.”
Nick Dragotta is warming to the chaos. His art is always elegantly composed, framed in such a way that you can tell he’s worked hard to make it look like this isn’t even work for him, just something that happens when his pen touches paper. In Vengeance #2, though, he’s loosening up a bit. Sure, his figures are still immaculate and his designs are still wonderfully off-kilter (dig the new Black Knight), but just look at the fight scene between the Young Masters and Lady Bullseye. Maybe it’s a conscious nod toward, well, the martial-arts nature of the brawl, but this is a fight that moves, bounding around the page and thrashing its limbs — as opposed to, say, a series of still snapshots of same. Looking at his published art over the years, I’m not sure Dragotta could make a truly messy comic if he wanted to, but he can certainly vibe with the bolted-together Frankenstein that Joe Casey is constructing here, and it all looks marvelous.
Still, a pretty face only makes up for so much. If I have one complaint about the series, it’s that there’s no one yet who I can really care about. For example: just this weekend, I was re-reading Casey’s run on Wildcats with Sean Phillips. (Worth seeking out.) Even in issues given over to frenzy, frolic, and other f-words, we could still squeeze out a firm grasp on who people were and what they were about — Spartan / Jack Marlowe, Grifter, Voodoo, Maul, Zealot in her fleeting disappearances. Agent Wax, Captain Pacheco, Ladytron, the serial killer guy with the eyes, and on and on. Here, we’ve got a lot of interesting characters (three teams’ worth and change!) who aren’t doing much to show why they’re interesting — so the natural assumption is that it only runs skin deep. Sure, the Ultimate Nullifier and America Chavez don’t need long soliloquies about why they do things, but for Vengeance to go down as “good junk food” in the record books, the books has to have more than a borrowed chorus of “kill people burn shit fuck school” in its heart.
This really is “the event comic that isn’t,” though — I’ll give Casey and Dragotta that much. It acts like we know what it’s talking about, but unlike most events, there’s no continuity or development to root any of it in (except for possibly The Last Defenders). The real money is in tracing it as a culmination of the threads of Casey’s Marvel work to date, as a meta-narrative rather than a literal one. It’s not a comic book event comic; it’s a comic book career event comic. Would that all mid-life crises were this engaging.
Final Verdict: 7.999 / Casey, you scamp
