The Marvels Project: Birth of the Super Heroes - Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting

This hardback collection reprints a mini-series published in 2009 and 2010, a short time before I started reading comics again, but somehow I'd never heard of it until I came across a copy at the Half Price Books in Corpus Christi last summer. It's written by one of my favorite modern comics authors, Ed Brubaker, and drawn by one of the best artists, Steve Epting. Since those two were responsible for what's probably the best run on CAPTAIN AMERICA since the days of Lee and Kirby, I expected to enjoy THE MARVELS PROJECT, and I certainly did.

Like Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross's iconic MARVELS, this story takes a look at some familiar events from a different perspective. The primary point of view character in THE MARVELS PROJECT is Dr. Thomas Halloway, who was also the masked crimefighter known as The Angel in Golden Age comics stories published by Timely, the company that would one day become Marvel Comics. Through Halloway's eyes we get a fresh look at some pivotal events in comics history: the creation of the original Human Torch; the attack on New York by Prince Namor, the Submariner, and the epic battles between him and the Torch; the transformation of Steve Rogers into Captain America; the introductions of the sidekicks, Bucky and Toro; and finally, after foiling a diabolical plot by the Red Skull, the formation of The Invaders, the first superhero team. Along the way, a number of other familiar characters show up, such as Nick Fury, The Destroyer, and even The Two-Gun Kid.

That last line is enough to tell comics fans that THE MARVELS PROJECT is a mixture of comics history from the actual Golden Age and some modern-day retconning that includes elements like The Invaders and John Steele. I'm generally a purist when it comes to such things, but Brubaker, after all, is the guy who not only did the unthinkable—bringing Bucky Barnes back to life after fifty years—but made even comics curmudgeons such as myself not only accept it but like it. He does a great job here, telling a fast-paced story steeped in history and nostalgia. Epting's art is excellent as well. His Captain America is the best since Jack Kirby's, and his period details are top-notch.

I'm glad I came across this one. It's thoroughly enjoyable and brought back a lot of good memories of Golden Age stories I've read, mostly in reprint volumes but a few in the original comics that I bought many years after they were first published. It was a different era in comics but a good one, and if you'd like to revisit it, THE MARVELS PROJECT is well worth your time.

Velvet #1 - Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting

Normally I don't blog about single issues of a comic book, preferring to wait until there's a collected edition available, but I'm going to make an exception for VELVET #1, the first issue of a new spy series written by Ed Brubaker and drawn by Steve Epting, the team responsible for some of the best Captain America stories in the past twenty or thirty years.

According to Brubaker, he wants VELVET to be a cross between the more over-the-top secret agent stuff like James Bond and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and the grittier espionage fiction of authors such as John Le Carre. I think he's succeeded admirably in this first issue.

Set in the late Sixties and early Seventies, the story centers around the activities of Arc-7, a top secret, ultra-hush-hush spy agency with headquarters in London. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a British agency or an international one like U.N.C.L.E., but that doesn't really matter. One of their agents is murdered while on a mission, and the leaders of the agency quickly decide that there's a traitor in their ranks, a former top field agent who now trains other agents.

But Velvet Templeton, the secretary to the agency's director, believes that the man being blamed for the leak (who happens to be a former lover of hers) is actually being framed, so she sets out to do some investigating of her own. And Velvet has some secrets in her past that make things even more interesting, so that by the end of this issue Brubaker has thrown in some very intriguing twists along with plenty of action.

Since I was a huge fan of all the espionage novels, movies, and TV shows from the Sixties, VELVET is right in my wheelhouse. Brubaker is one of the best writers in the comics business, and I've always enjoyed Epting's stylish artwork and top-notch storytelling. This first issue also includes a fine essay by Jess Nevins, "A History of Spy Fiction Through the Cold War". I really enjoyed this one and look forward to the next issue. Whether you read it as it goes along or wait for the hardback or trade paperback, VELVET gets a high recommendation from me.

Criminal: Lawless - Ed Brubaker

It's been a while since I've read one of these trade paperbacks reprinting a story arc from Ed Brubaker's great noir series CRIMINAL. LAWLESS is the second volume, and the title is not only a good description of the protagonist, it's also his name. Tracy Lawless is a young man gone bad who had to choose between being sent to prison or joining the army. It was an easy decision for him, and for a while he found a home for himself in the military before he got in trouble there, too, and wound up in a military prison.

Now Tracy's younger brother Ricky, who also drifted into a life of crime, is dead, and Tracy breaks out of prison and returns home to find out who killed him and settle the score. In order to do that, he has to assume a fake identity and infiltrate the crew of professional thieves Ricky used to run with. His quest is complicated because one of those thieves is a beautiful woman who was in love with his brother . . .

Of course that's just one of the dangerous complications, which comes as no surprise to those of us who are fans of hardboiled, noirish crime fiction. LAWLESS may be a graphic novel, but it's written and plotted like a prose novel that could have been published by Gold Medal or Dell or Lion Books. Brubaker writes great dialogue, and the artwork by Sean Phillips goes perfectly with it. From its violent, enigmatic beginning to its downbeat ending, LAWLESS makes for compelling reading. I have several more of these CRIMINAL collections, and I have a hunch I'll be dipping into them soon.

Criminal, Vol. 6: The Last of the Innocent - Ed Brubaker

As much as I enjoy Ed Brubaker's writing in CAPTAIN AMERICA and other superhero comics, I think his best work is to be found in his on-going series of noir graphic novels, CRIMINAL. The most recent on, THE LAST OF THE INNOCENT, with art by Sean Phillips as usual, pushes the standard for this series even higher.

The narrator, Riley Richards, grows up in a small town in the Fifties and Sixties, hangs around with his pals, and has to decide between two girls, sweet girl-next-door Lizzie and beautiful, sophisticated, rich Felix. Yes, it's all very much like Archie Andrews, and Phillips even draws some of the sequences in that style, very effectively, I might add.

       

But those sequences are flashbacks, because the main story is set in the Eighties, when Riley finds himself trapped in a loveless marriage, swamped by gambling debts, and driven by desperation to murder and acts even more despicable.

THE LAST OF THE INNOCENT is about as bleak as it can be as Brubaker tightens the screws on Riley, and he saves his last kicker for the final page. It's subtle enough that if you haven't been paying attention all the way through, you might miss it, but when you figure out what's going to happen, it's very effective.

Those of you who enjoy crime comics really should check out CRIMINAL. Each story is a stand-alone and is collected in its own trade paperback, although there are some connections between them that reward reading all of them. THE LAST OF THE INNOCENT is the sixth volume in the series. Highly recommended.

Secret Avengers: Eyes of the Dragon - Ed Brubaker

Of all the comics I’ve started reading in recent months, one of the best – if not the best – is SECRET AVENGERS. Not surprisingly, it’s written by Ed Brubaker, the writer of my other favorite, CAPTAIN AMERICA, and features Steve Rogers, the former Cap, in a leading role.


For years now, different teams of Avengers have tended to crop up, last for a while, and then go away. I hope this one lasts a long time. It’s the covert ops branch of the Avengers, led by Steve Rogers himself, and includes War Machine (Jim Rhodes in his own version of the Iron Man armor), Ant-Man (not Hank Pym; now it’s some other guy who used to be a SHIELD agent, I think), the Beast (Hank McCoy from the X-Men), another former SHIELD agent and Steve’s former girlfriend Sharon Carter, the Black Widow (the same one she’s always been), Moon Knight (I have no idea who he is now; I need to look that up), the Norse warrior goddess Valkyrie, and some guy in a hood called The Prince of Orphans (no idea who he is, either, or who he’s supposed to be).


Despite being a little fuzzy on a couple of the characters, I’ve been able to dive right into this book with great enjoyment. The storyline that’s just been reprinted in this collection is top-notch and features one of my favorite characters from the Seventies, Shang-Chi, the Master of Kung Fu.


Now you’d think that a character created solely as a quick way for Marvel to cash in on the kung fu movie craze back then wouldn’t be that great. But you’d be wrong, because Shang-Ki and the comic MASTER OF KUNG FU quickly evolved into much more than that, because of who Shang-Chi’s father was.


None other than Fu Manchu his own self.


For several years, with great scripts from Doug Moench and even better art by Paul Gulacy, MOKF became a globe-trotting, espionage-oriented, action-adventure epic with a superb supporting cast. At its center, though, was always the clash between Fu Manchu, one of the all-time great villains, and his idealistic son Shang-Chi.


Since then Shang-Chi has hung around the fringes of the Marvel Universe, popping up now and then to play a part in some story. In SECRET AVENGERS: EYES OF THE DRAGON, the story actually revolves around him and the efforts of an evil secret society, the Hai-Dai, to capture him so that he can be sacrificed in a ritual that will return his father to life.


In one of the annoying things about this storyline, for some reason Fu Manchu is no longer referred to by that name. Instead he’s become Zheng Zu . . . but come on, we all know who he really is. That’s Fu frickin’ Manchu the bad guys want to resurrect, so naturally Steve Rogers and the Secret Avengers have to step in to try to put the kibosh on that evil plot. Complicating things is yet another secret society, the Shadow Council, that’s behind what the Hai-Dai is doing, and one of their leaders is a rogue LMD of Nick Fury who calls himself Max Fury. (If you’ve read this far and you don’t know what an LMD is . . . well, let’s just say that’s unlikely.) Also working for the Shadow Council is John Steele, a former ally of Captain America’s from World War II.


Brubaker juggles all these plot elements quite effectively and tells a fast-moving story at the same time. The artwork is mostly by Mike Deodato, who’s a decent storyteller. Yes, this is typical superhero comic book stuff, but it’s done with skill and respect for the medium. In many ways, Brubaker is one of the most traditional writers working in comics these days, which is fine with an old curmudgeon like me. At the same time, the quality of his writing is high enough that his stories attain a freshness that I don’t see in some of the other comics.


So if you’re old enough to have been reading comics in the Seventies and remember MASTER OF KUNG FU with the same fondness I do, you need to read SECRET AVENGERS: EYES OF THE DRAGON. I had a great time with it.

The Trial of Captain America - Ed Brubaker

Ever since writer Ed Brubaker brought back Bucky Barnes from his apparent death in the closing days of World War II (and dang it, I still have to read that storyline, I’ve got the reprint collection sitting right here), the crimes he committed as the Soviet super-assassin The Winter Soldier have hung over his head. It was inevitable that somebody would want him to answer for them, and in THE TRIAL OF CAPTAIN AMERICA, it’s the U.S. government that comes after him. Although oddly enough, it’s New York City D.A. Blake Tower who’s in charge of the prosecution, not some federal attorney.


Anyway, as if being on trial for things that he did while he was under Soviet mind-control isn’t enough of a problem for Bucky, the new Red Skull (who is the old Red Skull’s daughter, previously and sometimes still known as Sin) is out to make his life miserable, too.


This story arc is a little slow-moving but still entertaining as it leads up to a final showdown at the Statue of Liberty (always a good spot for superhero fights), followed by a twist ending. Brubaker’s writing is good as always, and so is Butch Guice’s art (with the exception of D.A. Tower’s age and physical appearance being portrayed incorrectly, as Troy Smith pointed out in a comment on a previous post).


Under Brubaker’s guidance, CAPTAIN AMERICA continues to be one of the best comics out there today. While I didn’t enjoy this arc as much as some of the others, it left me eager to find out what’s going to happen next. That’s the true test of any form of serialized storytelling, I think.

Criminal, Vol. 1: Coward - Ed Brubaker

I’ve read quite a few favorable comments about CRIMINAL, the series of noir-oriented graphic novels written by Ed Brubaker and drawn by Sean Phillips. While I enjoyed Brubaker’s work on various Batman titles in the past and am really liking his current efforts on several comics published by Marvel, I’d never sampled the CRIMINAL series until now.


The first volume, COWARD, is narrated by a guy named Leo, a former pickpocket who has graduated to planning and helping carry out elaborate robberies. He has a strict set of rules, though, and won’t get involved in any job where he has to run too much of a risk. When he’s approached by a fellow thief and a crooked cop and asked to plan the robbery of a police evidence van carrying five million dollars worth of stolen diamonds, Leo first says no. He doesn’t want to get involved in something being set up by a crooked cop. Too chancy.


But he has his father’s former partner to take care of, and the man is not only hooked on heroin but also has Alzheimer’s, so Leo needs money. The fact that the widow of a former partner of his is also going to be part of the crew influences Leo as well. He feels a little guilty that the woman’s husband got killed during a job he planned. So, reluctantly, Leo says yes.


You already know where this is going. Leo has made a bad mistake.


Naturally, things don’t work out the way he expects them to. People die. Lies and double-crosses abound. More people die. And Leo is left scrambling to try to protect himself and the people he cares about while trying to make things right. You’ve seen this before, going all the way back to the Gold Medal glory days.


But the heist plot, when done well, is still remarkably effective, and Brubaker and Phillips do a great job in COWARD. Although Leo is a far cry from being the hardnosed guy that Parker is, reading this book reminded me quite a bit of Westlake’s Richard Stark novels. Brubaker writes fine dialogue, the plot twists back and forth nicely, and the whole thing has that inexorable spiraling of fate that makes noir fiction what it is. This is excellent work, and I plan to read more of the collected editions of CRIMINAL in the near future. Highly recommended.

Steve Rogers: Super Soldier - Ed Brubaker

Let’s recap. Steve Rogers was the original Captain America, but he died a while back, assassinated during the superhero civil war. (I missed all that, but I caught up.) Captain America’s former sidekick Bucky Barnes, who was thought to be dead since all the way back at the end of World War II, really wasn’t, so he took over as Captain America. Turns out Steve wasn’t really dead, either, but when he came back he didn’t want to take the Captain America identity away from Bucky. So, since his secret identity went out the window a long time ago, Steve Rogers becomes sort of a super national security advisor and also is placed in overall command of the various teams of Avengers.


If you’re still reading and haven’t gone, “Oh, no, more of that crazy comic book stuff!”, that brings us to STEVE ROGERS: SUPER SOLDIER (because it was the Super Soldier Formula that gave scrawny, sickly young Steve his powers back in 1941, you know), a new hardback reprinting the mini-series that introduced the character to the Marvel Universe in his current role. It’s written by Ed Brubaker, who also writes the regular Captain America comic and SECRET AVENGERS, the best of the numerous Avengers titles.


The plot of this story goes all the way back to Captain America’s origin, as Steve gets involved with the grandson of the scientist who invented the Super Soldier Formula. The secret of the serum was thought to be lost ever since its creator was murdered by a Nazi agent right after giving the initial dose to Steve. Now the grandson appears to have recreated the formula, but instead of using it for good, he’s going to sell it the highest bidder.


Or is he? That question is just the first of several nice twists that Brubaker throws into the plot over the course of the story, saving the last one for the very end. This isn’t ground-breaking stuff, but it’s very well-done superhero action, the sort of yarn I was reading and enjoying in comic books more than forty years ago and obviously still am. Brubaker’s script is nice and hardboiled, not too silly, and flows right along. The art by Dale Eaglesham is good, too, with a strong storytelling sense.


For good measure, the book also reprints the actual Captain America origin story from the first issue of CAPTAIN AMERICA COMICS in 1941, which was written by Joe Simon and drawn by Jack Kirby. This story has been reprinted several times and I’d seen it before, but the juxtaposition of it with Brubaker and Eaglesham’s yarn is a nice touch. Overall, I enjoyed STEVE ROGERS: SUPER SOLDIER a great deal and recommend it highly for comics fans.