DD looks sassy on this cover. I don’t think that’s the word you want for him. Well, it’s once again been 6 months since last issue. No matter what they thought after the first 3 issues, pretty much everybody thinks this thing is boondoggle now. Can they pull it out of the tailspin? Spoilers: No. Because despite being 6 months late, to get it out at all, Del’Otto has produced a comic that often looks like this:
There’s essentially only 3 panels on these pages, repeating, repeating, repeating. I mean, it could only read as desperation with the slip in the schedule. I wonder if Angelina Jolie ever saw this. I’m only running the following spread…
…because the Thing face copied from last issue stands out so very, very much. It baffled me then, it baffles me now. I guess it saved him some time, but somebody couldn’t have tossed a blue filter on it, at least? We see the heroes in Sue’s bubble and… are the villains dead? ‘Cuz, like, not one of them is dead after this comic. I guess the 2 jobbers in the Crimson Dynamo and Hobgoblin suits might be. Anyway, Von Bardas is doing a real Bendis-y “I’m talking to you but not saying anything” thing he does sometimes, and then Thing smashes the ground, thinking it might help, but all it does is make the pier collapse. Where Ben is, I don’t understand, really. He seems to be lit differently due to not being near the explosion, but… why? Well, anyway, Von Bardas is villain monologuing, and then Nick smiles (And that panel appears twice), and then…
It’s Daisy doing… whatever she’s doing. She has earthquake powers. Her supername is “Quake.” Von Bardas goes down, and some of the villains are alive, but they seem to think most of them are dead. I don’t know. Then Bendis explains what you just saw:
Really working those repeating panels. Back in the past, but the 6 hours ago past, not the one year ago past (Bendis just loves to do a climax in flashback, and I have never understood why), no one knows what’s happened except Nick and Daisy, and no one knows why it happened except them and Cap, who demands Nick explain it to everyone. Then the X-Jet lands, because Wolverine is mad.
Not only do you not get to see a secret war in the comic called Secret War, you don’t even get to see Wolverine’s part of the Public War.
Then Nick tells them what happened. He tells them what we already know, over panels from comics we already saw, now in black & white, about going to the President, being rejected, recruiting the heroes, putting them on the plane. The 2-page, Spider-Man’s-eye-view splash of the secret war appears in a 3rd issue of this 5 issues series. Over it, Nick says he could’ve snuck into Castle Doom and just poisoned Von Bardas, but that’s “not the language these people understand.” Bear in mind, Von Bardas first appeared in this series. Know one knows any more about her than the readers of this series, and we know nothing at all. Maybe developing this villain would’ve been a good idea! Then, we finally get to a little of the titular Secret War…
I guess the implication is Cap went in first as some kind of decoy? Why the fake costume then???
Well, she did, and in the present, Emma Frost, of all people, semi-reformed supervillain, says “Oh my God.” Like she hasn’t done horrible things to far more innocent people. But why did the heroes even go inside??? Daisy coulda done that from their hotel room! Well, in the past, all the heroes were furious about being conned into this wholesale slaughter, and in the present, they’re all re-furious as Nick tells them they were part of it, and that he casually brainwashed them all and they “lost 2 days.” Nick is completely unapologetic about all this, but doesn’t seem to have counted on how Logan, whose whole thing is being tortured because the Weapon X program stole his memories, would react to finding out Nick stole some of his memories. He is, in a word, unhappy.
Bendis just loves to brutalize Wolverine. It’s just funny to me. He really takes advantage of having a character who can’t die.
Well, there it goes. And here’s where it all got wacky. See, Secret War should have wrapped in January 2005. Instead, this issue hit shelves in October. A whole, whole lot has happened in the Marvel U that we’ll get some info about in the next ASM block, the status quo is very different for almost everyone featured in this series. And… rather insanely… Bendis decided this book should take place then, to sort of make up for the fact that it was so late. So… It started in January 2004, but now it takes place in the same rough timeframe as books published in October 2005. It’s hard to talk about without spoiling things. But one thing you’re seeing here is Maria Hill, acting Director of SHIELD, has been interrogating Daisy this whole issue. She is not properly introduced, because she was already introduced in a comic that came out 10 months prior, before Secret War 4… but she didn’t exist when Secret War 1 came out. Part of Bendis planting this book “now” when it came out instead of “then” when it was supposed to. It’s really, really unnecessarily confusing. Things were so much easier when your average comic story only lasted 1 or 2 issues. And Bendis will do this exact thing again after another book runs late in 2007! It’s not a good idea! It’s an even worse idea that time! But he wants these things to fit in where they publish, I guess.
But, yeah, so… a real misfire, this one. It was, I think, a learning experience for Bendis. He made his bones doing crime noir stuff. 2 people in a room. That translated pretty much perfectly to Daredevil, and he found the right way into USM. But we saw that his stab at X-Men was not what a reader of that title would want. He seemed unwilling or unable to write a team book (yet). And now he’s taken a run at a Capital “E” Event series, and found that his usual moves don’t really satisfy there. We were promised a secret war. Del’Otto wasted his time designing new suits for all the heroes and painted them, like, 6 times each or less. Douglas Wolk, author of the book All of the Marvels, wherein he read all Marvel comics and commented on it, came away with a pretty profound summary of what a Bendis comic is. He said Bendis stories are about “the status quo has changed, how does everyone react?” And that can be pretty thrilling. But it’s not really what anyone was looking for from this. It’s not what they were sold. People expected a superhero adventure, and they got a mystery box. People expected a big team-up featuring many of their favorite heroes, and they got the story of Nick Fury and the brand-new Daisy Johnson tricking the heroes into helping them fight a villain who has no backstory, motivations or personality in a past they forgot. And then they had to sit through all these delays. Just a mess all over, really. The good news is, Bendis will get better at teams, and Daisy Johnson will go on to star in one of the best Marvel titles of the late 2000s. The bad news is, the next time we see B handle a team book… It’s not gonna go any better than this.
Next up, we return to the world of Ultimate Spider-Man. And when we get back to Amazing… Everything changes. Eventually. Like 20 posts into the block. But really!