Secret Avengers: The Remender Redemption

It was upon first appraisal of Rick Remender that I recognized his style felt like Morrison in the same sense that Morrison felt like Moore.  It has to be recognized that nearly each and every character in a Rick Remender storyline has more depth and emotional complexity than most superhero books can hope to achieve, and it unfolds without too-oft repeated contrivances (or as-yet unexplored facets on those contrivances, or tropes, if you like) and ill-suited demographics-pandering that are built into the structure of Comic Books: the Entity, as a whole, both at this time and (let's admit it) most of its existence.

Could be that Rick Remender's a new breed of comic book writer, the metaspawn emerging around the Age that Morrison made Weird, altering the scope of the world with the destruction of Genosha and wide-screen life-tampering and near-cosmic grounded in adventure proper, writ large with neon signs and snappy dialogue.  He's not John Byrne and he's not Chris Claremont, thank Christ.  He's the type of fellow who knows the nuance of nerd like the palm of his hand, yet walks through the socially-crippling flames unscathed, with a quip or quirk that you'll need to reread, a hook that you can explain in two sentences, and cliffhangers that aren't simply driven by virtue of being the final page.  He kills characters with all the mercy of a slaughterhouse manager. This makes him very dangerous for the entities within Marvel 616, resilient as they are.

Rick Remender could turn the Marvel Universe into a graveyard and make it matter as he did so.

Secret Avengers, your surprise of the week is a newly reformed Masters of Evil. Have some.

Mind you, this is supposed to be a professionally structured review of The Secret Avengers storyline currently occurring (post Status Quo Disrupting Revamp? Pre?) but it will likely degenerate into gushing fandom for the man's work.  He made a comic book with a joke title (Uncanny X-Force) into one of the freshest and most surprising titles in the Marvel Universe, and has mined the veins of the mountains that came before with an aplomb as graceful as a swan and as ruthless as a badger.

Remender was no doubt raised on Bruce Campbell  dark physical comedy and likely when he saw the dystopian hodge podge future burned away by the Phoenix in Here Comes Tomorrow he liked what he saw.  Twisted variants on all the old themes, fresh and remastered as villains or heroes, morally grey issues greeted with enthusiasm rather than trepidation.

Currently two of his titles, the effective Uncanny X-Force and The Secret Avengers, involve his rehashing of two groups that seemed silly by title in the morally ambiguous quagmire attempting grand declarative statements: The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and The Masters of Evil.  Elements of The Venture Brother's Guild of Calamitous Intent are called forth: Who would want to join an organization called Evil right in its title?  How many demented souls would actually want to carry such a title? Plenty, it turns out, and not all of them from what we would call reality.

Remender alters the Marvel Universe landscape as he murders innocents and guilty alike... the mythos of place is conjured up and handed off to other writers, friends every one, to explore and adventure in.  The key to any Remender storyline is simple.  It's fun, see.  A comic book is supposed to be fun.

The activity of reading a comic book is a leisurely one. A novice, unschooled, must be entertained, but a certain gravitas (to greater or lesser extents) must always be given to the auteur providing the imagery.  Remender's eye for artists from his time in Fear Agent on has served his work well, a complimentary matter of fast motion and stillness incorporated to suit the events of the story.   Matteo Scalera's one of the latest in a line of artists whose ample abilities seem to suit the activity of Rick Remender's script, with motion and perspective driving the story at a steady pace.

Small moments like this mean so much. Pun intended.

So what is the story, at least with the Secret Avenger's corner of the Universe? Seems that Nick Fury has had this habit, since a very long time ago, to have life model decoy androids of himself all over the globe to keep from getting assassinated and to foster a sense of confusion, since he's the ultimate Cold Warrior.  One of his life model decoys went a little bonkers, calls himself Max, and is assembling a new Masters of Evil in a supervillain bar-pit formed by a Molecule Man battle (remember the landscape shifts mentioned before?)... and he's been collecting crowns of power (calling back to the first missions of the Secret Avengers series, led by Steve Rogers, Supercop)... to become Lord of the Abyss.  And the Abyss, from what we the reader can easily gather, is a darkness beyond demonic, reminiscent, in fact of the Qlippoth explored in Alan Moore's Promethea (the 11th gate in the Tree of Life, the Beggar, the Fountain).

This makes for entertainment, people.  A comic is supposed to be a good time.  And so long as this procession of entertainment continues to keep up in quality, we should pile great heaps of our money at the base of its altar, the serial, and its throne, the graphic novel.  Long may the King, Comic Books: the Entity reign. Long may it be held to a higher standard, with examples set by quality writers and extremely talented artists.

Max Fury, that's like Max Power or Lance Uppercut right?

15 hour Avengers Party.

The idea was simple.  For twenty American dollars plus tax apiece, Mr. So and I would partake of fifteen hours of comic book movies.  The offer stood as Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America, and finally, at midnight, the long-anticipated Avengers (in 3D), written and directed by this summer's cinema success story, Joss Whedon.

I got this swag.

When the first film (Iron Man) ends, a sweaty female attendant with a broken voice informs the theater that parking will only be validated for four hours.  A mild panic rises in the crowd when a rumor passes around that the show is going to exclude The Avengers itself. A quick check on the cell phone confirms the film is indeed playing.  Calm returns.

The crowd consists of much as you might expect: largely male population, with standard skinny bespectacled nerds, geeks that choose to wear their Captain America hoodies or thrift-store condition Avengers t-shirts (thus being the guy at the concert that's wearing the t-shirt of the band that's playing at the concert), a handful of stoner stereotypes, dorks that bred and brought their precocious children, and of course, samples of America's grossly obese, providing the sour milk fat flesh fold smell that over the course of the day sinks into the theater like scared-skunk stink.  Swag in the form of buttons and posters are passed out.

We're all sold on it.

What's not to like?

Admittedly, the only movies of the bunch that I go into the event having already seen are the Iron Man films, due in one part due to an odd affection for Jon Favreau, in another part because of an active attempt to avoid the genre of superheroes as much as humanly possible.  So often one gets burned. Ask anyone that has ever seen Spider Man 3.  In the cocaine-fueled executive rage for commercial success, many comic book adaptations could easily be viewed as escapism done wrong, a less refined, mostly immature attempt at pandering to the lowest common denominator, resulting in critical flip-floppers.

Most of all what I never enjoyed was the preening sense of inevitability concerning militarism that the Marvel franchise seems to endorse in each film it makes, while simultaneously (and only sometimes) pretending it does the opposite.

The Edward Norton version of Hulk doubles down on the concept of military run amok to the point of absurdity, blowing up a college campus with no accountability, while the Thor movie mythologizes it with a sanitized and shiny Asgard run by Anthony Hopkin's master Kenneth Branaugh (and in this you could extrapolate Thor being the brutish America proxy, Loki being the snotty British Gog, and the entire Middle East as a frosted mirror-glass land of the Frost Giants).

This uneasy feeling of being sold a toy of the military industrial complex is reinforced as we are treated to the same opening sequence of commercials six times at the event.  An ad for the Navy, an ad for the Navy-sponsored boardgame-turned-film Battleship, an ad for the same film, this time sponsored by Coke Zero, an ad for the Marines, an ad for the Hatfields vs. the McCoys on TNT (Kevin Costner in a bloodfeud), an ad for the new remake of Dallas (the words BLOOD and FEUD and BATTLEGROUND flash on the screen, almost subliminal), then a review of each preview, plus an oddly racist Ultrabook ad.  All of that, six times over.

Imagine an army of Purple Hulks.

So the twelve hours and five movies pass, with twenty minute breaks between films, and we devour the food we snuck in, sip on caffeinated beverages loaded with vitamin B and Guarna and Taurine, and I can feel myself becoming accustomed to the changing eye-patches of Nick Fury in each post-credits teaser, and I can see that the people involved are attempting to make something more than a two hour long advertisement for the military industrial complex, but at the end of the day, they're stuck in a system they never named, but were made by, much as in the Captain America movie, where after being dosed as a super-soldier, he spends the first stretch of his career spinning propaganda on the newsies.

When a true subliminal flashes after the word "compassion" at a certain point (Thor, I believe), I recall the recent Star Trek remake, where James T. Kirk's older father-proxy tries to convince him to join Star Fleet after a bar fight. I flash across the crass, commercialized, and crypto-fascist overtones of 300 and the Transformers franchise.  Michael Bay conditioning pods.  Though certain elements of Captain America call to mind the best elements of Star Wars as well as the quality of film making from the era it depicts.  Captain America is the best, most refined of the Marvel movies leading into The Avengers.

About midway through The Avengers, when the S.H.I.E.L.D Hellicarrier raises out of the ocean, I find myself compelled to join the Navy, for some reason.

I also find myself cheering with the crowd around me.

The Avengers, it should be said, calls forth all the elements of a comic book superhero team, and paces them in an order that should be just complex enough to satisfy critics and just simplistic enough to appease brohams.  It's a crowd pleaser. It will break box-office barriers.  I love comics. I know comics.  My conscious attempts at avoiding comic book movies came after a dissatisfaction borne out of constant disappointment.

The Avengers gets it right, in a big way.

[Perhaps that lengthy an exposure to such materials was never intended for public consumption. Perhaps I have overdosed.  I need to start a blood feud, right after I join the Navy.]

I'll admit, all of my resistances were worn down to some degree in the twelve hours leading up to The Avengers, but this is a first rate A+ film for being a comedy, an action movie, and a superhero movie that puts all others to shame.

The Tesseract (which sounds better than Cosmic Cube, perhaps) is our movie's objective correlative, first introduced in Captain America, a limitless power source, and a source of interest for the villain Loki and his unnamed benefactor Thanos (who we only see in the first of two post-credits scenes).

The entire film, I wanted Samuel L. Jackson, playing Nick Fury, to start screaming a litany of curse words, out of nowhere.  SHIELD Agent Phil Coulson (calling to mind Charles Colson) played by Clark Gregg, is the thread running from Iron Man through the rest of the films and on up into The Avengers, where he plays the part of Captain America's biggest fan and, later on, "the avenged".  Scarlett Johansson manages to explain why Black Widow is essential to the team dynamic by being the world's best interrogator.  Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye gets only a few spots to shine in the film, but he uses them effectively.  Bruce Banner is played for the first time by Mark Ruffalo, who does a bang-up job playing the eccentric gamma-irradiated scientist.  Better by far than any previous actor that filled the role, if you want to come down to it.  Tom Hiddleston is the core of the movie as Loki, and in the final analysis is one of the best actors in the film.  Something about Chris Hemsworth as Thor strikes me as a little too simple. Maybe that's the point. He has a good laugh for Thor, it's just that he walks with just the wrong degree of swagger to pull off "god of thunder", in my humble opinion.  Chris Evans, on the other hand, manages to sell Captain America's soldier boy appeal effortlessly, and of course, Robert Downey Jr. embodies Tony Stark to the extent that at certain points it doesn't feel like he's bothered to read the script, he's just channeling a genius billionaire philanthropist from a parallel reality.

Part of what can tell you how good a band is is how well the audience responds to their performance. By that measure, and given that the entire theater withstood fifteen hours of cinema for The Avengers, the movie is a rousing success. Big laughs from the audience.  Spontaneous applause. Bigger action.

Joss Whedon has proven something great about himself this summer.  He's the current nerd king of Hollywood, and we shall all bask in his light until the cycle of cinema degenerates again, in a new flashier more gimmicky Tour de France.

I want to give him a firm handshake for a job well done, right after I sign up for basic training.