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Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Recommended and coming soon
Tomorrow will see the release of the collected edition of one of Marvel’s greatest stories of the ‘70s. Avengers: The Serpent Crown by Steve Englehart and George Perez is filled with enough concepts going on in it that it just might be a better value than any other superhero book coming out this week. If you can imagine a story that combines left-leaning social commentary, superhero duels from the Gardner Fox playbook, artwork that introduces a talent whose prowess was just begin to show, bald space women and Norse Gods in the Old West all wrapped up in the Mighty Marvel Manner then you sort of have an idea of what this book holds.
Englehart had previous success on Avengers with his “Avengers/Defenders Clash” and “Celestial Madonna” storyline but this, his last hurrah on the title, is what I would consider his best effort. It combines all of his storytelling gifts when he was at the height of his powers. There’s that ability to draw from long forgotten characters with the introduction of Hank McCoy and Patsy Walker’s transformation into Hellcat. The Beast is a real joy to read because Englehart’s affection for the characters is just beaming. There’s the strong dialogue and characterization, in particular with Walker’s storyline. There’s also the political consciousness he infuses into his work by having The Squadron Supreme work for Marvel’s version of the Rand Corporation and Exxon Mobil. This leads up to a soliloquy on corporate power delivered by an unlucky cast member. It also gives us Nelson Rockefeller given the full Marvel cosmic treatment, which is just wacky enough to work.
One of the appeals for Englehart’s work today is that its influence is so evident. Kurt Busiek and Grant Morrison have both praised his work. In Busiek I can see that ability to use a shared superhero universe with a long history to come up with fresh stories. With Morrison there’s that love of getting really imaginative and sprawling, but bringing everything down to Earth with some funny quips (ever read a Morrison story where a character says something funny in the middle of a million weird things going on? You have Englehart to thank for that). You might consider Geoff Johns the Englehart of today. Both of them have this knack for taking forgotten characters or making sense of twisting continuity in the effort for good, readable stories. A lot of this is evident in The Serpent Crown.
To see George Perez land one of his first real high-profile gigs is fun to read as well. This was before Perez was a master of detail but that wonderful talent of making full use of the comic page is displayed here. There are some time travel scenes with Kang that are as trippy as a ‘70s Marvel book should be. It’s not just the flashy composition either, there’s real good examples of fluidity and motion in here. Perez has now since proven himself to be the best artist to ever work on the Avengers and it’s a joy to see where that legacy started with.
It’s wonderful to think there was a time where this story was able to be created this way. Something that’s both very smart and very silly. This is the kind of stuff that reminds me of why I stick with this mad genre. It’s book like these where it is at its maddest.
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