Ms. Marvel Annual #1

Posted by Jeb on September 16, 2008

(Marvel)

I know there are comics fans who regard Brian Reed as a video-game guy that sucked up to Brian Bendis and rode his coattails to a gig with Marvel; the fact that many of his high-profile comics have been co-written with Bendis doesn’t help that impression.

For his first solo outing, with character renewal the order of the day at Marvel, Reed was given a new Ms. Marvel monthly book (a good year or so before Bendis incorporated her into the Mighty Avengers), and handed the tricky task of trying to find some reason for her to exist. That’s only slightly a joke-while Marvel’s managed to create some high-profile female characters in teams like the Fantastic Four, Avengers, and X-Men, they’ve never really made a go of having a superheroine succeed in her own title over the long term (not that things are all that much different at DC: Catwoman’s been cancelled again, Supergirl gets rebooted/restarted every few years, no one’s reading Manhunter, and there was a time when only fear of losing the copyright kept DC publishing an ongoing Wonder Woman title). His job was complicated by the work of his mentor: the version of Carol Danvers that appeared in Bendis’ Alias was so strong (and so impossible to reproduce in the all-ages Marvel Universe) that Reed would always be operating in that shadow: trying to reconcile the capable and independent survivor that Bendis had written with the silky-maned blonde in the hooker outfit that was bursting out of Frank Cho’s covers.

Colorful superhero fun, thoughtful explorations of modern female celebrity, and half-naked babes aren’t the easiest combination to pull off, and Reed’s Ms. Marvel series has sometimes felt as though he’s trying to cram a decade’s worth of character development into a few story arcs, resulting in some jarring changes of tone (I’d mention the negative impact of several artist changes, but it’s more and more clear that’s something we’re just going to have to live with from the Big 2). Still, he’s been willing to take chances, and try and make Carol flawed enough to be realistic; in fact, he’s sometimes pushed her all the way to unlikable, a chancy move that seems to have paid off (well, artistically-the book’s hardly a top seller).

Of course, it’s possible that we’re detecting Bendis’ hand there, too, since he’s shaped Carol’s characterization in Mighty Avengers in the same direction, but either way, I think it works: female superheroines are too often located on the extreme of either bitch or madonna. Ms. Marvel, on the other hand, comes off as a working professional, projecting the doubts and difficulties that come with leadership-and, in particular, leadership at the service of an unpopular regime (true, many in the Marvel U supported the Superhero Registration Act, but opposition to it is clearly at the heart of a lot of current Marvel storytelling).I’m not saying that Carol’s literally a stand-in for American soldiers fighting an unpopular war, but in the tenor of the times, that reading’s not as far off as it might seem.

Given that, I was surprised that this Annual, rather than continuing to explore those aspects of Ms. Marvel, is basically an old-fashioned issue of Marvel Team-Up. Doubtless the inclusion of Spider-Man is designed to bring more attention to Ms. Marvel’s series, but the fact is, Peter’s clearly the protagonist in the story, with Carol playing straight woman to Spider-Man in what is nominally her book, snapping and snarling at his jokes like a blond, airborne J. Jonah Jameson.

The story takes place in between Civil War and Secret Invasion. Pete’s swinging around, worrying about running errands for Aunt May and laundering his costume, when he’s smacked out of the air by Ms. Marvel (or, as he calls her, “the leader of the dorky Avengers”), ready to run him in as an unregistered superhero. Well, of course, conflict ensues, heroes fight, a greater menace emerges, they put aside their differencesÃ¢â‚¬Â¦

Yeah, there’s a by-the-numbers quality to it, but Reed’s Spider-Man is completely engaging and funny, in a way that has only recently returned to being the standard at the House of Ideas (Ms. Marvel: “Don’t you ever shut up?” Spidey: “You know, it is really weird how often I get asked that question.”). And given that she’s almost a guest star in her own Annual, Reed lets Carol hold her own: her conviction that she’s on the right side of Registration never falters, even when she and Peter team up. The book is dialogue-heavy, in the mode of classic Marvel, but it’s mostly character stuff (and good jokes!), not sloggy exposition, so it never feels intrusive.

I also like the fact that Carol’s exasperation and short temper aren’t simply shorthand for “irrational female,” but grounded in Reed’s development of her character as a woman working through the difficulties of breaking the superhero version of the glass ceiling. And the baddies are a fairly clever construction.

This is also a story that points up just what Marvel was hoping to achieve with the reset button of One More Day: Spidey’s halfway-ironic flirting with Carol is highly entertaining (and fuels a great joke that ends the book), but would have felt out of place if he were still married (not an endorsement of reboots, by the way: just an observation of how Marvel’s putting this one to work).

Artist Mark A. Robinson’s style is a little more angular-cartoony than I generally enjoy, with every facial expression an extreme, and it’s sometimes hard to tell just how old he thinks Carol is. But he does Spidey in motion with much of the flair of Romita or Bagley, and there’s super-powered mayhem aplenty that he manages to keep fresh and fun. And one big damn robot.

Those who believe that a return to kid-friendly done-in-one stories is the solution to increasing comics readership need to take a close look at a book like this one. On the one hand, it serves as a pleasant, entertaining change of pace. On the other, apart from Peter’s bon mots, and the splashy action scenes, it’s certainly not going to stick with a reader in the way that the ongoing plotting and intrigue of, say, Daredevil or Captain America can. Personally, I think the industry needs to maintain balance between the two, but I’ll agree that stories like this one to tend to be in the minority.

This book would be very easy to over-praise, particularly with everyone today complaining about “event fatigue” (while they drive Secret Invasion to the top of the charts); it hasn’t much in the way of what one would call gravitas. But it is a whole lot of fun, and while I tend to be suspicious of those fans who seem to think that “fun” has to be synonymous with “inconsequential,” this really is a book that any fan of superhero comics is likely to enjoy to one degree or another.

Ms. Marvel Annual #1

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Filed Under: Rack Raids

Tags: 3.5/5, marvel, Ms. Marvel, superhero

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