Post by Meriades Rai on May 16, 2016 6:40:29 GMT -5
IMPERIAL # 1 by Anthony Crute
Always a joy to read a new series steeped in Marvel mythology but featuring characters who don't often (or ever, in this case) get their moment in the spotlight. I wasn't a regular reader of the X-Men back in the 80s, so all I knew of the Imperial Guard were the quarter-page bios afforded to each of the many, many, many characters in the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, and finding the vast majority of them to be obscurely awesome.
The names here are therefore familiar - Starbolt, Oracle, Fang, Nightshade, etc - but without the helpful info contained in the series Gatefold I would have been a little lost. On the one hand it would have been nice to have every character fleshed out more thoroughly in the opening issue, but on the other hand - and I know this from experience - it can be troublesome to bloat an issue #1 with too much character introduction. I think Anthony achieved a decent balance here, but I don't think it's any coincidence that the stand-out characters here were Izzy and Oracle, who had by far the most screen-time. Hopefully the other characters, especially Nightshade and the intriguing Manta, will get more solo play as the series progresses.
I definitely applaud Anthony's approach to Izzy. Her character was poorly crafted in Hickman's Avengers, I feel (personally I struggled with a lot of that series, but mostly with Hickman's throwing new characters straight into the mix without much process), but here Anthony really brings her to life. I also enjoyed the classic space opera style opening, but there's one small criticism associated with this...
So, there's something about Doctor Who which really grinds my gears: here's a man with a special craft that can transport him to any point in time and space, and yet he routinely ignores Ancient Greece, and the moons of Neptune, and the distant reaches of the Andromeda galaxy, and instead indulges his predilection for chatting up and abducting chavy teenage girls from 2010-era London. Obviously this is a narrative dictated by real life BBC budget costs, but prose fiction shouldn't have that worry. I was therefore a little disappointed that this new series starring a band of space-faring alien adventurers very quickly became rooted on Earth; I was kinda hoping to see alien worlds, and big Star Wars-esque space battles and the like. However, it's only issue #1, and there's plenty of time yet. I just hope that after the series settles in and we've met the characters that the stories will start to play out on a more unique stage.
That isn't to say there's nothing to be had from this story itself, because it's a blast seeing how these extraterrestrials start to interact with the foreign culture of Earth, and I'm sure there's some excellent fun to come!