Taking The Bullet: Secret Avengers #21.1 Review

In the world of stand-up comedy, one of the biggest nightmares you can have as a comic is for a legend of the medium to show up unannounced to do a guest spot. Entertaining people on your own merits is hard enough without suddenly discovering that one of the best in the business has shown up… and now you have to follow them. It leads some acts to tweak around their own styles to better match the person they have to go up after. It can fuck your own rythyms and take you off your game.

In Secret Avengers #21.1, writer Rick Remender is taking over from Warren Ellis’s title-redefining four-issue run. And while it’s too early to really tell, it feels like Remender might have fallen into that old comedy trap.

Please don’t misunderstand me; this is not a bad book. And it doesn’t feel like any kind of slavish imitation, just that it was influenced and steered by the fact that Remender is being forced to follow a modern legend. When you see lines like, “When you see your yankee doodle deity in his chicken-fried heaven — tell him you died molesting the world!” come out of the mouths of characters not written by Ellis, I can’t help but picture some pimply-faced yeoman comic taking the mike and saying, “Jeff Foxworthy, everyone! Hey, you know when you might be a redneck?”

This issue has Captain America and Hawkeye infiltrating the country of Bagalia – a “Red Light Nation” where the wealthy can fulfill any vice they want. Which is a fine concept, and the type of big cultural idea that Ellis has been exploring since Lazarus Churchyard. However, Remender doesn’t really flesh the whole concept out; I couldn’t see any visible vice other than the availability of liquor and a waitress offering to spit in your drink for a hundred bucks, thus making the place $100 and a plane ticket more expensive than even a midrange shithole in Boston’s South End.

Cap and Hawkeye are in town to rescue a United States Senator marked for assassination, only – surprise! – the senator’s an exploding Life Model Decoy set as a trap for the boys. And – surprise again! – Cap knew it was a trap; he brought Hawkeye into the situation to see if he displayed leadership qualities! Because apparently ol’ Hawk forgot to write, “Leader: West Coast Avengers, 1986 – 1993” on his resume! Then people get captured, villains expose themselves (No, not that way, Red Light Nation or no), trick arrows get shot, heroes save the day.

I poke fun, and in fact, this book does have its weaknesses. But I’m trying to keep in mind that this book has a few very specific tasks it needs to accomplish. First, as a Point One issue, it needs to serve as an entry point for readers unfamiliar with the book, or even unfamiliar with comics. Despite ignoring a bunch of continuity, the Hawkeye test plot points do an effective job telling you who the character is; it even explains his new, Avengers movie costume for lapsed readers.

The book also needs to serve as a bridge between Ellis’s run of frenetic, one-and-done issues and what seems like will be more of a decompressed, long-form set of storylines; and for good or ill, it accomplishes that, partially by introducing a new set of villains and allowing them to remain at-large for future stories… but unfortunately it also does that by aping Ellis’s writing tone, which really sticks out for this old readers and made it hard to become fully immersed in the book. To go back to the well: a comic could do the best Steven Wright impression in the world, but it’s gonna be damn hard to watch if you do it after a performance by Steven Wright.

The art by Patrick Zircher is good, but honestly, it’s challenging. His figures are realistic as superhero art goes – jacked, but not 90s-style unrealistically so. His facial expressions are generally clear, although in a book starring a couple of jut-jawed, stoic, manly-men heroes, he tends toward repeating grim-faced, purse-lipped intense face a lot. His action is dynamic, and the bodies in combat or even moving across the rooftops are cool-looking… but there are times where his storytelling is more difficult to follow than it needs to be. There’s a scene where Cap throws his shield… but there is absolutely no visual cue as to where he threw it and what he threw it at for another two panels, and even there it’s shown tiny and partially obscured at the top right. There are a few occasions in this book where Zircher shows something happening, but it’s obscured and requires going back and forth across the page to figure it out. The information’s all there, but it can be hard to figure out, and it sometimes slows you down while you try to follow it.

This isn’t a bad comic by any stretch of the imagination, but it almost feels like a chore that Remender had to do before he could go full-swing into his own interpretation of the book. On that level, it’s a success – the book has enough of a feel of the Ellis run to maintain some consistency while laying the groundwork for a new team and form of storytelling different from Ellis. But by aping some of Ellis’s conventions while performing the rote tasks required from a Point One issue, it all feels like watching the green open-miker that comedy clubs throw up between a guest spot by Chris Rock and whoever the local headliner is to cool the crowd off from the legend enough to appreciate the rest of the show.

If I were you, I’d treat this issue as a chance for a bathroom break and come back for #22 to enjoy the rest of the show.