"More Rigged Than a Duke Home Game", in Beyond! #4, by Dwayne McDuffie (writer), Scott Kolins (artist), Paul Mounts (colorist), Dave Lanphear (letterer)
Beyond! came out in late 2006, probably during the stretch where Steve McNiven fell way the fuck behind on Civil War. I don't think that has anything to do with this, just a bit of temporal context. It has to have wrapped up before McDuffie took over for JMS as writer of Fantastic Four, since McDuffie pulls a plot element from this for one of his stories there.
A disparate group of characters - Medusa, Spider-Man, the Wasp, Hank Pym, Firebird, the Hood, Gravity, the Mac Gargan Venom, and one of Kraven's kids - are lured to a mysterious spacecraft landing in Central Park. Which then carries them to a distant planet where a mysterious voice tells them they'll receive their heart's desires if they triumph over their enemies.
Sounds familiar, right? But things aren't what they seem, as they aren't the first, or even the second bunch to be brought here. Plus, one of them is an imposter, and no I don't mean the Hood impersonating a badass.
McDuffie's able to give every character a chance to show how they can be cool or even just human. He draws some good stuff out of the old history some of the characters have (Kraven and Spider-Man for one, Pym and Firebird for another). The reveal of the true mastermind seemed clever and in keeping with the character, at least based on my understanding of him.
Kolins' art has a kind of roughness to it that I don't exactly love, but it's effective. He can handle the scenes of people talking, the parts where tensions are running high and people are starting to snap at each other, and he can handle the fight scenes. He knows when to pull back for a sense of scale or scope, and when to zoom in on someone under strain. I don't think I've ever seen the outfit he gave Medusa before or since, but it was pretty cool.
You can probably find Beyond! pretty cheaply in trade or single issues, and I'd say it's worth a look if you enjoy Dwayne McDuffie's work or stories about random collections of characters having to work together somehow.
2 comments:
I remember almost nothing about Beyond! -- aside from there being a twist about the Beyonder's true identity -- but I do remember enjoying it. It was much better than one might expect from one of Marvel's random miniseries.
Yeah, I think I bought it because a bunch of people on the comic blogs were talking it up when it came out as single issues, so I grabbed the trade, and really was entertained.
It's not trying to reinvent the wheel on a bunch of characters, doesn't have to tie-in with any big event. It just gets to be a story, basically.
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