Not Much of a Chase If It Never Goes Anywhere

I feel like I've seen this origin story somewhere before.This guy doesn't scream other people's names as much. Kind of strange since everyone else in this thing love to shout people's names.

So I did end up buying the Battle Chasers Anthology that came out last fall. I'm old enough to remember when Joe Madureira's original series was the "it" thing in the independent publishing circles. It didn't mean much to me, because I mostly missed his run on X-Men that made him a big name. Of course, then Madureira couldn't be arsed to actually get any issues out in a timely fashion and everyone eventually moved on.

Reading this for the first time, what strikes me is just how little progress into the story they made. Assuming the various main characters are supposed to form a team, they haven't assembled themselves. They were most of the way there, but Monika's, the thief with the ludicrous chest, storyline had just curved back in the direction of the others.

It feels like there was potential in the setting and the story, but that may just be because we didn't get into anything far enough to see what Madureira and Munier Sharrieff had planned. There's some vague stuff about the amount of magic declining. There's a swordsman, Garrison, that had sworn off violence for his wife, who is deceased, and he's become a drunk. He's forced back into action, but he's clearly dealing with some stuff. The king of a kingdom is up to something. He acts so sinister I half expect they were just messing with our expectations, and that he's actually a very caring monarch. Probably not.

You got the evil guy in the mask, August, who is up to something. Revenge, for one, but probably bigger than that. The little girl character, Gully, inherited her father's super-strength gloves, but no one knows where the guy is, and near the end of the collection, we find out the great hero may not have been such a swell guy after all. He's actually a deadbeat dad. Oh, and he sold children into slavery.

Considering what happened to his firstborn when he tried to use the gloves, I wonder if he left them behind because he couldn't use them any longer. A real "Thor's not worthy," kind of thing. But we'll never know.

I would say Madureira's style gets smoother, more refined over time, but that might just the increasing number of inkers that get hauled into service as things go along. Less cross-hatching, more thick, heavy inks and shadows. Faces are more rounded and smooth, just generally less busy in general, at least with the human characters.

It's still recognizably manga-influenced (there's one bad guy whose body type strongly reminds me of Sagat from Street Fighter, and the swirling tattoo designs are reminiscent of Dhalsim). Giant swords, big mechs, monsters with rippling musculature, improbable proportions. There's a lot of energy and motion in his work, sometimes too much. There's a big fight in a cemetery with some sort giant monster made of tar and teeth that's hard to follow, especially when they keep hinting towards something going on with Garrison's sword.

Anyway, the book's an artifact of a different era, and it was kind of interesting to see the book that was such a big deal once upon a time.