In 2015, when Marvel canceled all their ongoing titles to play along with Hickman destroying the universe in service of his Secret Wars, the need for product was filled by a bunch of mini-series, allegedly set on different pieces of the patchwork world Doom cobbled together from what survived the Beyonders' attempts to destroy the multiverse. I bought 3 of those mini-series. Mrs. Deadpool and Her Howling Commandos is long since excised from my collection. The second book we'll get to next month. The third, is this thing.
I never really got into the Marvel Zombies fad. Maybe the premise just felt too much like a '90s What If? blown out to increasingly bloated proportions, what with multiple mini-series going back to the same well. Obviously I'm not entirely immune to a "everybody dies" story, just look at last week's entry, but it's rarely my favorite thing. But Spurrier had written something I liked previously, and Kev Walker drew the hell out of Avengers Arena, and I liked Elsa Bloodstone (and my list of books was dwindling), so here we are.
And the zombies are not really the focus. One does manage to teleport Elsa far away from her post along "The Shield", a giant wall I think Doom made out of Ben Grimm to hold back the section of zombie world he incorporated, but it's mostly Elsa wandering the wilderness with a peculiar child that she wants to protect for reasons she can't explain. All the while something else is tracking them. There are still other zombies, an entire gang of them led by a Mystique, and they retain their intelligence because they keep a Deadpool tied up and take out a little of his brain to feed on everyday via, as Wade puts it, "le Spork."
But as with the best zombie stories, they're really there to give the non-zombie characters a way to show their true selves. Spurrier and Walker keep showing us flashbacks of this Elsa's upbringing with her demanding bastard of a father. Who insists on no weakness, and goes so far as to expose his wife to a horror that shreds her sanity so he can have her taken away, because she was interfering in his training of Elsa. So Elsa is constantly confronted with the notion of how her father would deal with this frightened, secretive child with no survival training or combat instincts, who for some reason doesn't turn after being bitten. And then she keeps going against that training, right up to the point they encounter something much worse than a zombie.
Walker mostly gets to draw various Marvel characters in various states of physical decay, and his does it very nicely. When he's not drawing that, it's mostly the flashbacks of Ulysses Bloodstone being an emotionally constipated ass towards a very young Elsa, who looks suitably frightened or sad. It makes a nice contrast from her as an adult, where she's mostly glowering with gritted teeth or looking irritated while stomping some zombie's skull to a pulp and cursing about the annoyance of the whole situation. Which also serves to contrast her from her father. Even after all the training, she still refuses to just accept the harsh realities of the life she's stuck in and bear it stoically. Is constant sarcasm and cynicism a better approach? Eh, probably not.
And with that, we bid farewell to Many Months of Marvel.
No comments:
Post a Comment