Marvel's late-1990s/early-2000s Marvel Knights imprint is probably best known for Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's 12-issue Punisher maxi-series, or the Christopher Priest/Mark Texiera Black Panther book (the longest running of the bunch.) There was also the Daredevil revival by Kevin Smith and Joe Quesada, and Inhumans, by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee. I got back into comics a bit late for most of those, but I did arrive in time for the last few issues of Chuck Dixon and Eduardo Barreto's street-level heroes team book.
The basic set-up is that Daredevil has once again decided Frank Castle Must Be Stopped. (No mention is made of the humiliating beatdown Castle gave him in issue 3 of Ennis' mini-series.) Since he hasn't had any luck doing that solo, DD decides to enlist some other friends and allies for the job. He encounters the Black Widow during a whole thing where Ulik the Rock Troll has come to Midgard looking for a valuable artifact. Natasha had met Dagger, who's looking for Cloak, during that. Dagger has no place to go, so she becomes a bit of a younger sister to the Black Widow.
It's got to be a measure of when the book was written that Black Widow by herself isn't enough to deal with the Punisher. I feel like these days she'd be written as taking him down in her sleep.
Shang-Chi was also defending a subway car full of people from Ulik's minions, and he's not happy about some of the crime in the area, so she's in. After that, the thing almost takes on a life of its own. Moon Knight hears about it and asks to not only join, but offers to bankroll them. With a headquarters and everything. Spector is not written anywhere near as dangerous or competent as he is these days, either. He takes a lot of damage, but less in the sense of "holy crap, we can't stop this guy." More, "this guy is overmatched." Zaran the Weapons Master shows up, working for Shang-Chi's unnamed dad and pretty well takes Moon Knight apart.
Oh, and Moon Knight hired Luke Cage, back rocking the yellow shirt and tiara.
The joke of the thing is, the group barely even sees the Punisher. Frank gets wind of the idea early on and tries to use his various stoolies to feed the team info so they'll take out possible roadblocks for him. They spend a couple of issues trapped inside Cloak's world while Dagger tries to reach him (with an assist from Dr. Strange.) They have a throwdown with Tombstone (colored more pink-tinged than I've ever seen) and a group of super-powered leg-breakers he hired. Black Widow gets targeted by someone using a Nick Fury LMD. Yes, that old bit. Shang's eternal problems with his dad derail the team before it can really get going.
Barreto draws 14 of the 15 issues, the exception being issue 14. Klaus Janson inks the first 6 issues. Concluding with, of all things, a Maximum Security tie-in that's all about Frank Castle fight some giant insectile alien in a crackhouse full of mind-controlled addicts. I've often heard that Klaus Janson inked book just looks like Janson's art, regardless of the penciler. And while that's mostly been my impression, Barreto is somehow the exception. The linework is definitely heavier, and with more cross-hatching than in other comics I've read Barreto drew, but not as heavy as other Janson-inked titles, and it's not as stiff, either.
I don't know if Janson consciously pulled back, if the preponderance of shadows in the settings made him dial back to avoid the whole thing being too dark, or if it was something else. Barreto's work is in a very superhero style, most of the characters with the idealized physiques and shiny costumes. Blood or violence is shown in outline or alluded to, rather than anything explicit or gory. The setting inside Cloak's dimension is rendered as just New York city under an eternal sunset sky. It's not the sort of bizarre, twisting architecture or swirling nightmares a Ditko, Colan or Mandrake might adopt. It's street-level superheroes, the emphasis on "superheroes" rather than "street-level."
2 comments:
The idea of the Marvel Knights line crossing over with Maximum Security, of all things, baffled me at first, but then I remembered how MK always struggled a bit with an identity crisis.
On one hand it presented itself as a sort of proto-MAX line, but then the first Daredevil arc was a Mysterio story. It was ostensibly for more grounded stories, but then they did a Fantastic Four series. It was sort of continuity light, except the Spider-Man series, which crossed over with the other Spidey books of the time constantly.
It was a very strange line and I'm not sure Marvel ever knew what to do with it.
Yeah, I had to double-check that Priest's Black Panther book was under the MK heading, because it seemed so obviously in the Marvel Universe, with Mephisto and Gyrich and whatnot.
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