Monday, September 09, 2024

Escape Company Events Via Space Travel

In any other fictional universe, that might seem strange.

Cannonball Run is the volume collecting the second half of Al Ewing's U.S.Avengers, where Sunspot agrees to make A.I.M. an officially sanctioned entity for the government.

Unfortunately, the first 3 issues of the tpb are Secret Empire tie-ins, as the group is brought down from within as HYDRA Cap uses all the intel Sunspot so helpfully provided to take the team down. The current Red Hulk - a deliberate dollar store version of Thunderbolt Ross - is being controlled by nanites injected under the promise they'd help him use his "Hulk plug-in" for more than an hour at a pop. The current Iron Patriot - Dr. Toni Ho, genius daughter of the doctor who saved Stark's life all those years ago - ends up in a holding cell with Sunspot, who's barely coherent after being shot in the head. Turns out people who work for AIM don't want to work for the government. Go figure. He activated his mutant power to survive, but he's got that "M-pox" from the Terrigen cloud, so using his powers is killing him.

Those three issues are split between Toni's attempts to MacGuyver a way to get herself and Sunspot out of prison, and Squirrel Girl and Enigma working with a hodgepodge of other heroes in Paris to fight the HYDRA forces stationed there. It puts a spotlight on Toni's reasons for what she does and why, and her deciding that making weaponry, even non-lethal weaponry, isn't a good use of her talents, or a healthy one.

The Squirrel Girl and Enigma thread is the pretty standard, "fascists aren't as strong as they think, their efforts to crush resistance only breeds more, and when push comes to shove, they're gutless cowards." Which is fine, Ewing and Paco Medina bring in a hodgepodge of Euro-heroes - actually, they may have created a few of these, I'm not sure about Outlaw, the non-lethal Punisher, or Guillotine, the lady with a bloodthirsty cursed sword - but there's nothing to it that says much of significance about the core cast members.

Medina's work is pretty much how I remember it from Daniel Way's Deadpool run, allowing for some honing of his style over the subsequent 6+ years. The lines are steadier, and everything's less busy. He toned down some of the excess in character proportions, but to be fair, he was drawing a Deadpool book. Unrealistic proportions were to be expected, especially when factoring in the "hallucination" shtick Way used. That's not an issue here, so Medina keeps it straightforward and easy to follow.

The other three issues - drawn by Paco Diaz - see the team dealing with the fallout from Secret Empire, but mostly rescuing Cannonball, who ended up floating in space at some point. He was sold into slavery, and ended up on that Skrull planet from the Lee/Kirby FF where everyone looked and talked like gangsters. Except now they all mimic "Richie Redwood" and his pals. Meaning Sam Guthrie's hanging out with a bunch of Archie cosplayers.

The HYDRA prison sounds preferable.

This whole thing really seems to be Ewing talking about the people whose concept of being a fan of something locks it into a particular state, and only that state, forever. The Skrull playing Richie only wants to act out the status quo of the earliest transmissions they received. When his brother (playing the Jughead knockoff, Bugface Brown) came back from an outer space jaunt with decades of new stuff, introducing all sorts of new characters and updated ideas, Richie threw everyone in favor of that into prison.

The sheer goofiness of the whole thing is almost enough to carry it, but issue 10 also has a conversation between Sunspot and a senator who says he'll be the new liaison for Roberto's group. The Senator insists Sunspot throw out all the people he currently has as being not good enough or "diversity hires." OK, yeah, we get it, thank you. The time for beating horses to death was when half the team was in France, where they might serve as sustenance.

Diaz, like Medina, is a pretty solid artist. Able to draw make-believe Americana, alien super-tech and gangsters and make it all look like it belongs on the same page. He makes all the Archie knock-offs similar enough you can tell who they're meant to be (assuming you know Archie characters), but different enough to not just be palette swaps.

He does, however, have a little trouble with faces. Not so much if they're glaring or neutral, but shock or surprised characters kind of fall in the uncanny valley. Toni's face looks more like someone badly playacting at surprise than actual surprise, and I'm pretty sure that wasn't the intent. It seemed more noticeable with Tony, Squirrel Girl or Enigma, but I'm not sure why. The shape of their faces, maybe.

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