I don’t know who recommed Secret Warriors to me as an actually readable Marvel comic, but whoever did wants shooting. Just spend an hour reading through the first seventeen issues, all that’s been published so far and it got everything I hate in modern superhero comics. It’s all climax and no buildup, where every issue has to be important, every page a revelation, every panel a beat. At the same time, so much of the importance of what we’re seeing on the pages is not in the issues themselves, but derived from other titles and crossovers, especially in the first six issues, fitting in with that whole Dark Reign event. The art doesn’t help, because while the artist Stefano Caselli is not bad, more times than not you have to guess at who that shocking character at the end of yet another Big Reveal was actually meant to be. The usual “realistic” muddy computer colouring doesn’t help either.

I don’t really want to talk about the overall plot of the series and how develops, because that’s not really the issue here. What I found annoying is the storytelling rather than the story. So let me try to make it clear what I object to, by looking in detail at Secret Warriors #1. The first thing is that this is a properly modern superhero comic: no thought balloons, almost no sound effects (three blam, blam, blams in) , no speed or action lines and captions used like in the movies: establishing a place and time for a new scene, as well as to represent the first person narration by one of the characters, which comes and goes according to whether or not she is in a scene. Of these three I miss the sound effects and speedlines the most, as without them the action seems stilted.

Moving on, this issue has two covers, the normal one and a variant cover showing three characters not appearing int he comic and whose significance I only found out by looking at Wikipedia. Which is the second problem with this series, in that it comes out of an earlier crossover event, with the backstory to these characters told there, but never refered to here. This is annoying in the extreme. I’m sure that if you’re a Marvel zombie you know who all those people are, but I didn’t, I just want to be able to read a comic without having to read a zillion more just to keep up with who the players are.

Now we come to the major problem with the issue and the series. The issues starts with two people talking at what looks like some oil refinery in Texas, shots sound and they and several other people start whaling on Hydra agents, after which another set of armoured villains drop down out of the sky and starts attacking everybody. The first set of people, who as it turns out are Fury’s rookie superhero agents, flee the scene back to their secret base to be reamed out by Fury himself for exposing themselves needlessly. We stick with our narrator as she and Fury look in at a twelve year old boy playing computer games, who’s apparantly a god. Then she asks Nick what’s bothering him and we get a flashback sequence of him breaking into an ex-SHIELD computer centre, as well as a chat with the US president, which ends with Fury showing exactly what he found. Cue various database files ending the issue.

This is actually one of the better issues in the series for actually connecting the various scenes into a coherent whole, but it still reads like a series of independent scenes, not a story. We start in the middle of a story and end there, but there’s no sense of a journey, just one thing happening and then another. The series as a whole sofar reads as if somebody took all the kewl scenes from some summer blockbuster and didn’t bother filling in the rest of the movie.

Then we come to the art. The splashpage below is from the first issue and can serve as an example.

Can you tell easily what’s going on here? How you should read it? Follow the caption boxes, which have nothing much to do with the action on the page? Or read it from bottom left to top right or vice versa? The composition makes no sense, there are no natural lines for your eye to follow the action and the result is a mess. It doesn’t even look that cool. Most of the rest of the issue has the obligatory widescreen, narrow panels of modern superhero comics, mixed with inset vertical panels closing up on a face or an action. Again, no sense that much thought has gone in laying out the pages to help the story.

So, not impressed with Secret Warriors. If I can sum it up, it feels as if a whole layer of storytelling has gone missing in a misguided attempt to make a comic look more like a movie.