The scope expands a bit more
Creative Staff:
Story: Peter David
Art: Will Sliney
What They Say:
Secret Wars continues as the Avengers of the year 2099 come face to face with a tremendous beast who’s no stranger to the team! Who could it be? We’ll give you a hint – you won’t like him when he’s angry.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The opening installment of this series was one that certainly dropped us into the middle of things. While there were familiar elements from previous incarnations, mostly in design, we essentially got a whole new set of characters, mission and background to adjust to. That keeps you from really connecting with the characters quickly, since they’re essentially all unknowns outside of Miguel, but with some well placed dialogue and a few actions, you can suss out most of who they are and hope for details, depending on the overall fate of this series, as time goes on. With the introductions out of the way, the series is now looking to expand its scope a bit and add a little more fun to the mix with new characters arriving.
The catalyst for events here is an assassination attempt on Captain America while she sleeps in her Roberta form, unaware of who she is. When The Specialist arrives in the middle of the night to take her out, there’s interference from her husband, who is an Alchemax agent himself, but Roberta switches personalities with ease and deals with the problem while trying to keep Roberta from figuring out what’s going on. Considering how it unfolds, you basically get the clue that Roberta is in a whole lot of denial or has a huge wall up in her mind that lets her not remember any of this. Because of the attack, that eventually puts Alchemax on the case of figuring out who authorized the job and finding out more from there. Conveniently enough, The Specialist had a business card on him that could be the employer.
That in turn eventually takes us to within the city to go after the man whose name is on the card. There some fun little character material beforehand that clues us in a bit more on Hawkeye, Black Widow and Hercules a bit, but it’s hard to get too invested just yet without knowing the series run length. But we do get some fun little nods towards who they are. When they go after the man named Hargood though, things take a delicious turn as John Eisenhart is there before them with questions of his own, and some violence to get out. It’s amusing to see the Avengers trying to brush him away so they can deal with Hargood, only to have Eisenhart turn into the Hulk. And then be joined not long after by the Defenders (2099), which includes the familiar Doctor Strange we saw in Spider-Man 2099 as well as the Silver Surfer. Suffice to say, curiosity seriously piqued.
In Summary:
Secret Wars 2099 continues to be a guilty little pleasure that I hope finds some life beyond the event itself, even if it’s a full on fresh relaunch from scratch. This is a fun timeline to do things in and this issue has a lot of fun in the way we get the characters’ layers being peeled back and seeing more of what kind of team this Miguel has put together under Alchemax. Bringing in the Defenders certainly takes me back many years to the original series and how much fun I had with that during the end of its run, so there’s a lot of pleasure in seeing this here. I’m really curious to see just how far this book will go and what it wants to accomplish, so I’m definitely all in and looking at the bigger picture aspect of it.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Marvel Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: June 10th, 2015
MSRP: $3.99
