Secret Avengers #8 – Review

by Nick Spencer (Writer), Luke Ross (Artist), Matthew Wilson (Colorist)

The Story: As Mockingbird tries to assess her situation, the A.I.M organization and its minister continues their operations after the attempt on their leader by S.H.I.E.L.D.

The Review: While many read superhero to follow their favourite characters and how their heroic combat for justice and their life are going, there is no denying that many do the same for certain villains as well. A book is as strong as its lead, of course, but any protagonist need a good antagonist as well or else the conflict thrown in its way would feel a bit pointless or derivative.

It seems that Nick Spencer understands this quite well, as the focus of this issue is set largely on the A.I.M organization, with some of it on Mockingbird also. The writer had shown pieces here and there to show how the antagonistic organisation worked, yet it was always with Andrew Forson being the face of the whole thing. Here, the other ministers are covered as well, showing what they do, how they react and how they see themselves and their roles in A.I.M.

The mixing of general workplace environment vibe to the craziness of super-science and the Marvel universe makes for a rather fun read here, despite the focus on the more villainous aspects of the script. It is in fact the whole focus on the madder aspect, like Taskmaster training his soldiers only to go play table tennis with Mentallo only to be followed by much darker scenes featuring Andrew Forson, Yelena Belova, Graviton and others that make for a weird balance. Showing the readers that even the antagonists have the same problem, like in-office fighting, politics and the ambitions of the persons in power that the protagonists have to deal with.

Secret Avengers #7 – Review

Nick Spencer (Writer), Butch Guice, Steve Epting, Brian Theis, Rick Magyar (Artists), Matthew Wilson (Colorist)

The Story: Maria Hill needs to take control of an operation that has gone too far, one that had been ordained by Daisy Johnson herself.

The Review: Back in the days, I only had a single thought when it came to S.H.I.E.L.D. as an agency in the Marvel universe: pity. When an antagonist needed to be shown as a big menace, S.H.I.E.L.D. was always there to provide token ”good guys” being beaten badly in order to set up a scope for the story itself. Rarely had I seen a series that took that agency as being particularly effective or being the actual source that is able to solve a problem.* Secret Invasion, Civil War, Marvel Boy, Captain America by Brubaker and so forth all portray S.H.I.E.L.D. as either being antagonistic or just plain ineffectual, which does not bode well for an organisation that is supposed to be the prime spy agency and the thing that binds the metahuman community together.

It’s a good thing then that some authors like Jonathan Hickman, Mark Waid and Nick Spencer came along to go a bit further in showing the prime spy agency as being actually useful or at least active in several parts. While the discovery of S.H.I.E.L.D. thanks to the marvel cinematic universe has been a boon to the credibility of the agency, in the comics format, Secret Avengers has been another huge bonus thanks to its direction mixing espionage, politics and super heroics.

This issue, in many ways, is a great example of just why this series can work, even though it has still some rough spots here and there. One of the best aspect, though, is the fact that they show how ”the spying game” is played, which makes for a pretty effective comparison to other superheroes book on the market and those made by Marvel itself. It’s a fun thing to see that despite the high action, the jokes, the big hero moments and all, there are other scenes which shows that they clearly cannot remain the supposed ”good guys” in the eyes of the world if they go en masse and attack a whole island without any backing from the U.N of the government. It was a very neat way that allow the readers to differentiates just how an agency like S.H.I.E.L.D. needs to work if they can get several important backing and so forth.