S.H.I.E.L.D. #3 – Review

By: Jonathan Hickman (writer), Dustin Weaver (artist), Sonia Oback (colorist)

The Story: The property rates are just gonna plummet after this, aren’t they?

The Review: The pace of release for this series has just gotten into joke territory, hasn’t it?  Two months between issues is simply way too long.  When you take a step back and look at the figures, it means that in one year, the title releases six issues, about the length of a single story arc.  Unless that arc is completely groundbreaking and/or stellar, there is almost no way such a title can expect long term success or pull with its audience.

Unfortunately, this story arc (which basically continues the plot from S.H.I.E.L.D.’s last volume, crazy as it sounds) has been neither groundbreaking nor stellar.  While it certainly boasts a few ostensibly far-reaching, intellectual ideas, they’ve all relied on vagaries and innuendo to promote themselves.  Not to dismiss the title’s concepts entirely, but at the end of the day, it’s just your usual secret society power plays with a dose of sci-fi and philosophy thrown in.

None of that is enough to keep your interest vested in the long, dry periods between issues, especially when Hickman insists on emphasizing the same points over and over: da Vinci and Newton in a war of ideas; Leonid stalling between them; Howard Stark, Nathaniel Richards, and Night Machine hanging around; and Michelangelo taking it all in with a smirk—in the buff.  This has been the status quo for nearly the last year, which is a major problem by any standard.

A comic that chooses to go without text is a very artsy, ambitious conceit, but that means the story has to have such substance that words aren’t necessary.  In this case, it feels more like the substance is so formulaic and straightforward that words would only be redundant.  After all, with a mad Celestial rampaging around the Immortal City, you essentially have a fancier, more cosmically driven Godzilla flick, and we all know how that goes.

For all the craziness that goes on, it only reveals that Celestials, shockingly enough, are a bugger to kill.  Don’t expect to learn anything about what drives the Celestial forward or why it’s after Newton.  Nonsense math started this, and nonsense math (courtesy of Michelangelo) ends it.  As usual, it all has the gloss of high-concept sophistication, but no real meat to chew on, so the story doesn’t go much of anywhere.

S.H.I.E.L.D. #2 – Review

By: Jonathan Hickman (writer), Dustin Weaver (artist), Sonia Oback (colorist)

The Story: Genius white men…and other sorry excuses for the state of the world!

The Review: In ordinary circumstances, S.H.I.E.L.D. would be the kind of title I’d fallen hopelessly in love with by now; it has fresh ideas, remarkable craft, rounded characters, and some gorgeous art.  Instead I find myself surprisingly nonplussed by the series.  I appreciate and respect the kind of story it wants to tell, but it just hasn’t done much to get me invested.

Maybe it’s the highly cerebral nature of the title.  The whole storyline so far, after all, deals with a literal war of ideas, the smartest people in history giving way to violence strictly to defend their principles, which, I suppose, if you’re going to war over anything, it might as well be your dearly held beliefs.  While the ideas at stake (determinism vs. fatalism, hope vs. resignation) do have a certain intellectual appeal, it’s no surprise they do little to capture your heart.

Then, too, the story has proceeded at a horrendously plodding pace.  Forget the fact they labeled this issue #2.  We all know this is really the eighth issue of the series, and considering this title launched June of last year, well—that rate isn’t great, to say the least.  And even had all eight issues been released on time, that doesn’t change the minimal advances the plot has made.

The first time I reviewed S.H.I.E.L.D. (half a year ago, if you can believe it), you had Newton and da Vinci duking it out in the Immortal City, with Leonid standing by.  Now, two chapters later (three, if you count the “infinity” issue), we’ve only just started our way to a resolution.  Hickman has filled the yawning gaps between important moments with a lot of expository, conceptual material, but again, it’s intriguing in an academic sort of way, but hardly engaging.