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AVENGERS: CELESTIAL QUEST #1
"I Die Unknown!"
Neutral (4/10)
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Marvel Comics
Writer: Steve Englehart
Pencils: Jorge Santamaria
Inks: Scott Hanna
Colors: Hi-Fi
Letters: Sharpefont & PT
Editor: Tom Brevoort
Price: $2.50 US/$3.75 CAN |
I've never much cared for the Celestial Madonna story or any of its players. Moondragon, Swordsman, Mantis, I could take or leave any of them. This series is aimed pretty much directly at those who don't share those sensibilities, as it ties up the long-running tale of the Celestial Madonna, begun in Englehart's run on Avengers and continued in part of his run on West Coast Avengers. Mostly, I was bored silly.
There's a lot of big mystery going on here, as we see various incarnations of Mantis battling Thanos, and the Avengers becoming involved toward the end. Include a surprise guest star who was cast off from Squadron Supreme in the early days of Busiek's run and you've got a book that requires a pretty intensive experience with Avengers continuity to really get into. I consider
myself fairly up on these things, and I didn't fully understand what was going
on. Englehart nods toward the new reader by including Silverclaw as a character
to whom the others can explain things, but a lot of the necessary explanation
isn't offered up.
Of course, I get the gist, which is that
Thanos is going around killing various incarnations of Mantis before she can
reform into one powerful being. What I don't get is why he's doing it or what
the consequences are if he succeeds or fails. And while I'm all for a little
mystery, it seems that conveying the basic idea that what is going on matters to
the reader is job one for a new series.
On the art side, at least, the book is
quite fun. Jorge Santamaria, along with veteran inker Scott Hanna, turns in some
truly impressive work with a variety of different settings, and although I found
some of his forms a little on the skinny side, I think he is an impressive
storyteller.
This is a book for fans of Englehart's writing and his stories from the Avengers. I am
definitely not in that camp. I find Englehart's dialogue to be along the lines
of Stan Lee or Roy Thomas, fairly clunky and enthusiastically melodramatic, and
while I have enjoyed some of his work previously, the characters and plots that
he's dealing with here are not at all interesting to me, or, I'll wager, to many
modern super-hero fans.
Email Randy Lander comments about this review. |
