While the super-hero genre has always had a heavy crossover with elements of the soap-opera genre, Noble Causes is one of the few comics to really acknowledge and play off those elements. Much like Powers or Astro City, the super-powers are secondary, a trapping around the real story, which is all about the over-the-top melodrama surrounding relationships, media scrutiny and the conflict that comes out of that kind of pressure. Family Secrets is a new mini-series, as the Noble Causes series converts to a series of mini-series, and Faerber creates a nice balancing act between making it accessible to new readers and making old readers have to start over with the series and forget everything they've already read.
Faerber has created a cast of interesting characters for this series that maps onto well-known super-hero figures in some respects, using that as a character shortcut, but generally is based on Faerber's own ideas. You can get a sense of the Fantastic Four in the family aspect of the book and the family patriarch Doc Noble, but you usually won't find Reed drunk in his lab after his robotic creation tried to murder the whole family. Rusty has the same hot temper as the Human Torch, but the Human Torch isn't married to a philandering sexpot a la Joan Collins or stuck in a robotic body. In other words, though these characters may share surface similarities in powers to familiar characters, Faerber isn't pulling a "Supreme" here, telling super-hero stories with DC and Marvel trademarks with the serial numbers filed off.
The framing device of Liz Donnelly-Noble on a talk show works very well to introduce the characters, but it also serves as a culmination of Liz's outsider role in the first mini-series. And while the relationships of the characters are made very clear to the new reader throughout this issue, they have different resonance for those of us who already know these characters and some of the recent history they've shared. The title also indicates one of the most interesting things about this arc, a couple of big secrets revolving around Zephyr's baby and Frost's parentage which will hopefully be resolved over the course of the mini-series.
As is traditional for Noble Causes, this story features two pairs of artists, one on the lead story and the second on the backup tale. The styles are fairly similar, and both are pretty solid. John Wycough's inks make Ian Richardson's pencils blend smoothly with the art performance that Pat Gleason brought to the book, and while the art has definitely changed, it's not a jarring shift. The same strengths of character design and storytelling are there, and I was particularly happy with some of the work that Richardson put into the backgrounds, such as Gaia's garden or the Doc's lab. On backup, Meyers and Hacker deliver some work that reminds me of J. Scott Campbell's work, and it's perfect for the tone of the backup story, which presents Celeste at her most sexy (or slutty if you're feeling less generous) and Frost as his bad boy best.
Noble Causes: Family Secrets is a step up for a series that was already pretty damn good, with better paper quality, a monthly frequency and some very intriguing plot developments. If you haven't been reading yet, now is as good a time as any to jump onboard, and if you have been reading, you'll be pleased to see that the quality of the series continues to climb.
