Marvel Pick Of The Week – September 10, 2014

PICK OF THE WEEK!

Avengers 34.1, by Al Ewing and Dale Keown

Hyperion is a character that has never really grabbed me. He started life in Marvel Comics as the Superman analogue in a Justice League team that used to fight the Avengers, and Superman is a character I have tried so hard to like for thirty years with minimal success. Mark Gruenwald used him in the maxiseries Squadron Supreme, one of the first comics I read that challenged my beliefs about morality and responsibility, but he seemed like a fairly consistent (and thus bland) good guy throughout. He was passionate about what he believed, but he seemed too big and kind to really connect for me. Decades later, J. Michael Straczynski reinvented him as a vaguely sinister government experiment, an interesting concept in a book that never really clearly launched. Hickman brought the current version into the Avengers as the sole survivor of an incursion, rescued by terrorist group AIM from a collapsed space between dimensions, and though the science fiction concept was well-developed, the character lacked warmth or heart. Nick Spencer had a go at humanizing him by having the character bond with a group of alien children, connecting via the shared difficulties finding a community. This helped me sympathize with the character, but I still didn’t especially enjoy reading him.

It came as a shock that a one-shot focused entirely on Hyperion turned out to be my favorite Marvel book this week.

Part of what grabbed me about this book was Al Ewing’s writing, a taut thriller about a British super villain kidnapping a child. Hyperion offers to help law enforcement close the case, and he ends up facing down a powerful technological armament. The suspense builds as well as most crime movies would allow, and what makes this so much better than the average plot is that Al Ewing conceptualizes Hyperion’s limitless power as a type of autism. This is a man who has trouble understanding his own emotions, and though he honestly wants to connect to the family he’s helping, his alien nature limits him to concrete observations like “I heard someone crying” or “I hear the sound of their muscles relaxing.” He even catches himself flying into the atmosphere, offering the cliche that people are the size of ants, and reminding himself that he doesn’t do well with metaphors and needs to be sure that he doesn’t start taking that one literally. With this interpretation of Hyperion, I was genuinely worried about how he’d handled the social demands of talking down an armed kidnapper, and Ewing handled that scene with such beauty and respect that I found myself speaking Hyperion’s concrete but sensitive words aloud.

Thus, Al Ewing takes a character that is usually hindered by the difficulty applying complex emotion, and he builds a story that uses that very disconnect as a talking point to engage the reader. I find myself wanting to read Ewing’s ideas for a Hyperion solo title based on the strength of these twenty-two pages, and my heart breaks again for the market that could not support Ewing’s ongoing Mighty Avengers title past issue 12.

Honorable Mentions:

Death of Wolverine 2, for a perfectly-paced pair of 9-panel grids depicting Wolverine killing the crap out of eight henchmen without ever taking his feet off the floor. Someone please film this.

Ms. Marvel 8, for stamping “Free Wi-Fi” on the body of a murderous super-robot. It’s the ultimate moral dilemma for the Facebook generation. I mean, yes, you want to keep him from smashing all of your friends to a pulp. I get that. But to have the ability to quickly Tweet about it first…?

Hawkeye 20, for bringing this long nightmare of Kate Bishop’s California vacation to a close. Ugh. Kate has managed to shine in several versions of the Young Avengers, and she brightened the Hawkeye book when she appeared with Clint, but Fraction sending her away has only led to a grating melange of modern teenspeak, publishing delays, whiplash changes between artists, a stack of dull supporting characters, and a bizarre loss of ability to do any aspect of the superhero job. As a one-shot, this was cute enough, but as half of the title’s publication for the year, this was a poke in the eye to the fans who try to love either gender of Hawkeye. Come back to New York, Kate. We miss you.

Captain Marvel 7, for returning to form after the went-on-two-issues-too-long sci-fi planet story. This issue has emotionally resonant dream sequences, humor, action, and suspense. And also kitties. This is pretty much exactly what I was hoping for when Carol headed out to space.