Saturday, August 15, 2009

The Marvels Project #1



Written by Ed Brubaker (Criminal, Captain America)
Pencils by Steve Epting (Captain America)

The Marvel 70th Anniversary celebrated last Tuesday, Aug. 11 saw the release of two new titles from the House of Idea(s), The Marvels Project being one of them. In the tradition of Marvels (and maybe even DC's Kingdom Come), The Marvels Project runs down the reaction of us "normies" to the presence of supernatural, super powerful beings among us. The "normy" doing the running down in this case is a little known (to me anyway) hero named Angel from way back, when Marvel was still called "Timely Comics" and comics cost a strawpenny and nobody told lies. In this, the first issue, Angel is still Dr. Holloway and as he toys with the idea of fighting crime he relates the state of late 1930s America on the brink of war with Germany. Plus the American Government has invented the Human Torch. Plus Germany has been conducting experiments on Sea-People and the Prince of Atlantis is pissed. Fascinating Times, indeed.

Ed Brubaker is an unstoppable force. I don't want to stop him. Incognito is one of the best books out there, Captain America still kicks ass and Criminal? Come on. I think one of the things that makes his writing so sweet is his whole matter-of-fact approach to the fantastic. He just completely nails the tone of a life weary, unbiased observer who gets the outlandishness of what he's seeing but still wants to find out what happens next. The Marvels Project is this to the umpth degree. I fucking love it. You might think by this point that there was little left to work with when it comes to this theme of super-hero realism but that was before Brubaker got his mitts on it.

Read The Marvels Project, you won't be sorry.




1 comment:

evan said...

Sorry-couldn't find a contact link to e-mail you . . .
Hello. My name is Ekko, and I run www.berkeleyplaceblog.com. We mostly blog about indie music, but also do comic book posts (especially over the past year), mostly about Marvel and DC. Our readership is about 2k-3k unique hits per day, so we aren't huge but we also aren't small.

Being that 2009 is winding down, we are preparing a "Best Comics of the Decade" post. I am wondering whether you, as a comic book blogger, would be interested in contributing? All you would need to do is pick a comic that came out between 1/1/00 and 12/31/09--pick a "run" (such as the Geoff Johns Teen Titans run) or a single story (such as "Lady Bullseye") or even a single issue or title--and write a brief (i.e., a paragraph) blurb on it. I'll run your piece as written by you, and credit you by linking to your site.

If you, or if you know a quality comic book blogger like you, are interested, please let me know. I'll be wanting your submission within a few weeks.

I hope you will join me--I think it will be a good way to cross-promote your site. And if you have other ideas for promotion in the future, please let me know.

Thanks!

Ekko

PS-I'm also interested in trading blogroll links, if you want (and we haven't already done so).