Broken Frontier

Hello, everyone! This is William Gatevackes. Let’s take a look at the comics coming tomorrow, April 5th.

Marvel unleashes Moon Knight #1, another new book featuring a character from the annals of comic history getting another shot at life. This title marks at least the sixth one, if you count limited series, to feature the character.

How do you sell a book featuring a character that had five shots before? One that is often considered a shade too close to DC’s Batman? How do you try to sell Moon Knight to fans that fall outside of its loyal following?

First, you start with the creative team. Marvel decided to put Moon Knight in the hands of Charlie Huston, a writer from outside of comics. His website states that he writes “pulpnoir” novels, some which have been optioned for movies. So you get the chance, slim though it may be, that fans of his books will pick up the comics. Pair him up with David Finch, an artist described by Marvel as “red-hot” and a “fan-favorite”. He is coming off the best-selling New Avengers book, so he might bring fans from that title over.

Then you create a media blitz. Huston has been interviewed by most comic websites. He was even interviewed by Entertainment Weekly, which exposes the title to an even larger audience, one that might not be familiar with Huston or Finch or even picked up a comic book before.

Next, you release a preview of the book to the various comic websites, including Marvel’s own site, and include one in your shipping catalog. This gives any stragglers a chance to taste what the book will be like before they buy it.

Will all this effort pay off in new readers? Well, it worked on me, but to be honest, I always had a soft spot for Moon Knight. Whether any other fans will check out a character that may unkindly be called a “five-time loser” is anybody’s guess.

While Moon Knight has had at least six series, the Silver Surfer has had that many, if not more. However, the Silver Surfer is a much more popular character. None of Moon Knight’s titles have ever made it past issue sixty, while Silver Surfer’s run in the ‘80’s to the ‘90’s lasted over twice as long, which makes his latest appearance somewhat interesting.

Annihilation: Silver Surfer #1 is, as the title indicates, a part of the “Annihilation” event currently being offered by Marvel. His limited series is one of four starting this month. However, he is definitely the most popular character out of the four. None of the other three have the following he has. Nova had several titles to his name, but none that lasted as long the Silver Surfer’s. And as far as I can tell, Ronan and the Super Skrull have never headlined their own book before.

Admittedly, Annihilation is a crossover focusing on Marvel’s “cosmic” characters, and the Silver Surfer definitely fits the bill. But his inclusion in the event has the feel of Alex Rodriguez playing for your local softball team, if that makes any sense, like the character is a “ringer” brought in to increase the success of the event. At least that’s the way it seems to me. Regardless, he does bring some star power (no pun intended) to the crossover, which can’t hurt.

Swamp Thing #26 is the latest issue featuring a character that has come to symbolize the entire Vertigo line. If it wasn’t for Alan Moore’s seminal work on the character, Vertigo might not exist today. Moore’s thought-provoking and adult-aimed writing style helped raise comic books to the level of true literature, and his success as a writer opened the doors for Neil Gaiman, Peter Milligan, and Grant Morrison to work on American comics.

Moore was long gone when Vertigo began in 1993, when such avant-garde DC titles as Sandman, Hellblazer, Swamp Thing, Shade the Changing Man and Doom Patrol left DC proper to start the line.

The early books shared a similar theme: a look at typical superhero fare through a fresh and unusual viewpoint. However, while Gaiman’s mythological-based Sandman and Morrison’s surrealistic take on the Doom Patrol were great stories featuring strong narratives, many other Vertigo books came off like they were written as weird for weird’s sake, and in the effort to write a story that was unusual, cohesiveness and entertaining plots were lost.

Joshua Dysart’s early arcs on the current Swamp Thing resembled this writing style, at least to me. The story seemed to come in second to how many weird and unusual aspects he could add to his scripts. Lately, his plots have become stronger and have become similar to the writing in some of the best of the early Vertigo books. Issue 26 is a stand-alone book, and an excellent jumping-on point for people who might be willing to give the title a try.

While Vertigo was started as a venue for unusual takes on the superhero, recently a trend for the line is to publish stories more grounded in reality. Instead of Dada-esque super teams, we get rogue C.I.A agents looking for revenge. Instead of dream kings, we get a gun and 100 untraceable bullets and the mystery that surrounds it. Instead of plant elementals, we get a Civil War veteran fighting for his land. Now we have two versions of Vertigo titles, ones based on the real and ones based on the fantastic, both united by the fact that they are too unique to make it to the mainstream.

This brings us to Exterminators #4. To be honest, I haven’t read an issue of Exterminators, but the concept seems to bridge both sides of today’s Vertigo. It focuses on an exterminator working in Los Angeles that has to deal with a career-minded girlfriend, a psycho as a partner, and a pesticide that doesn’t kill cockroaches, it mutates them. The series has been receiving a fair share of good buzz in the fandom community, and since it is only four issues into its run, now might be a good time to jump on the bandwagon.

Vertigo books are aimed at a more erudite audience. The kind of people who think of comics as art and literature. But what if that's not enough? What if you want a book with a more “small-press”, “art-house” sensibility that still focuses on superheroes?  Well, Adhouse books might just have what you are looking for with Superior Showcase #1.

The book, created by Ignatz Award-winning Nick Bertozzi, Mike Dawson, and Dean Trippe, is solicited as being “all about heroes that are super” (that’s one way around Marvel and DC’s trademark on all varieties of the word “superhero”). From the looks of it, the title might be a good bridge for all fans of capes and tights into the indie comic world.

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William Gatevackes has starred in a grand total of zero series published by Marvel, although he does write the periodic comic review at  PopMatters. The closest he gets to a first issue is being husband number one for his lovely wife Jennifer.