Broken Frontier

Five years after the last issue, it’s time to meet the Nobles?

Five years have passed since Gaia turned herself in for setting a creature loose on the city. Now we meet the Nobles in their current phase. Liz and Race are gone. Zephyr and Slate are married. Frost has been acknowledged by Doc. Rusty is acting like a robot and oh yeah, Doc has remarried and his stepkids are on the team.

Noble Causes is one of those books that no one reads, but everyone should. For several years now, it has been the soap opera of comic books. The book has focused less on superheroic actions and more on the home lives of the world’s most famous family of superheroes. It is a unique book that features characterization above everything else.

Faerber promised readers that when the hiatus was over, it would be a fresh start. For the most part he kept his promise. There are new heroes, new villains, missing faces, and a lot more action than the book has had in the past. Plus between the normal recap page and roll call, the news feature framing of the opening sequence gives the reader the status quo of the book.

Unfortunately in one aspect, this issue is not fresh at all. Surge, Doc’s stepson, is bringing home his non-metapowered girlfriend for the first time. Long time readers of the series know that much of the first couple of mini-series and the first 32 odd issues of the book had to do with Liz Donnelly’s acceptance into the family. This was a problem for me while reading the book.

I forgot who Faerber is though, he threw me for a loop on the final two pages, putting Frost back in familiar territory and setting forth a much darker direction for this new phase of the book. Kudos go to Jay for baiting, hooking me and then switching to a finer quality bait at the very last second. I should have know better.

Cinar has been with the book since issue #27 and he was a stark difference all those issues ago, but the redesigns for the team and the break have helped him find his own voice in the book. With his work, Asrar’s work on Dynamo 5, and the look of the new Youngblood book, it almost seems as though Image is going for a house style again, but one look at the preview for Gemini dispels that feeling.

The action sequences actually suit Cinar better than the discussions and bedroom scenes of the book before the break. There had certainly been a shift to a more action oriented book before, but this is the most frenetic the book has ever seemed.

New readers are being welcomed with open arms here, but us old timers need not fret, Faerber seems to want to surprise just as much as before.