Broken Frontier

Ares is awesome!!!  I first became aware of Marvel’s Ares when Ms. Marvel picked him to be on her Mighty Avengers.  She described him as “both a Wolverine and a Thor,” which was so intriguing. I’ve since learned that he’s been around the Marvel Universe for a while—and not always as a hero.  In the last few years, Ares has been a Mighty Avenger, a Dark Avenger, and father to a Secret Avenger.  Basically, he’s pretty involved in the Avengers world.  With such strong ties to the Avengers, it’s easy to forget that Ares is not really even a superhero.  He’s a god.  This book reminds us all of that fact.

Savage Axe of Ares #1 is a one-shot featuring four stories by different artists and writers.  Each of these stories is set in a different place and time, and involves different styles and cultural approaches to warfare.  The first is set in Germany during the Cold War.  The second, in an ancient barbarian land of demons, wizards, kings, and magic.  The third story takes place in Iraq during the present war.  The final story takes place during the Middle Ages in Poland, and is primarily text, with some illustrations.

The first story is very well done.  It builds on the atmosphere of tension and espionage that was characteristic of the Cold War.  The artist uses the black and white theme of this book to enhance this atmosphere.  In this tale, Ares is seen as a silent and mysterious figure that appears out of nowhere and simply acts.  He is a god, plain and simple.  He doesn’t explain himself to mortals and is a force that cannot be stopped nor explained.  It was a fantastic start to this series of stories, setting the pace and capturing the readers’ sense of awe.

The second showed his barbarian tendencies and, as he is enslaved in the beginning, shows that while he is a god, his powers can still somewhat be limited.  This makes him interesting and a little more relatable.  The art is gritty, like the story, and shows us the side of Ares that makes him stay on the Dark Avengers team.

The third is a mixture of the two previous stories.  In this, he is a master of all warfare, as he was in the first, but he’s also savage, slaying giant mythical monsters with nothing more than his axe and gravity.  He receives aid for the first time in this collection, which gives the reader a sense of his humanity, or at least, his human tendencies.

The final story is my favorite.  Being primarily text, it is capable of delivering a high degree of detail and character more easily than typical comics can.  It shows that while Ares is powerful, he is also very intelligent and capable.  We see that he is not only able to direct war by participating in it; he can also influence the soldiers.  It is a phenomenal display of his inspirational abilities.

All in all, this collection shows readers all of the different aspects of the God of War.  He is terrifying, savage, brilliant, and powerful, but ultimately, flawed like us, and thus relatable.