HEROES REBORN #1 - A Surprising Return to a Much Derided Concept
This story was written by Jason Aaron, with pencils from Ed McGuinness.
I understand that I promised to review this title today and everything, but boy was it a long process to actually get it all started. My usual schedule for my reviewing starts just after I have had lunch, where I then spend the next few hours reading the titles for that day and splurging my thoughts out on to this very page. In the couple of years or so that I have been reviewing my comics seriously, there as not been a single one that I have ever been stressed or worried or just completely unwilling to read, until this dreary Spring day that is. For the entire morning, since I woke up at half past nine, I had been dreading the exact moment that I would sit down at my desk, as I really just didn’t want to have to acknowledge the existence of this rehash of a concept that I am sure everybody had hoped died a horrible permanent death after it’s failure the first go around. As a little disclaimer, I have never read the original slate of Heroes Reborn titles from back in the day, although the moment that I have to do so is creeping ever closer, I have simply heard all of the things that they had tried to do, and utterly hating the prospect of ever seeing it. Also, as we all know by now, Jason Aaron’s tenure on anything to do with the Avengers thus far has been pretty bad, so the idea of him doing this was never going to go down well, especially with Ed McGuinness coming back to help him with it.
It is with a heavy heart then, that I say this to you now: I actually didn’t hate this first issue all that much at all. As somebody who has been far less than complimentary of Aaron’s recent works, it is a complete shock to me that this wasn’t a completely atrocious mess from start to finish, but maybe it will turn into a nice surprise by the time that all of this nonsense ends at some point in June (seven issues in two months is quite ridiculous). While it does keep along the same kind of lines as the original tales, where many characters are given completely new origins, or in some cases just don’t exist at all, it also invokes the spirit of the House of M event, wherein the entire world has been changed up, but one solitary figure from the original world is still left to remember how things used to be, with it being Blade in this case, rather than Wolverine. For the first time in a good while, I actually think that Jason Aaron’s writing, for the most part, was pretty good, with the sinister undertones in this otherwise perfect world being teased perfectly, mostly using the character of President Phil Coulson. Once again, it is no secret that I am not a massive fan of what they have done to Coulson in recent times, as he is such a departure from the character that we all know, but in this context all of the changes suddenly just make so much more sense than ever before.
From the looks of it, Blade is not the only one that thinks that this world is completely wrong either, as Nighthawk of the Squadron Supreme is apparently having some doubts over it all as well. As much as I hate the Squadron Supreme, in this current iteration, this is actually the best way that they have been portrayed for a good while. At times, the perennial DC knockoffs have come across as brash and unwilling to work alongside others, coming across as complete departures from the characters that they are meant to (allegedly) be emulating, but in this story they actually almost came across like they were actual heroes, who people would actually want to be saved by. However, that isn’t to say that everything here was perfect though, as quite a lot of the dialogue seemed incredibly clunky in execution, especially in the case of the Blur during his battle with the Silver Witch (an amalgamation of Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver). I would assume that Aaron was trying to make it seem as though he was speaking really quickly, in line with the way that certain Speedsters in the Flash do when they don’t have control of their powers, but it just didn’t really work on this occasion.
On the subject of the Silver Witch, I believe that these new versions of some classic characters were the highlights of the story. While some of the names were a little bit clunky (Doctor Juggernaut), I did really love the designs of each of them, especially the likes of the Black Skull. Ed McGuinness honestly did an excellent job will his artwork here, as it was much improved in my opinion from his work at the beginning of his run on the Avengers from a couple of years ago, and while that isn’t solely down to his pencils, I can do nothing but commend him on this. The only real problem that I had with these new characters was in the way that their origins were explained. Blade makes it sound as though the lack of discovering Captain America’s body caused some kind of ripple effect on the world, but that it a completely absurd notion quite honestly, as most characters were introduced way before the return of the Star-Spangled Avenger, some by two or three goddamn years in fact. Obviously, this isn’t really the case at all, and whatever Coulson and company have done clearly involved making sure that none of the heroes received their origin stories. Due to one of the variant covers for this first issue, I am just going to go ahead and assume that our old buddy Mephisto is behind all of this, which basically means that we don’t have to read the rest of this series.
To conclude, despite my original apprehension surrounding the release of this series/event, I actually didn’t hate it as much as I originally thought I would. While some of the dialogue is incredibly clunky, the majority of the writing for this first issue was much better than what we have come to expect from Jason Aaron over the last couple of years, not quite back on the level of his Thor run, but I would say that it is getting there. Some of the other titles for this new Heroes Reborn are looking quite interesting, and I will be making sure that I at least pick a couple of them up (mostly the Peter Parker and Weapon X titles). You can be damn sure that I will be picking up that second issue in a couple of weeks (or next week, I’m not too sure), as I really do want to see how this all ends up.
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