Moral of the story: don't get involved with Elektra

[colonel_green.insanejournal.com]

A somewhat belated post of four scans from Dark Reign: Elektra #5, which my store didn't get last week for whatever reason.

The story has followed Elektra ever since she returned from the Skrulls, as she finds herself dodging assassins who keep asking her about whether "the stars are safe in the sky".  She has no idea what this means, but she eventually follows one of the people targetting her back to base.  Turns out that her enemies are a group of ex-SHIELD agents, the survivors of the crash of the helicarrer Blackhawk (from "Wolverine: Enemy of the State"; this story turns out to be almost a direct sequel).  Those who recall that story will know that Elektra was hired by Nick Fury to infiltrate the Hand, and in the process the Blackhawk was brought down, killing over 200 agents.

Elektra doesn't remember any of this, and says that Skrullektra must have been the one who did it.  However, they're interrupted by Norman Osborn, who tells her that based on his Skrull prisoners' testimony, it was her; she doesn't remember because she used a ninja mind-trick to forget all the details around her various resurrections (which was what the Skrulls were looking for), including the one that came soon after the Blackhawk crash.  She undoes said mind trick to remember what happened, and flashes back to killing her way to the carrier cockpit.




Earlier she told Wolverine that she hadn't killed these guys because she believes she was innocent of their charges;  "If I had wronged them, I would simply kill them all."

Comments

[darkblade.insanejournal.com]

You know for a guy without access to his full database of supers Osborn has his fingers in a whole lot of pies.

[neuhallidae.insanejournal.com]

There must be some kind of rule about this: "No matter how pissed off you are about the loss of your friends, never tell the assassin to her face that you'll hate her forever and hunt her down. That's just asking to be dead by the end of the issue."

[404glitch.insanejournal.com]

Except it's Norman, so Elektra can't do anything. Though it'd be a nice way to end Dark Reign.

[stratosfyr.insanejournal.com]

I loooove this art. What else has Clay Mann done?

[colonel_green.insanejournal.com]

He did a one-issue fill-in on Brubaker's Daredevil last fall, and some of the art on Fraction's Thor one-shots; that's all I've seen of his work, but I really like it.

[cf105.insanejournal.com]

motto to the max

[roily_rogue.insanejournal.com]

I love that art.

[box_in_the_box.insanejournal.com]

Am I the only one who's long since felt like the well has kind of run dry on Elektra?

The problem is that Elektra isn't ANYTHING, and hasn't been for quite some time.

[roily_rogue.insanejournal.com]

"Isn't anything"? Care to explain a bit more?

[box_in_the_box.insanejournal.com]

She's a cold-ass killing machine, and she has been since at least Rucka's run, but I haven't seen any other side to her since then. As killing machines go, Deadpool is amusingly psychotic, and Wolverine struggles with his darker nature - hell, even Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name was a crafty, clever son of a bitch with a dry sense of humor - but with Elektra, there's nothing else THERE. I actually liked the Rucka plotline, in which a victim of Elektra's "collateral damage" got the worst revenge possible on her, by using his connections to ensure that no one would hire her for any more assassination jobs, nor even get into any fights with her, out of the theory that the only thing she lives for is to kill people, because that plot acknowledged how one-note Elektra has become.

[roily_rogue.insanejournal.com]

I figured that was what you meant, but I haven't followed Elektra in a long time, so I wasn't positive. I see I haven't missed much.

[ashtoreth.insanejournal.com]

Oh, Wolverine doesn't struggle anymore. It's so much easier now that the 'team conscience' started giving out the kill orders.

[colonel_green.insanejournal.com]

Wells said that his goal with this series was to write her as close to Miller's version in Elektra: Assassin. He described her as being closed off, someone the audience is meant to find hard to understand.

[darkblade.insanejournal.com]

I'm starting to feel like that boils down to hard to give a rats ass about.

[jaybee3.insanejournal.com]

Exactly. Am I supposed to feel anything for loathing for her? Assassins can be portrayed as sympathetic even the worst ones - Deathstroke and David Cain were men who had no mercy but loved their children (at least until Beechan came along). Elektra? Nothing. Wasn't she supposed to be anti-hero at some point?

[ashtoreth.insanejournal.com]

She is an anti-hero as much as Wolverine is...except that she doesn't pretend to be the hypocritical good guy that he does.

She took a terrible undercover assignment to save someone, and in the process save a lot of people. People died. Otherwise, it wouldn't have worked. Instead of blaming the guy who asked her to do it, Nick Fury, or the people who made it necessary, Hydra/the Hand, some people chose to blame it all on the easiest target. They're bad agents and not great soldiers. There was no real recourse for Elektra except to kill them. It's a tragedy.

It'll be interesting to see how the Contessa handles it, since apparently she's doing the exact same thing.

[okkult3000.insanejournal.com]

At least Wolverine has the decency to feel bad about being a monster.

[colonel_green.insanejournal.com]

Elektra's origin, as told by Miller in one of the final issues of his run, is really important to how much you understand her. Until I read that I found her really difficult to get any kind of feel for (simply losing her father, as revealed earlier, never quite seemed a proper transition into her life as an assassin).

[pmagod.insanejournal.com]

I must be hungry... I read "I want Electra nachos"

[khamelea.insanejournal.com]

I always read it as Elektra Nachos.

[demonprawn.insanejournal.com]

The entire mini was great, but my favourite part was the startlingly competent, if ultimately outmatched, HAMMER agent at the beginning of issue 2. that guy was a badass.

[mxlm.insanejournal.com]

The page isn't here, but was I the only one who thought there was something strangely...tender? Intimate? About the way Elektra killed that woman?

[blackdocs.insanejournal.com]

i only have the first issue of this because i thought Clay Mann's DD issue introducing Lady B was gorgeous.
but yeah, I hope Dark Reign culminates with everyone Norman's ever fucked over teaming up and taking him down SO HARD!

[x5455.insanejournal.com]

This is the first thing I've read Elektra in, and I have to say I liked the mini very much, except that I was a bit disappointed that she really did all those things and not the skrull. I was kinda hoping this would lead to a "I have to redeem my name" sort of thing, but I guess not.