Heroic Age: One Month to Live

[stolisomancer]

One Month to Live is a five-issue limited series from Marvel, set in mainstream continuity, and all five issues came out in September of this year. The idea came from a conversation between Stephen Wacker and Rick Remender, and each issue has a different creative team. (John Ostrander wrote issue #3, which is what originally got my attention.)

It's very much the kind of project that's characteristic of modern Marvel: it's got decent writers, decent to good art, and it's an okay read, but it's gotten very little exposure and it sold like a juice box full of Ebola. (Each single issue did between 12,000 and 14,000 copies, which is actually better than I thought it did before looking it up.)

The book is a "man on the street" view of life in 616. Dennis Sykes is a bank manager, dealing with a job he despises and with becoming, as his wife puts it, the "instant parent" of his ten-year-old niece Kelly. His life is about to get worse.



Dennis gets stuck with the thankless job of telling a children's hospital that their grant has been withdrawn. On his way out the door, he makes the mistake of interfering with a robbery in progress; two junkies are trying to get drugs from what they think is an ambulance, but which is really just a medical waste disposal truck. One of them upends a bag of waste over Dennis's head...





(Yes, Kelly's a brat. She's also ten, she's lost both her parents, and she gets better over the course of the series.)

Since he lives in a comic-book universe, this has the bizarre upside of giving Dennis the power to telekinetically manipulate inorganic matter, which he discovers while fixing a picture frame. He immediately realizes that he can go get the children's hospital their money back, but after pulling it off, has second thoughts:



The rest of the series is Dennis getting a sort of guided tour through the Marvel Universe, guest-starring the Avengers, Spider-Man, and Wolverine. It's a pretty decent series, although it's very much a deliberate tearjerker, and the last issue has great art by Jamie McKelvie. If you're a trade-waiter, the trade paperback comes out in January.

Comments

[jocutus.livejournal.com]

This is one of those series that really doesn't feel like a typical Marvel book, even though there are Marvel heroes all over it. The "True Believers" mini felt the same way to me. That scene above where he talks Spidey into letting him go sold me on the series, along with a recommendation from my local Comic Shop Guy.