Heroic Age: One Month to Live
Oct. 26th, 2010 04:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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scans_dailyOne 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Dennis gets stuck with the thankless job of telling a children's hospital that their grant has been withdrawn.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.
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.
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Date: 2010-10-27 09:14 am (UTC)