Secret Avengers #20

[stolisomancer]

The last few issues of Secret Avengers have been done-in-one stories by Warren Ellis and a rotating cast of artists. It's been a pretty good read so far.

#20 came out yesterday, with art by Alex Maleev. After the Avengers get wiped out in the field, Natasha's the last one alive. She has a time machine. She has to save the rest of the team by changing history so subtly that no one realizes it's been changed at all.

One of her planned timejumps takes her to the 1960s.







For absolutely no reason, the book shifts into a three-panel comic strip layout for three pages for the sake of doing a "Modesty Blaise" shout-out. Maleev even signs the last panel like the late Jim Holdaway, the original artist on "Blaise."

I got a real kick out of it, particularly since Ellis and Maleev have to know that a good 90% of the people who read this issue will have no idea what they were going for here.

Comments

[glimmung]

We have a Modesty Blaise tag!

[halloweenjack]

While probably not a lot of people (particularly non-British) have seen an actual Modestly Blaise strip, the character is hardly obscure--Quentin Tarantino has wanted to do a film for years.

[stolisomancer]

She's had a lot of influence and yeah, there are the novels, but for the forty-odd years the strip ran in newspapers, there was only one American paper that carried it. I think it was in Detroit. Even then, the strip left the papers in 2001.

[dorothy1901]

One of the Rochester, NY daily papers carried Modesty Blaise for a while. It was in the late 1970s, I think. I don't know if this was in addition to Detroit, or instead of Detroit.

[lieut_kettch]

Groovy, baby! I love it! Though to to be more Blaise-like, there should be some panels of nekkid Natasha.

[brooms]

omg maleev's art works so much better for me like this!

[razsolo]

^^ THIS!

I don't *hate* his stuff normally, but find it not super fitted to sequential art....this here is pretty awesome though!

[skalja]

I like the fake white-out effect.

[icon_uk]

Yeah, that made me smile too.

[citygod]

Isn't that fab - and it means it's not just a flash-back to the style of an old comic, the page actually looks like a piece of comic art. Awesome.

[stubbleupdate]

This is fun

[blackruzsa]

It is pretty damn cool to see it in such a new comic :D

[righthondude]

My husband and I?

[cainofdreaming]

Kongo 'drive' a bed good too.

And yay for villains who actually have a brain to take the offer for their heart's desire when it's offered to them by the hero.

[stolisomancer]

Count Khronus the mad scientist is in a mutual, forty-year-long relationship with his Igor. Said Igor is also apparently a gourmet chef with an appreciation for fine wines.

[pallas_athena]

Yeah, that grated on me too-- should've been "my husband and me" :D

[darkknightjrk]

Damn it, why isn't this run in a shiny hardcover that I can own and cherish yet?

Also, this does make me curious to see more Modesty Blaze comics.

[terra]

I wouldn't say it's for absolutely no reason, it's a visual representation of the sixties in comic form, similar to the Bendis/Bagley Mighty Avengers time-travel sequence that had a retro coloring style and the old warnings for advertisements on the bottom. It also emphasizes that Natasha is cut from a quite dated archetypical cloth, which in turn reflects on the themes of time and its spending that were really the themes of the issue.

But yes, I'm sure that a lot of readers didn't understand that it's a Modesty Blaise shout-out.

[jlbarnett]

it really annoys me how Marvel can't decide if time travel actually changed things or not

[vitruvian23]

They've never been consistent about that, though. If the FF explanation about splitting off another timeline was universally true, what would be the point of Kang the Conqueror, after all - unless he was perfectly happy to just rule new timelines and never worry about whether he'd changed his own past. Cable and Bishop don't really have any excuse, though.

And this story handles things pretty well, too. The way Ellis has it set up, it's actually impossible to tell whether Natasha has actually changed history, just in a sneaky enough way that some form of 'temporal inertia' doesn't undo her changes, or whether she's part of a Heinlein-style stable time loop (e.g., By His Bootstraps or All You Zombies) that is essentially the way things have 'always' been, so there's no 'changing' history at all.

[notactuallyauser]

I loved this so much I showed it to 2 friends, only occasional readers of comics, and they thought it completely awesome. Going to a different art style for a while is one thing - going to a different panel layout, along with strip title and credits every 1/3 page, and starting and ending it not even on a page boundary, is sheer insane genius.