The Crew #7 (final issue): Big Trouble in Little Mogadishu, Chapter Seven: The Crew

[superboyprime]

"The Crew was custom-tailored for Marvel’s marketing department. It could have been—and could be today in trade paperback—a trial balloon used to explore new markets. The one story arc, 'Big Trouble In Little Mogadishu,' has no specific bearing on current continuity (whatever that may be), and the people Marvel would be trying to reach with this don’t read comics and wouldn’t have any idea about continuity anyway. I wrote this series eight years ago. Marvel has done absolutely nothing with it. They sent it to Diamond as part of a flood of poorly-planned new launches, most of which were summarily cancelled. And, despite my routine pleas to the contrary, Marvel has not shown the least interest in packaging the series and approaching black and Latino channels for distribution.

"The abrupt and premature cancellation of The Crew, which I was terribly invested in and extremely proud of, was, for me, the death knell. I threw up my hands, that’s it for me and comics. Had Tom not offered me Captain America and The Falcon, The Crew would have been my last published comics work. It’s not the art form I despise so much, it’s the idiocy of the people controlling it. Billions of dollars lying on the floor. So many bills we’re slipping in them as we walk past trying to sell the same old crap to the same old people."

- Christopher Priest



















Based on things Priest has said here and there, we know some of the things he'd planned for the series but didn't end up doing, though it's unclear which are ones he would have done if the series hadn't been cancelled and which are ones he simply changed his mind about:

1. Josiah would have gotten the code-name Justice.
2. While Rhodey would have started off the leader, Josiah would have eventually gravitated into that role.
3. Junta would have provided Rhodey with a miniature gravity well. Pairing it with that one Iron Man/War Machine gauntlet we saw Rhodey using in the series, this would have unlocked the gauntlet's ability to generate a full-body War Machine armor made entirely out of solid holograms. The holo-armor would have been a gas guzzler, so he'd activate it in emergencies only. How fast it'd run out would depend on how much he used its weapons and other tech.
4. Princeton Walk and Little Mogadishu would have had a New Genesis & Apokolips-type setup. It would have turned out that the expensive Princeton Walk created Little Mogashidu in that it pushed all the undesirable out of the neighborhood and concentrated them into one place. This would have made Rhodey partly to blame, as he was one of the big investors in the company behind Princeton Walk.
5. Junta would claim his powers come from being the son of one of those generic henchmen that supervillains use, but that would have been a lie covering up some big secret.
6. The Crew would have over time forged into a found family.
7. Taking down 66 Bridges would have thrown the Mog into a state of chaos, and the Crew would have to clean up the mess.
7. Presumably, the series would have at some point dealt with the dangling thread from Priest's Panther run about how Triage was secretly Kasper's half-brother and the real head of the 66 Bridges gang was the two's weird dad.
8. And wild speculation on my part, but I suspect maybe there would have been some connection between 66 Bridge's corporate front (Grace & Tumbault) and Kasper's ex-girlfriend Grace. I know, I know, it's a common name, but the two were introduced in the same Black Panther arc, one shortly after the other.

So... thoughts on the series, everyone?

Comments

[zachbeacon]

At the time I was annoyed that Rhodey is the only one that got more than a cameo after this series ended.

However Josiah spent a lifetime hiding from the shady government types we saw in Truth so I guess it makes a certain amount of sense that he'd drop off the face of the Earth right after his superhero debut. There's a perfectly good plot hook waiting there if someone would just pick it up.

I still can't rationalize the neglect shown to Kasper. What a waste of a perfectly good character.

Junta was always the one I cared about the least so naturally he was the one that showed up again (once).

I remember thinking this comic was better than it was. It look a really long time to get going and was given the axe as soon as it started to get somewhere.

Captain America and the Falcon, OTOH is something I remember as a huge disappointment that set up some plots (Notably the Steve/Wanda relationship) that were immediately dropped with Disassembled. I have more to say about the art and the portrayal of certain characters but that can wait until someone decides to post scans.

[laughing_tree]

Priest is incredibly candid about his past work in interviews and such. Surely at some point he's talked about what the deal with Kasper's dad was? I have to know, dammit!

[pyynk]

It's been very interesting to revisit this one and I found especially interesting Priest's comments regarding how broken the distribution system is. And he's right. Genre, non-superhero books should see promotion outside of the traditional channels because I'm fairly sure that those audiences don't know that books like this exist.

[tcampbell1000]

In general, yes, and Priest's comment were echoed by many other talented industry observers and participators at the time. But there are two big caveats:

1) The Crew was fifteen years ago. While some things about comics retail are depressingly the same as they were then, other things have changed drastically. A book like this would have a serious chance in today's market, not because it would be sold as an insert in Vibe but because it would be treated as a fleshed-out pitch for a Netflix series, very much in the vein of Luke Cage.

2) This isn't really a non-superhero book. For all that's original about what Priest is doing here, I feel like there's something disingenuous in the narrative that The Crew would've outsold Shonen Jump if only those stupid marketers had set it free from the shackles of the direct market. The book is clearly leaning on its characters' connections to several prominent Avengers, none of whom were major film stars in 2003, and in two out of three cases, it's not interested in telling you how or why these connections came to be. To know why Rhodey was doffing armor in the first issue's cover and how come Kaspar was wearing a color-inverted Black Panther costume, you had to have read other comics, comics that weren't in the bodegas and barbershops Priest was hoping to reach.

None of this is meant to disparage what Priest did accomplish or the goals that he invokes in interviews. It's just that the goals and the product don't really line up with each other.

[kore]

I'ver really enjoyed the scans from the whole series, and the interview excerpts. Thank you!