BATTLEWORLDBATTLEWORLD

ROUND 2, BATTLE 3

Follow the bracket here!

INFINITY GAUNTLET #1-2

VS

OLD MAN LOGAN #1-2

There’s a reason why Spider-Man remains Marvel’s company mascot, the character that is clearly their favorite among a stable of thousands of characters. It’s not just because he happens to be the most popular, and Marvel loves whoever is the most popular (see: Wolverine). No, Marvel loves Spider-Man because Marvel is Spider-Man. He’s an upstart punk. He’s a little less serious. He wears his heart/melodrama right there on his sleeve. He’s a hero, while still trying to be a hero. He tries to be funny, and although he rarely is, he’s Richard fucking Pryor compared to everyone else around him. This is why you see Marvel kicking down doors just to get Peter Parker to cameo in their movies, but you don’t see them doing shit about Wolverine and the Human Torch. Peter Parker’s story may not be the greatest fictional story ever told, but it’s the most Marvel story, and they have been chasing that high since August 10^th, 1962. Some of those have been garbage, sure, but some of those have been great. Some of them have even led to movies you’ve seen, or will see soon. And if you act fast enough, you might be able to catch another great one before it blows up into a TVvideogameMOVIEbedspread.

Infinity Gauntlet #1 wasn’t my favorite issue of Battleworld so far. It was a little all over the place, almost like it was trying to hard to be an average first issue, full of exposition and set-up. It was able to make it out of the first round, though, and now it kind of doesn’t matter how many information dumps there were, because now we have the second issue. Now everything is already starting to pay off, or develop the extreme stakes for the rest of this series. “High stakes” doesn’t necessarily mean the world is about to end; each story sets up its own levels, and then tries to deliver on them. If the stakes were the world ending, I wouldn’t really care, because we’re reading about a temporary world that was built to end soon anyway. What’s the best way to create stakes, then? Making us care whether or not the lives of characters are about to end. In the case of Infinity Gauntlet, it’s the Bakian family. The father, who is leading and protecting his daughters through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, one of Doom’s favorite backgrounds. The mother, who ditched her family years ago to become a Nova, but is now back. The youngest daughter, a scared little kid. And then there’s the oldest daughter, Menzin. Menzin is a street-wise smart ass. Menzin is tired of being told she’s too young. She’s ready to grow up. She’s quick and witty. She’s ready to prove to everyone else that she’s the hero she knows she is destined to be. And she just became a member of the Nova Corps. And then we get a quick training montage. Any of this sound familiar?

Don’t think that this is Marvel desperately trying to recreate the success that they had fifty years ago. It’s not desperation. It’s knowing a slam dunk recipe for a story when you see it, and it’s knowing the types of story you’re great at telling. You watch this family (who all became Novas by the way — it just feels mostly like Menzin’s story) slowly fly for the first time together, and your stomach drops a little bit, because one of these characters isn’t coming home. Then you get to the end of the book, and see that at least one Thanos is marching his way towards the Bakians. So we’ll get to watch Menzin thrive and fail at learning how to be a hero, wondering if she’ll get her shit together before god damn Thanos finds her. It’s a different world than we’re used to, full of characters we’ve never heard of, but that sounds pretty Marvel to me.

So, it is with great regret that I must tell Old Man Logan that his journey stops in Round 2. The slick greatness of the first issue is ground to a halt in the second one, where we get all of that exposition we avoided initially. If you are reading the main Secret Wars book, and just want more information about that, as opposed to the great tangential stories the world has set up for us, then go Old Man Logan. There’s some interesting things regarding what would happen if all of these characters (which would mean like 30 Wolverines) got thrown into the same world. If this book is cruising toward a battle royale with 30 Wolverines, then it might pick up some steam. But based on the first two issues, it’s Infinity Gauntlet who makes it into the Sweet 16.

– Ryan Haley

TUNE IN TOMORROW FOR MORE ROUND 2 ACTION, AS SECRET WARS JOURNAL TAKES ON WHERE MONSTERS DWELL!