My books for this week have arrived, but total a mighty three comics, two of which we’re going to be covering on the podcast, so I don’t think it’s necessarily worth my putting together a separate post just for them. Instead, I’d like to have a look at a weighty tome that landed with a resounding thud on my doorstep two weeks back.<\/p>\n
War of Kings<\/em>, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning and Paul Pelletier, is the recent event series that played out in Marvel’s ‘cosmic’ books – Nova, Guardians of the Galaxy<\/em> and the War of Kings <\/em>miniseries itself, which was preceded by a one-shot called Secret Invasion: War of Kings<\/em>, titled as such for seemingly no reason beyond the presence of Skrulls, and followed by another one-shot called War of Kings: Who Will Rule?<\/em>. There were also two tie-in Darkhawk minis, one simply called War of Kings: Darkhawk <\/em>and one called War of Kings: Ascension<\/em> for some reason, and a loosely connected one-shot entitled War of Kings: Savage World of Skaar<\/em>, which, as you can imagine, features the Hulk’s hilariously-named son. This was supplemented with four shorter online comics, which were eventually released in print form as War of Kings: Warriors<\/em>, and an issue of Marvel Spotlight<\/em>. That’s a lot of comics, and aside from the Nova <\/em>and GotG<\/em> issues, which are collected in the current (and, in GotG<\/em>‘s case, imminent) volumes of their series, the War of Kings<\/em> hardcover contains all of them.<\/p>\n The basic premise of War of Kings<\/em>, in case you don’t know, is relatively simple. During events taking place prior to Secret Invasion<\/em>, Black Bolt, king of the Inhumans, was kidnapped and replaced with an undercover agent by the Skrulls. Having been recovered in Secret Invasion: Inhumans<\/em>, he and the rest of the royal family decide to wipe every last stinking Skrull out of the sky. In doing so, they are faced with a choice – let the escaping Skrull fleet go, or chase them into Shi’ar territory, taking out Shi’ar ships as they go and generally provoking an interstellar war with the barking mad Shi’ar emperor, Gabriel Summers aka Vulcan. No prizes for guessing which they choose, and when the Shi’ar Imperial Guard strike at the Inhumans during the wedding of Crystal and Ronan the Accuser (a symbolic marriage designed to link the Inhumans with their new subjects the Kree, whom Black Bolt decided also needed to learn a lesson at the Inhumans’ hands) it is, as they say, on like Donkey Kong.<\/p>\n Abnett and Lanning have carved themselves out a niche at Marvel over the last few years, launching the Nova<\/em> ongoing, guiding the second Annihilation<\/em> crossover, writing the Guardians of the Galaxy<\/em> series that span out of that, and now running their own little star empire in the form of the cosmic books and their various spin-offs. They’ve assembled a fairly motley bunch of characters, from ex-Infinity Watch, Avengers and New Warriors members to one-time Atlas monsters and raccoons with guns and managed to use them to populate compelling books that use cliffhangers to great effect to bring readers back month on month. It seems that Marvel trusts them enough to take up plot threads from the X-books too, as Havok’s Starjammers and Vulcan play central roles in War of Kings<\/em>.<\/p>\n War of Kings<\/em> is the natural next step for Abnett and Lanning – they haven’t had the opportunity to do a properly big crossover since the second Annihilation<\/em>, and with two ongoing series under their belts they have the ability to spread their wings a bit with this story. This is a big plus for the crossover, with the widespread nature of the war playing out on different fronts in the different books involved, giving the conflict a scope and scale which is much broader than most recent events (where the central story happens in one miniseries and the reader gets the feeling that everything else is that most dreaded of non-essential purchases, the ‘tie-in’). With War of Kings<\/em>, there may be different strands of the story playing out in different locations, but the whole thing hangs together as a multi-faceted huge story.<\/p>\n It would be easy for Abnett & Lanning to draw up battle lines with ‘good guys’ on one side and ‘bad guys’ on the other, the noble Black Bolt facing down that monster Vulcan, but to their credit they take the harder road and muddy the waters a little. Black Bolt’s the one who starts the war, with his zealous pursuit of the Skrulls, and it’s hard not to wonder if he’s gone off the deep end when he starts invading the Kree empire and prosecuting war with the Shi’ar. Likewise, Vulcan may be madder than the night porter in Scooby Doo’s Nutjob Motel, but the Inhumans do pose a clear threat to his people, and let’s not forget, Black Bolt shot first. The reader gets to see both of these perspectives through the use of alternating narrators who are each one step removed from the key decision-makers – Gladiator on the Shi’ar side, who narrates the odd-numbered issues, and Crystal on the Inhumans’ side, who does the rest. This isn’t just a clever technique to allow us to effectively follow the events taking place in both camps, but a way of showing the moral complexity of war by removing the main players from the expected positions as the readers’ POV characters. Between the sure writing hand of Abnett & Lanning and the never-more-polished artwork of Paul Pelletier, the War of Kings<\/em> series is one of the highlights of Marvel’s cosmic books since the launch of the first Annihilation<\/em>.<\/p>\n The main series aside, though, the rest of the collection is something of a mixed bag. C.B. Cebulski co-pens the first of the two Darkhawk series, with Abnett & Lanning handling the follow-up, and while the two series do set up plot points in the main mini, the core story can be read and understood perfectly well without them. The repercussions are felt more in current issues of Nova<\/em>, and one may wonder in an idle moment whether six issues of Darkhawk comics were necessary for the crossover at all or whether they’re just there to bulk the event out a bit. The Warriors <\/em>stories are a little more worthwhile, adding a bit of flesh to the characters of Gladiator, Crystal, Blastaar and Lilandra (surely the dullest character ever to appear in the X-mythos), but in the end are just mildly diverting fluff. The Skaar<\/em> one-shot, on the other hand, is pure filler, and completely inessential stuff seemingly just there to shoehorn the character into a spare crevice in the story. None of these stories are offensively bad, though, and aside from Skaar<\/em> they all add in their own way to the package so long as you treat them as ‘extra’ stories rather than as part of the core series.<\/p>\n The War of Kings<\/em> story is being followed up right now with the Realm of Kings<\/em>, which appears to be more along the lines of the Initiative banner post-Civil War<\/em> than a separate event per se. Happily, there’s not a lot you need to know about War<\/em> to follow Realm<\/em> that isn’t set out in the titular one-shot, but if the idea of Marvel’s cosmic side floats your boat and you’re interested in seeing exactly how the cosmic books got to this point, you could do far worse than pick up this shelf-bending tome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My books for this week have arrived, but total a mighty three comics, two of which we’re going to be covering on the podcast, so I don’t think it’s necessarily worth my putting together a separate post just for them. Instead, I’d like to have a look at a weighty tome that landed with a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":122,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions\/122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}