{"id":4794,"date":"2019-10-06T09:49:53","date_gmt":"2019-10-06T08:49:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4794"},"modified":"2019-10-06T09:49:53","modified_gmt":"2019-10-06T08:49:53","slug":"marvel-comics-presents-1-9-the-vigil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4794","title":{"rendered":"Marvel Comics Presents #1-9: “The Vigil”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Well, this went wrong. Marvel Comics Presents <\/em>was a format that worked in the eighties and nineties – the original run made it to issue #175 – but the market is no longer so friendly to anthologies. Marvel put some well known creators on this book, and put a Wolverine story in the lead slot – at a time when the character had only just returned from a lengthy (if largely notional) absence. But here we are, cancelled after issue #9. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s particularly awkward since Soule’s original announcement of this storyline described it as a twelve-parter. The final issue is extended, but it still seems to have lost some pages along the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Charles Soule really likes a high concept, and this certainly qualifies – to the point where it’s not altogether easy to tell whether it’s supposed to be in continuity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It starts in World War II, with soldier Logan happening to stumble by as a witch called Marie summons up a demon to fight the Nazis. This turns out to be a very bad idea, as the demon in question is the Truth, who is emphatically stated to be a world-ending threat. His name also justifies all sorts of “the Truth wants to be free” and “the Truth cannot be killed” dialogue. Logan helps send it back, but the Truth is going to come back every ten years, and Logan needs to team up with the witch’s daughter Sylvie to help her banish it each time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cue a string of stories of Logan fighting the Truth in different decades. There’s also a theme in here about the Truth always appearing in “the worst place of the world”, which doesn’t work out so well; it limits the scope for variation between the different settings and tends to flatten everything out. For some reason the 80s and 90s sequences are set amongst X-Men stories published <\/em>at that time, without regard to the sliding timeline, which really just confuses matters for no obvious reason. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But this isn’t quite as repetitive as it sounds, since the focus is less on the local colour and more on the long-term development of the relationship between the functionally-immortal Wolverine and Sylvie, who starts as a five year old and ages through to adulthood. Eventually that leads to Sylvie’s daughter Rien in turn showing up to take her place, and Sylvie’s clan taking an interest in all this – there’s a very contrived attempt to suggest that this might all have something to do with Agatha Harkness, which really adds not a great deal to the story. All this eventually leads to an attempt by Wolverine and Rien to break out of the cycle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paolo Sequeira’s art is solid in terms of the shifting settings, and selling the melodrama of it all. But it’s all a bit of a mess. The finale relies on the idea that the Truth’s truth is that everything dies, except the Truth itself, making the Truth an internal contradiction that it can’t tolerate. This idea is nowhere near as interesting as the story wants it to be – it comes off as just a trite idea and a bit of wordplay, which falls very short of the sense of scale it seems to be gunning for. And yes, sure, the story gives Wolverine a new relative… but it’s (a) from a self-cancelling timeline, (b) in Marvel Comics Presents<\/em>, and (c) from the writer who gave you hot claws, and whatever happened to them<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I like the idea of this story a lot more than the reality. The Marvel Comics Presents <\/em>format of short chapters is unavoidably episodic, and this sets itself up to use that format as a way of jumping through history on a grand scale, before swerving to take the story in a different direction instead. But that’s the formal stuff; the story itself hasn’t got much going on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, this went wrong. Marvel Comics Presents was a format that worked in the eighties and nineties – the original run made it to issue #175 – but the market is no longer so friendly to anthologies. Marvel put some well known creators on this book, and put a Wolverine story in the lead slot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"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":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4794","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4794"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4796,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4794\/revisions\/4796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}