{"id":6352,"date":"2021-02-05T20:54:30","date_gmt":"2021-02-05T20:54:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=6352"},"modified":"2021-02-05T20:54:30","modified_gmt":"2021-02-05T20:54:30","slug":"king-in-black-marauders-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=6352","title":{"rendered":"King in Black: Marauders #1"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>KING IN BLACK: MARAUDERS #1
\n“Queen in Red”
\nby Gerry Duggan, Luke Ross & Carlos Lopez<\/strong><\/p>\n

So this is a thing. Why is this a thing?<\/p>\n

I will grant you, I am not the most receptive audience for a “King in Black” tie-in. To say I couldn’t care less about Knull is a considerable overstatement of my level of interest in Knull. He doesn’t even interest me as a Venom<\/em> concept – Venom doesn’t cry out for a mythology involving alien space demons. But hey, Venom<\/em> isn’t my concern.<\/p>\n

What’s the thinking behind line-wide crossovers like this? There used to be a fairly obvious strategy for event comics. You had a central storyline in a core miniseries, and maybe one or two central books. And then you ran a bunch of tie-ins in assorted ongoing titles – maybe side quests, maybe just things happening in the margins of the main story. And why did you do all those tie-ins? Mainly, to sell more copies of the tie-in books.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But increasingly the format is to label the tie-in issues as not part of the regular series, and off to the side somewhere, and basically Not Proper Issues. Which is commendably honest, I suppose, but does that sell? If we’re not doing this to sell comics to enthusiastic event followers and sighing completists, why\u00a0are<\/em> we doing it? At all?<\/p>\n

King in Black: Marauders<\/em> #1 is by regular writer Gerry Duggan. It features the regular cast, doing Marauders-type things. It’s drawn by Luke Ross, who isn’t a regular on\u00a0Marauders<\/em> proper, but he’s perfectly at home here. He gets the swashbuckling vibe nicely enough, and he does a pretty decent Kitty, albeit one with particularly uncontrollable hair. This could have been published quite happily as an issue of\u00a0Marauders<\/em>, which makes you wonder why it wasn’t. It would just have been a profoundly inconsequential one.<\/p>\n

Obviously, “aliens symbiote thingies invade Earth” isn’t a story that has anything much to do with\u00a0Marauders<\/em>. There’s a tried and tested solution to doing tie-ins with this sort of thing, which is just to do your own story and use the crossover as the generic crisis that launches the plot. That way you let another book do the heavy lifting of setting up the plot, you tick the box of making the crossover part of your story, and you can still pretty much get on with telling a story of your own.<\/p>\n

Which is… sort of the approach taken here.<\/p>\n

The starting premise here is that Knull has already invaded Earth, swarmed the planet with symbiotes (mostly dragon thingies, from the look of it), and surrounded the planet in a symbiote shell (so it’s night everywhere). As the story starts, the Marauders are on their way to New York to help rescue Cyclops and Storm – which sounds like we’re going to be connecting directly to the plot of\u00a0King in Black<\/em> itself. But that, it turns out, is a story for another day. Instead, the Marauders are going to divert to deal with a ship in distress.<\/p>\n

So the Marauders save a passing boat from symbiote dragons, and rescue the crew. But wouldn’t you know it, it turns out to be a baddie ship, with a whole load of trafficked people down in the hold. The Marauders figure that out, rescue the prisoners, dump the baddies in a desert (where… I guess there aren’t any dragons around?), and then decide what to do with the trafficking victims.<\/p>\n

Since the Marauders are meant to be on a rescue mission, Kate’s initial plan is to drop the victims off in New Jersey, but they want to go to Canada. Taking them to Krakoa is not an option for political reasons, and so they wind up being offered asylum on Island M. And Magneto shows up to give them a little speech about how magnanimous Krakoa is – which it sounds like we’re meant to agree with – while explaining that the refugees will still be booted off the island as soon as the crisis is over.<\/p>\n

There are quite a few things that don’t really work here. For one thing, it’s very obviously a story being told against the backdrop of a generic crisis. You could have done literally this same story as an\u00a0Empyre<\/em> tie-in – and, incidentally, two generic alien invasion crossovers in such a short space of time is too many. All you do is swap out the symbiotes for wandering Cotati and give the Marauders some other random assignment that they have to get back to. In fact, it would have worked better in\u00a0Empyre<\/em>, because the general vibe of\u00a0King in Black<\/em> is much more apocalyptic. There’s a real disconnect between “alien dragons prowling the symbiote-encased world” and “shall we drop you off in New Jersey?” In fact, for the most part everyone acts as if the whole thing is just a passing inconvenience.<\/p>\n

For another, the book seems way too ready to congratulate the mutants simply for being willing to put up a group of desperate people for a short period until a global crisis passes. It’s not like the Krkaoans offer them a permanent home or refuge or anything. It might work better if there was some sense that dropping them off in New Jersey really would have been a safe option, but it feels like we’re expected to give Magneto a medal simply because he didn’t boot them over the side and tell them to swim for it.<\/p>\n

But also… the plot doesn’t work. Is the world meant to be overrun with Knull’s symbiotes, except for a few remote locations? If so, then there was no real choice but to take in the refugees; dropping them off in New Jersey was never an option; and dumping the slavers in the middle of a desert with no shelter or equipment was really just an elaborate way of killing them. But if that’s not the case – if the world is largely safe outside the major flashpoints – then why didn’t they just take the refugees to Canada, where they wanted to go in the first place? They took the\u00a0slavers<\/em> onto Krakoa en route to dumping them in the desert. What’s the problem with letting the\u00a0refugees <\/em>onto Krakoa en route to Vancouver?<\/p>\n

Duggan’s a good enough writer to make it feel like this all makes sense, but the more I think about it, the more it really doesn’t. It’s okay as a fill-in issue, but it’s really not much more than that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KING IN BLACK: MARAUDERS #1 “Queen in Red” by Gerry Duggan, Luke Ross & Carlos Lopez So this is a thing. Why is this a thing? I will grant you, I am not the most receptive audience for a “King in Black” tie-in. To say I couldn’t care less about Knull is a considerable overstatement […]<\/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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6352","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=6352"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6355,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6352\/revisions\/6355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}