THE DEFENDERS
They’re on TV and now they’re back where it all began, too – in comic books.
Marvel is bringing out its creative big guns for this timely team book. But while David Marquez’s style of art sells The Defenders as a tough, mostly grounded series, Brian Michael Bendis’s script is weak.
D-list dastard (and one time bestie of Luke Cage) Diamondback has returned from the dead with two goals in mind. First, he intends to fill the power void left by the Kingpin’s recent retirement (Wilson Fisk has apparently gone straight and is now making a play for the Businessman Most Likely To Appear On Rogue Traders award); secondly he intends to wipe out the Defenders.
The book is, naturally, focused on the TV line-up of the perennial superteam: Luke Cage, Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Iron Fist. Four against one might not seem like bad odds, but the ambiguous appearance of the Punisher and Black Cat – not to mention Diamondback’s newly acquired superpowers – just serve to complicate matters.
This is a straightforward, enjoyable street-level scrapper. It’s packed with kinetic action and it looks fantastic, thanks to Marquez’s clean visuals and inventive layouts. One memorable splash sees a gang of crooks getting their asses handed to them by Daredevil, without us ever actually seeing The Man Without Fear himself, just his spinning baton. Likewise Justin Ponsor’s colours are dark but not drab, making this a vibrant and colourful take on New York.
Where things go awry is in Bendis’s script. The big theme of the comic so far is that these people have been working apart for too long and need to come back together if they’re going to be a credible superteam. Unfortunately, each of the first three issues follows a similar pattern: someone goes looking for Diamondback, gets beaten up and ends up in hospital (this is a good book for fans of Night Nurse frowning). The dialogue, too, is often repetitious, info-dumpy or of the tone deaf “Diamondback is back” variety. Speaking of whom, the bejewelled gangster never feels like a particularly menacing threat. He spends much of these issues chatting with Black Cat, and the mystery around his resurrection is dull. As characters in the comic keep pointing out, that sort of thing is now par for the course in the Marvel universe. The Defenders is a fun read that makes a decent-enough jumping on point for fans hooked in by the Netflix show. It’s just a shame that, on the basis of these issues, there’s little more to it.
It’s packed with kinetic action, but the script goes awry
The original Defenders lineup, in 1971’s Marvel Feature #1, was very different: Hulk, Doctor Strange and Sub-Mariner.