Dark Reign: New Nation

As part of the Dark Reign storyline, Marvel put out a book of five 8-page previews of new series or minis set to launch within the next few months. What's fascinating is how each of these writers handle the task of getting a comic into about a third of the normal length.

War Machine: Crossing the Line (Greg Pak) and Skrull Kill Krew: Breakfast in America (Adam Felber) are both pretty standard short stories. They're both simple and true to the premise of their respective books. In War Machine, Iron Man's friend James Rhodes goes looking for bad guys to kill because he's a soldier and has no problem with killing. For this 8-page short, he finds a bad guy and kills him. Skrull Kill Krew is pretty much the same thing, only the main dude's killing Skrulls. Again, the story is short and predictable, solid writing with a few good jokes but nothing outstanding.

In Secret Warriors: Declaration, Brian Michael Bendis and Jonathan Hickman give us a glimpse inside Nick Fury's head. Fury's new team has already been introduced through a sort of backdoor pilot in Bendis' New Avenger series, so the short just sets the tone for the ongoing book. Rather than trying to cram a story into 8 pages, this is more of a vignette - if it were fanfic, it would be a drabble. It works well for what it is; Bendis writes good dialogue, so we get to see a classic Captain America WWII speech with a Band of Brothers feel. It's also interesting to see an old soldier/spy approaching the 21st century War on Terror with his 1940s idealism intact.

Agents of Atlas: The Heist was probably my favorite story in the book. I met Gorilla Man in X-Men: First Class and was looking forward to seeing him in action with his team. Jeff Parker really used the 8-page format brilliantly, introducing a group of people I was expecting to be superheroes, yet here they are stealing all the gold from Fort Knox. The reason for the heist ties into the Dark Reign overplot, but we get a full adventure that sets the group up for what's to come. It works as a short story because the idea is so simple; we get 6 pages to see how they pull off the heist and a couple pages at the end to find out why. It's not a standard plot for a super team, and it works beautifully.

The story that actually got me to pick up the book, and the one I'll probably follow in series form, was New Avengers: The Reunion: Suspicion (Jim McCann). It's about the aftermath of Secret Invasion, with Ronin and Mockingbird reunited. I was intrigued by interviews with the writer that showed he was very excited about the relationship dynamics between these two, and, as previously blogged, I liked what I saw of Mockingbird's return from years of captivity on a Skrull homeworld. The story is a prelude of what's to come rather than a self-contained plot, and it does an interesting job of showing us Mockingbird's mental state. She's returned to a changed Earth, where some friends have died, and others have fought one another in a Civil War. Her husband is just glad she's home and ready to act like nothing happened, but she's working through some PTSD and trying to figure out who she is and what the world is now. I came into this short hoping for a great superhero love story, and I still think and hope that's where Reunion is headed, but what I got was a great psychological study. Now I'm not just excited about where Ronin and Mockingbird are headed as a couple. I'm equally invested in where Mockingbird's journey is taking her alone and how she'll balance her past and her future.

- JC