released 01 jul 08 / last mod 01 jul 08 / greg goebel / public domain
* I was never heavily into Marvel comics when I was a kid, back into the 1960s, but I was familiar with them to know most of the parts of their kit: Spider-Man, Daredevil, Nick Fury, Fantastic Four, X-Men, and so on. As a result, when I was visiting the library and ran across the graphic novel the MARVEL 1602, a retelling of the Marvel saga in the 17th century, I was intrigued enough to take it home.
MARVEL 1602 -- written by Neil Gaiman, with artwork by Andy Kubert with help from Richard Isanove, opens with an aged and ailing Queen Elizabeth in conference with her intelligence officer, Sir Nicholas Fury, and her doctor, Stephen Strange. The Queen is most concerned about strange portents of the weather and asks Sir Nicholas to investigate. Fury, working with his young assistant Peter Parquah, who seems to have a fascination with spiders, assigns his best agent, a blind troubadour named Matthew Murdoch who has an astonishing agility, on a mission to help uncover the mystery.
In the meantime, Virginia Dare, the first child born in the Virginia Colony, is on the way east across the colony, on a lobbying mission to the court. She is protected by an enigmatic, guttural blonde Indian warrior named Rojhaz. In Spain, a man with angelic wings, one of the "witchbreed" with strange powers, is to be burned by the Grand Inquisitor but is rescued by a band of witchbreed from England, which has granted them safe haven, led by the crippled Carlos Javier. And an old man is on the way from Jerusalem, carrying an object that few would find noteworthy -- but he knows it is of world-shaking importance.
MARVEL 1602 is a neatly-written, tightly-plotted, and imaginative adventure, with very competent -- maybe not brilliant but no complaints -- artwork. The only problem with it is that it would not make that much sense to anyone who wasn't familiar with the Marvel pantheon of super-heroes; I wasn't so familiar with it that I didn't have to consult Wikipedia here and there to get my faces straight. (No, Virginia Dare is not really a Marvel character.) Beyond that, MARVEL 1602 is fine reading and highly recommended.
