Little Pieces Parts: Fear Itself #7 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review contains spoilers. It’s a comic book where the good guys win. You have been warned.

Fear Itself #7, the ultimate chapter (Except for Fear Itself 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3, and don’t forget the Shattered Heroes followup) of Marvel’s tentpole event crossover of 2011 (Except for Spider-Island and X-Men: Schism), has everything you want from a book like this: a giant fight scene. Costume changes. A major character death. Iconic characters acting all iconic.

Yep, Fear Itself covers all the bases that the granddaddy of all crossover events, Secret Wars, threw down. It checks off all the boxes that Crisis On Infinite Earths put on the checklist. It mixes in all the ingredients that Civil War put in the recipe.

(Rob: Omit needless words. – Amanda)

Fine. It’s fucking formulaic, okay?

We start off with Captain America being all Captain America-y, embodying the image of the World War II gyrene holding the line against impossible odds with only two rifles… while simultaneously never acting less Captain America-y by standing in the street and using two rifles to blow away all comers. So where the first Crisis made Superman scream “I want to kill him for this!”, writer Matt Fraction has upped the ante by making Cap literally try to kill people for… whatever “this” is. If he’d had an extra couple of panels, he probably would’ve had Cap scream “Get some, noob!” while teabagging a Nazi robot.

We then go straight to Iron Man returning from the forges of Odin’s weaponmakers with new costumes for everyone, like a super Tim Gunn with 90 percent less flaming and 7,000 percent more stink of bourbon. So where Secret Wars shook things up by giving Spider-Man a new, muted costume, Fraction says, “Fuck it: new pants for everyone!”

I particularly like Wolverine’s new suit:

He looks like an armadillo with space gonorrhea. “I’m the best there is at oh Christ it burns no wonder they call her Phoenix Jeeeesus – ”

And then there’s the obligatory epic fight scene. It’s The Avengers versus the Worthy – Juggernaut, Absorbing Man, the Grey Gargoyle, and Titania. All big-name, classic villains from Marvel history. All armed with hammers like Thor. So it should be awesome, right? And it probably would be if we spent more than eight panels and one splash page seeing it (Yes, I counted). The rest of the combat? Thor versus the Serpent and Cap versus the new Red Skull… both villains introduced when? Yup, during Fear Itself. Seriously: who gives a shit about the Serpent or the chick Red Skull? It’s like a porno flick that focuses on the van driver who dropped off the cable guy.

If you didn’t glean it from the title, a major theme of the book has been the power of irrational fear and how it can cause us to turn against each other when the real enemy is elsewhere. Which means that when the tide of battle starts to turn toward the Avengers when ordinary people stop being afraid and join in the battle, it’s because Fraction is making an important story point, and not because the idea of Manny Ipshitz from Queens chucking beer bottles at The Juggernaut is fucking hilarious. Yeah, thanks for the assist Manny, but I think The Mighty Avengers have this one handled. Why don’t you toddle over to Maple Street, we hear there are monsters due over there.

And then Thor dies. From what? Dunno; we see him stab the Serpent in the head and then Thor kinda falls over. He’s not bleeding or anything, and in fact, in the entire fight? We never see Thor get hit. Not one. Fucking. Time.

Sure, we see him grappled a couple times, and we see him prying open the Serpent’s jaws so maybe he got bit while we weren’t watching, but the only time we see him even remotely injured is at the very beginning of the fight, when he’s caught in the backlash of some fire breath that wasn’t even fired AT Thor – it was to deflect his hammer. So what killed Thor? Fucked if I know, but if I had to venture a guess, he’s the first God that was killed by editorial edict and / or shitty storytelling.

Finally, after six months, seven main issues, God knows how many spinoff and crossover issues and probably a hundred and a half dollars of comics, the story ends. How? With a fat bald guy lending his neighbor a lawnmower. Seriously. Meaning… what, exactly? That if you’re nice to your neighbors you won’t be killed by a giant hammer? Sorry, that lesson didn’t work to save my neighbors, and it’s not working for me now.

Look, I have to give Fraction some credit for at least trying to bring a greater theme to a big event comic than “Stuff ‘splodes n’ dudes get kicked,” but that theme comes from somewhere else, as does every story beat I can remember from Fear Itself. Let’s face reality: Thor died because someone always dies in one of these things (In Crisis it was Supergirl and The Flash. In Civil War it was Captain America. Final Crisis? Batman). People got new weapons because they always get new costumes in crossovers (Flamebird in Crisis. Spider-Man in both Secret Wars and Civil War).

I could go on and on, but I have beer and Batman: Arkham City on the XBox waiting on me, so let’s stick this pig: Fear Itself exists because it was June and Marvel needed an event book. It did everything an event book was supposed to do, to the point where you could see it coming… or at least you could when they bothered to show you. It fulfilled it’s intended purpose: to sell more comic books. And now it’s over, meaning Fraction can go back to writing Casanova.

So I guess the ending was worth something after all.