The Final Countdown: Secret Avengers #20 Review

Unlike every other comics Web site in the world, we here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives are not putting together any lists of the best and worst comics of 2011. This is partially because we only came into existence in September, partially because when we review books we try to tell you what we think in a little more depth than a star rating or an idiotic list of weekly winners and losers, and partially because before we started this site we read many, if not all, of our comics on Wednesday nights while shitfaced at the bar next to our local comic store.

But if I were compiling a list of my favorite comics of 2011, Warren Ellis’s Secret Avengers would have a rock solid place on it. It has been a series of big idea, one-and-done issues with rotating, top-shelf artists, and an overriding concept – missions to stop extinction-level events that no one can ever know about – that cheerfully lends itself to big stories that can flip the bird to ongoing continuity. And this week’s #20 continues the solid run… although I readily admit that more than once, the stories have felt a little, shall we say, recycled.

A couple months ago when I reviewed Secret Avengers #18, I reveled in the fact that Ellis acknowledged that the problem with time travel is that if you just move through time, the planet would have moved, and you would pop out of your time tunnel or your hot tub or your DeLorean in the empty vacuum of space to die with blood boiling in your brain and leaving Elizabeth Shue available for Karate Kid II after all.

But clearly the idea of time travel stuck in Ellis’s head, because this issue is a flat-out time travel tale. It gets around the whole you’d-be-sucking-vacuum-while-your-eyeballs-froze-and-burst aspect of time travel via the simple expediency of saying, “Yeah: this time machine also moves you through space,” which is all I ask from a time travel story other than the obligatory Elizabeth Shue handjob.

The plot is simple: on a mission to stop the Shadow Council from opening a magic portal, Captain America, Sharon Carter and War Machine are killed, and Black Widow needs to use a time travel device to change the outcome, but indirectly, to avoid destroying the timestream. Which means that she can’t go back and warn them not to show up, and that she can’t do anything that directly and appreciatively changes the events that occurred leading up to the moment they were killed. So when I said “simple,” I clearly meant “bafflingly fucking complicated.”

So what we have here is Black Widow moving throughout forty some-odd years of Marvel history, convincing some people to make minor tweaks to the weapons the Shadow Council uses and the time travel device she’s using, moving back and forth through time making tweaks and trying not to mess things up… and that’s when I realized – just the way I realized that issue #16 felt just like NextWave – that: holy shit, this is fucking Primer with superpowers. But then again, so what? Primer was a good fucking movie, and you could do worse than riff on the best time travel story since Jules Verne said, “Betcha in the future we’re all fucked!” And then he got a handjob from Elizabeth Shue. Or Christopher Lloyd. I forget.

Alex Maleev’s art delivers the way it always does, with the only question being whether or not you want to take that delivery. His stuff is a style all it’s own: somewhat abstracted and heavily stylized, and if it reminds me of anyone at all, it’s maybe David Mack. Having said that, his stuff on this issue seems to be a little bit more conventional than what I remember from his run with Bendis on Daredevil, or even on the current Scarlet, and it felt like he was making more of an effort to be more mainstream while maintaining his art’s general look.

Maleev does a somewhat nifty gimmick in the first sequence where the Widow is 44 years in the past where he draws in the style of a three-panel newspaper comic strip… the problem is that Ellis wrote a similar draw-it-retro sequence in his Stormwatch run 12 or so years ago, and unlike that book, Maleev’s “comic strip” style is his normal art, only in black and white. Still, it makes the look interesting, and if you like his art, you’ll like this…, and if you’re not familiar with his stuff, this is probably a better entry point than many.

This book doesn’t have a ton of action in it, but that’s okay because it’s a time travel story, which are generally about ideas unless you’ve cast Kirk Douglas and have borrowed an aircraft carrier. Like all the best time travel stories, it establishes it’s own rules and follows them explicitly. It has heartbreaking character moments. It has dialogue like, “My time gun will send your heart to be eaten by dinosaurs!” and “This is my sanctum of sorrow, where I drunkenly bemoan the lack of really big stuff to kill these days.”

And it does it all in twenty pages.

Ellis has one more issue on Secret Avengers. If you’re not already on board, you owe it to yourself to get there. This is, unofficially, one of my top ten comics of the year.