This Is About Fights: Versus #1 Review

Versus #1 takes the Avengers Vs. X-Men event, strips out the backstory, the plot contrivances and the other useless crap that is being pounded into this event to make it hang together as a story, and it leaves us with the core idea which is all that almost anyone gives a tin shit about in this event: superheroes kicking the shit out of each other.

Let me offer an analogy: let’s say that Avengers Vs. X-Men is a Grateful Dead show. If that’s the case, then Versus is the smelly guy in the parking lot selling hits of acid for five bucks a whack: in other words, it’s far more entertaining, and if you’re honest with yourself, it’s the real reason you decided to attend the main event in the first place.

This book is fucking fun. It is meant to be fun, and it knows that it’s fun; any comic that opens on its recap page (and interesting choice for a first issue) with…

This book is about AWESOME BRAWLING! You want PLOT? LOOK ELSEWHERE, CHUM. You want a KNOCK-DOWN, DRAG-OUT WHUPPIN’? WE GOT YOU COVERED.

…is a book whose only ambitions vis a vis obtaining an Eisner Award to to snatch one out of Joe Sacco’s hands and use it to beat Grant Morrisson about the head, neck and face.

This comic book will not make you smarter. But what it will do it provide answers to many schoolyard arguments, and it will do so while providing solid, situationally-accurate character work and entertaining dialogue. This book opens with the Jason Aaron-written and Adam Kubert-drawn battle between Magneto and Iron Man. Now, be honest: when it comes to matchup battles between superheroes, Magneto vs. Iron Man has to be one of the gimmes that everyone wants to see play out.

And Aaron fucking nails it… up to a point. Sure, he addresses what would seem to be the obvious questions about such a matchup – for example, how a dude in a suit of armor with “iron” in his name might stand up to the master of magnetism (and my initial advise of “offer Magneto a blowjob!” that I screeched at the inside of the comic went, thankfully, unheeded). But he also gets at the cores of both characters while the whole thing is happening, and in the case of Iron Man, in a way that I’d never really specifically considered before: that Iron Man’s real power is having a ridiculous amount of money to throw at problems. Which is a take that is rarely put front and center, at least not in the heat of a battle, and which I found refreshing, and almost enough to allow me to gloss over what felt like a truly disappointing and copout ending.

Seriously, the ending of this battle felt like watching a 2012 Red Sox game, where one side doesn’t win so much as the other loses… or worse, like a Don King fight where the local sports book has taken a statistically significant amount of action involving the fourth round. With that said, when it’s the close of a brawl where Iron Man siphons power from the magnetic field of Jupiter and quips, “There’s a whole new master of magnetism in town,” I’m willing to forgive a certain amount. Particularly considering there’s another fight on he ticket to cleanse the palate from the end of this one (I still, however, want to start yelling, “Fix! The fix is in!”).

That battle is Namor Vs. Thing, which on paper is a wretched mismatch that makes no sense at all. The concept of an earth-based guy against a water-based guy – even when one has just about the strength of the Hulk – seems like a bad idea on it’s face unless one of them is calling out, “Marco!” But what writer Kathryn Immonen brings out in her character writing, and which makes this an ingenious and entertaining little fight story, is that it is a battle between an arrogant, narcissistic monarch, and a blue-collar joe accustomed to working with his hands. This mismatch leads to some great call and response dialogue, which is enough to get past the fact that how The Thing could breathe underwater is barely, and disappointingly, explained (at least to anyone who watched Adam Savage try to breathe underwater from a tire stem on Mythbusters).

Look: this comic is popcorn entertainment. It is violent and fun and overblown, with a sense of humor about itself (The “AvX Fun Facts” every few panels, including things like, “Iron Man likes to exaggerate,” and, “This Helicarrier repair will cost $3,200,067” were a clever wink-and-nod addition) and work by a couple of top-shelf artists. But it distills pretty much everything that anyone really wants from Avengers Vs. X-Men into one shot. Is it high art? Fuck no, but that’s why distillation is cool; there is fine wine, and there is White Lightning. Versus #1 is White Lightning: it’s bad for you, but it’s fun and it kicks. Check it out.