The Outhouse - The Greatest Comic Book Forum

[Punchy]

This was a strange issue of an already strange comic book. The Defenders have been sent back to the 1960s Marvel Universe, but it seems to be a parallel Universe, and it’s not really explained too well as we start the issue after they’ve been wherever they are for a week or so. How did Iron Fist and She-Hulk manage to get jobs at ‘The Hydra Club’, what’s the deal with Frankenstein-Hitler? What was Nick Fury doing there so out in the open? What was with the crazy sky? Lots of unanswered questions. Luckily, the book is still a lot of fun, that’s the thing about a lot of Fraction’s work, while some of it might not really make sense immediately, there’s always a surface level of madcap fun that makes it easier to swallow. A spoonful of Steranko makes the medicine. The best things in this issue came from Fraction and McKelvie playing with the classic 1960s super-spy stuff and how cool Nick Fury was back then. McKelvie and Norton’s artwork was once again excellent, he’s a very good fit for this title, I particularly liked the double page spread of SHIELD busting in to save the day, and the panel with Nick Fury and Silver Surfer blasting at Hydra goons was a great image. In the end, Prester Omega warps the team, with Nick in tow, to another weird place, which will lead in to the introduction of Ant-Man to the title, and from the cover to #10, it looks like it’s Scott Lang Ant-Man, which is… not what I expected. So yeah, this was an issue of scenes that were individually great, but it didn’t really hang together all that well.