Welcome back to the Marvel Rundown! This week, the Rundown Crew (D. Morris, George Carmona 3rd, and Beau Q.) take a stab at Blood Hunt #1 and Get Fury #1, two of the more gruesome releases from the House of Ideas! Will they survive? Check out our SPOILER-LITE roundtable to find out!
What did you think of this week’s batch of fresh Marvel Comics, True Believers? The Beat wants to hear from you! Give us a shout-out, here in the comment section or over on social media @comicsbeat, and let us know what you’re thinking.
Blood Hunt #1
Writer: Jed MacKay
Artist: Pepe Larraz
Color Artist: Marte Gracia
Letterer: VC’s Cory Petit
Cover Artists: Pepe Larraz & Marte Gracia
The Beat: Welcome back everybody! So, what do we think of Blood Hunt #1?
D. Morris: I am a regular reader of Jed MacKay’s Marvel books and this was kind of an interesting read because none of those books were preludes for this opening issue. It’s certainly an interesting take to throw both your readers and your characters into the middle of a crisis with no build up.
Beau Q.: Yeah, this is Jed MacKay’s endgame lol– in that, he had to interrupt his Doctor Strange run, and dovetail his Vengeance of Moon Knight series to make this work. THOUGH, this just feels like the next carousel go-round of his Avengers run. All in all, I found Blood Hunt out to be kinda what you want from the opening shot of a Marvel crossover: snippets of cataclysm all across the world, reconverting of effort, Avengers caught off guard, new enemies, character deaths [possibly], a narrative twist to excite the scope of what’s to come, and a reading order checklist!
George Carmona 3rd: I wasn’t surprised by it, another big event, with crazy stakes and action that won’t have any real consequences. BUT I love Pepe Larraz’s art.
DM: George, I haven’t really kept track of any Marvel events in the last few years but also reading this I thought “Isn’t this the second dark related Marvel in the last ten years?” Who could forget Dark Ages from 2017?
GC3: It can also be that I’m not a big vampire fan, but we are still in the middle of the Fall of the House of X, so events can bog us down. And don’t get me started about Dark Ages.
DM: I almost forgot we’re going into this right after “Gang War” while “Fall of the House of X” goes on. It’s a little frustrating that MacKay’s Avengers run got hijacked by both an X-Men storyline and now this.
All of that said though, this is a runaway freight train of a first issue. It hits the ground running and doesn’t let you catch your breath even when it hits that final reveal. All frustrations of event fatigue and storyline highjacking, this is a lot of fun.
GC3: Seriously, MacKay gives us a solid start setting up the stakes of this Vampire takeover, and if you’re able to the Free Comic Book Day gives readers a view of other characters’ response to the Sundeath event.
The Beat: George, you mentioned it a bit ago, but I want to circle back and ask what we thought of Larraz’ work here?
GC3: Again, I love their storytelling, linework, and character design. The action moves and Marte Garcia’s coloring adds a magnificent texture to the art. Also, Blade’s fade is tight!
BQ: Larraz’s Avengers are all cast in voracious swings of desperation as they deal with this Sundeath bs. These are not images of heroes in triumph, but Marvel folks under attack, which is hard to show if they’re also adequately asswhooping hordes. I’m just glad Larraz has taken the Olivier Coipel/Leinil Yu spotlight at Marvel in that he’s this era’s Marvel house style!
DM: Yeah, Pepe Larraz does excellent work making this feel overwhelming for the heroes but not for the readers. His ability to stage and choreograph large scale action sequences really shines here. He also does a great job with drawing a lot of various characters “on model”. People who may not read Vengeance of Moon Knight, Avengers, or Doctor Strange won’t have issues recognizing current iterations of certain characters. Even if he doesn’t draw like him, his work here really makes me think of George Perez specifically Infinity Gauntlet #1. Just that ability to draw things on such a large scale but keep the storytelling clear so everything isn’t overwhelming.
BQ: I’m really digging how Larraz is panel stacking horizontally. You can see it best in the big fight where the next panel is either placed above or behind the next, which helps communicate the teamwork at play and the villain’s undermining– a kinda 1 step forward, 1 step back approach to page construction, if you will. Also, Larraz has gone back to some 90s styled tilt-shifting to his panels that turns every moment into a rhombus, which doesn’t gestate compositional beauty as much as jumbles the moments to evoke a scathing sense as they slash one right after another, which is a perfect metaphor for Blade in this event.
GC3: Blood Hunt’s strength lies in the art and crazy high stakes. I’ll hang around to see how MacKay gets out of this mess, specifically the ending of issue #1. Browse/Buy.
DM: Again, this is a freight train for the first issue of an event book. MacKay throws the characters into this massive conflict with little warning. Then we get to that ending which was kind of (and I say that very generously) set up by the most recent Blade series. I don’t know where MacKay is going with this event since again, very little of this has been set up at least in his books outside of vampires showing up in his Moon Knight run. But MacKay hasn’t let me down in any of his other books so far. It’s a strong BROWSE for me
BQ: As this is the big crossover event Marvel is taking into their summer convention season, I think come October, we’ll see some payoff in the form of a newly important Blade series! I’ve been iffy on the execution of any Big Two crossover event for a decade going, so Blood Hunt seems less IMPORTANT than superhero fun. Though, the Sundeath casts an interesting playspace for Marvel series to deal with, what with all the darkforce users turned into darkness shrouds, so let’s see how important Marvel wants Blood Hunt to be!
I’ll give it a BUY, but that’s because I love Blade. Welcome to the main event, Blade.
Get Fury #1
Writer: Garth Ennis
Artist: Jacen Burrows
Inker: Guillermo Ortego
Colorist: Nolan Woodard
Letterer: Rob Steen
Cover Artist: Dave Johnson
The Beat: Alright, what’d we think of this return to MAX comics for Marvel? This is their first new book since Punisher: Soviet in 2020.
GC3: I never read Punisher: Soviet, so I’m coming into this fresh and appreciating the “real world” timeline of these characters, very reminiscent of John Byrne’s Generations for DC.
DM: For a book titled Get Fury, there was way more Frank Castle/Punisher in this first issue than I expected. I wasn’t expecting this to be a sort of sequel to Punisher: Born. Ennis is hit or miss for me and this book was not on my wavelength outside of Jacen Burrows’ art.
GC3: Burrows’ art reminded me of Steve Dillion, a frequent collaborator with Ennis, specifically the gory violence in this issue. Don’t have food in your mouth.
DM: Oh you’re right, it was very reminiscent of Steve Dillon. I actually thought it was Goran Parlov, one of Ennis’ other collaborators, until I looked at the end credits. But Dillon is a much better comparison.
GC3: Sidenote to the cover art, I love Dave Johnson’s art in general, but this homage to the Punisher’s appearance in Amazing Spider-Man #129 is a true chef’s kiss.
BQ: While Ennis’ characterization of the Vietnamese War through the Marvel MAX lens has been efficiently strong for two decades now, and while Burrows’ thick, outlined and grit-detailed world is the perfect companion to telling such a story– at the risk of being reductive– why tf is Marvel publishing another one of these ??
DM: Beau, I’m kind of with you on this. I don’t want to sound too harsh but also I really want to know who is the audience for this book. It’s unrelentingly bleak and violent at a time when there’s multiple military actions occurring where we see unrelentingly bleak images daily.
GC3: But isn’t that the point of most of Ennis’s work to comment on the BS of war and the glorification of heroes who kill.
BQ: I never ascribed to Ennis’ work as a detraction of war when his work clearly revels in its clinical mind-state. I’ve found most of the target demographic for war stories are folks who’ve lived through them, and might want something to relate to or make sense of what they’ve felt, though by a book’s end, the takeaway I hear from war story aficionados is usually “war is bad in xyz way” or, worse, a doubling down and cold justification of what war humans did to one another. It ain’t great for comics, much less superhero comics.
DM: My issue with Ennis is that in trying to be anti-war, and it’s an issue many storytellers have, is that he also makes it look really cool.
GC3: That’s a solid point.
DM: On top of that he also put this horrific violence into the framework of a slick action story. Even Frank Castle will end up doing horrifying things to the NVA, and I’m sure because it’s Ennis he will do horrifying things, it will still end up being “heroic”.
GC3: And here’s where I’m going to say this works because I’m here for Fury and the Punisher can kick rocks. Fury gets a kind of hero worship, but he’s as bad as the Punisher when it comes to killing, so I like this depiction of how dirty Nick can get.
DM: I really hope for people reading this series issue two has more Fury because once again George has changed my mind and the idea of a dirty Nick Fury as the chief CIA military guy in Vietnam is intriguing. Again I think my biggest issue here is that Fury is in this but so much of the focus in this issue is on Frank Castle.
BQ: Oh, I ain’t reading this series again. Not when Ennis is having characters fire off AAPI slurs and Burrows is drawing an old Vietnamese general as Joe Biden. SKIP.
GC3: I don’t see Biden and I literally opened up the book, but yeah if you’re not a big fan of either character, SKIP.
DM: I didn’t quite see that when I first read it Beau, and now I can’t unsee it. However, the opening and framing device with the general really left a really bad taste in my mouth. I get this is a historical piece of fiction and I know Ennis writes satirically. Still everything about this is Ennis at their most unpleasant. So this is a hard SKIP for me.
The Beat: Thanks everyone for coming by tonight, see ya next week for another classic Marvel Rundown!
Next Week: Blood Hunt takes hold across the Marvel Universe!
Is there info as to why Marvel decided to take a big dump on the digital comics readers, making the Red Band Edition available as a physical copy only??
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