Marauders #26: (un)Even Stevens

As you can probably discern from the title of this review, Marauders #26 was a steeply uneven book. Half of the story was moving, fun, and bursting with excellent character work. The other half seems to exist solely to fill out pages, or else because Duggan realized, twenty six issues in, that he hasn’t actually used Boby for anything and wrote these pages as an attempt at shoring up the deficit. That might seem a little bit harsh, but I can’t emphasize enough how jarring it was to switch from totally stakes-free, unnecessary battling with a shoe-horned opponent into a story featuring character work so good that it made me freaking like Harry Leland. This issue is what you get when you staple a crappy book and a great book together without reading either of them, and I have no idea at all how to process that experience.

So I’m going to quickly skim over Bobby suddenly remembering that he’s an Omega mutant (and shouting it at us) in order to talk about what’s happening with a character who has been dead long enough, within the text, to have a previously-unknown son grow from infancy into his mid-twenties. 

Duggan writes Harry Leland absolutely perfectly. This is how he always should have been written: a giant, good-tempered, roly-poly ass kicker with a temper as large as his faulty heart. This is the first time that we’ve seen the effects (the psychological trauma) that resurrection would have on people who have been dead for, well, long enough for a fetus to grow into an adult with a lust for vengeance. Hickman wrote about this in one of his interminable infographics, but we’ve never seen it on the page. Now that we have, Harry’s trauma reads as deeply authentic.

It’s frustrating that this story is so unbalanced. Had Duggan cut the Fing Fang Foom attack (or at least granted Iceman the same level of authorial care that he did Leland) the story would have been stronger. It’s a little bit disheartening, for Iceman fans, to be thrown this tattered scrap right before the series comes to a close. 

When it comes to the art, Matteo Lolli’s line work continues to be uniformly strong, and undeniably beautiful. His figures have tremendous energy, and the details are packed into every panel. The whole book ‘acts’, from ship, to boot, to the hem of a cape draped across a chair. The visuals never fail, and are continuously satisfying.

Rain Beredo’s colors are clear, lucid and engaging, shifting the emotional tone of each scene. This story is lovely to look at, whether the narrative sails or fails.

This issue was a little bit uneven, but the emotional heft of the story, and the lovely art, carry the reader through storm and through calm.