3 out of 5
You have one of your great, modern-day Marvel architects – Jonathan Hickman – trying to revitalize Marvel’s cosmic side, and thus kicks off “Imperial,” which I will not attempt to recap here in any way; whether or not you like Hickman, or Marvel events, there was a smart move here: to cast back to Marvel’s prior biggest cosmic book, Annihilation, and get one of the grandmasters of that scene to participate: Dan Abnett. And Dan Abnett, on the Imperial spinoff Imperial Guardians, does what he does so well: wrangles his British comics-borne sensibility of working in small doses across sprawling storylines (e.g. 2000 AD), and/or on making underdog characters fun and immediately compelling (e.g. Marvel UK), and also applies his familiarity with space soap opera from Warhammer, to thread his way through the often overwrought nature of a Big Two event/crossover books and make it accessible. While Imperial Guardians also does the Big Two kowtowing common of Dan’s writing for those imprints – doing overly quippy dialogue; falling back on splash page fights frequently – the aforementioned skills keep it fresh, especially the way our titular team essentially stars in a series of one-shots, making each issue a compact shot of banter, world-building, and actionry.
In short, Imperial Guardians are a space special ops team, put together on the sly by Inhuman Maximus for the Galactic Council to keep the peace between races like the Shi’ar and Skrulls… or something. It doesn’t really matter: you can read the call sheet up front to know who our heroes are, and each book consists of a cold open where the Guardians are mid-rescue or mid-plot foilage, then we flash back to Maximus giving them their impossible mission for that issue, then we build back up to the cold open moment. It moves fast, and the Marvel quipiness is well countered by the missions each being distinct, interesting, and actually employing each person in the group effectively and with personality.
Some things prevent this from fully landing, however. I’m not exactly sure why Dan decided to include “journal entries” – little inset panels where each character talks to a video journal, i.e. talks to the reader – except that it avoids swapping the POV narration; I definitely appreciate that, but it also causes a lot of relatively unnecessary clutter. Like I think just having Gamora’s narration would have sufficed (and maybe added some intrigue, not knowing what others are thinking), as Dan is practiced at giving us plenty of insight on the others through context and subtext. But the journal entries otherwise feel very forced to be confessional or clever, and double-down on story beats like Netflix’s now infamous second screen writing style, making me wonder if this was an editorial inclusion. Adding to the negative effect is artist Marcelo Ferreira’s loose style, which, though fun for the main storyline, with his wild, Image Comics angles and cartoonishly morphing models reminding of artists like Larry Stroman, or anime-ized Chris Bachalo, does not know how to manage these diary panels in a way that they don’t just add noise. Characters break out of the panels, or are too dramatically posed. A guest issue by Eduardo Pansica is much more consistent in this regard – and overall, as Ferreira seems to lose focus towards the end of each issue, with that cartoonish morphing starting to go way off; they’re at least guarded by Jay Leisten’s clarifying inks, to a degree.
But also impactful is that the series got canceled. We’ve always had canceled series, of course, but the Marvel of the 2020s seems especially put out to give books a try, and I suppose it feels more noteworthy that a big event got the axe – Imperial was kiboshed, and thus Imperial Guardians. Abnett seemed to have enough warning to wrap things up a bit (and bless the call-backs he worked in as part of that), but there was definitely work being done to thread some things throughout the initial issue that never get the chance to come to any fruition, rendering this an enjoyable, if ultimately weightless, read.
