2 out of 5

This is very much “of the time,” and maybe it makes me sort of gag.  I picked up the series because of Kot.  I figured Marvel had snatched him up after the praised he’d received on ‘Zero,’ but then I found he’d actually been bouncing around the big 2 stables a bit in the recent past.  Still, his name suddenly appearing on two prominent #1 launches – this title and Iron Patriot – I would think is due to that elevated name awareness.  What I was expecting… coming off of the rather in-your-face revolution vibe of ‘Zero…’ I can’t articulate.  I mean, glancing through Secret A, it was obvious there was a strong vein of humor pulsing throughout, so I don’t think I was thinking it’d be ‘Zero’ in spandex.  I was just following a writer whose story I’d enjoyed onto a new title.  The funky cover from ‘Zero’ artist Tradd Moore helped, and there’s M.O.D.O.K., so that helped too.  But whatever the Marvel mandate that requires all narratives been written in a “three seconds previously” format for setting up jokes, with constant, timely quips that mention NSA and have constant internal snarky monologues (oh, right, it’s the Marvel Cinematic Universe mandate, methinks), it just feels so tired, and it doesn’t feel natural.  In the first two issues, our Secret Avengers must fly a car into space to rescue Coulson and Fury while Maria Hill defends herself against an assassin; issue 3 has the crew stopping a talking bomb from “rewriting reality.”  Kot is going for high action poppy kicks (pitched as ‘Michael Bay directs an episode of Breaking Bad as it meets Arrested Development” in the first issues editorial, which, yeah, is pretty duffin’ mainstream for a dude who’s posting links to a free Death Grips album in his indie comic), but it’s incredibly unnatural (these are the movie versions of characters, not the Marvel U some of us may know) and worse, he stretches for jokes, or just bumbles the dialogue to try and keep momentum (Issue #2, prefacing a flying car to spaceship gag: “But we’re in a car and we’re flying to space and cars don’t fly in space…” – and yet, that car being discussed is flying through our atmosphere just fine.  But space… space is freaking ridiculous, ya’ll.)

Michael Walsh’s art initially has a kind of rushed verve to it, almost the slick clarity of Chris Samnee, but then you notice it’s been twenty pages with no backgrounds.  It ends up being rather boring to look at, unfortunately, hidden behind those dynamic covers.

This opens up a larger discussion of whether roping in new readers via this rewriting of a fictional reality to be more in line with another fictional reality is a good or bad thing…  On the one hand, Marvel has been bringing in a slew of indie creators, on the other hand, it seems to encourage those same creators to put out pretty mindless pap like Secret Avengers.