Blade has a daughter who’s gonna be a hero. Moira McTaggart, erstwhile mutant savior and now number one mutant enemy, creeps out on Mary Jane Watson. And those adorable Eternals commit a wee bit of attempted genocide. That’s right: it’s Free Comic Book Day 2022. A.X.E.: Judgement Day, story by Kieron Gillen, art by Dustin Weaver, colors by Marte Gracia, letters by Cory Pettit; Blade story by Danny Lore, art by Karen S. Darboe, colors by Ian Herring, letters once again by Cory Pettit; Moira vs. MJ story by Gerry Duggan, art by Matteo Lolli, colors by Rain Beredo, letters by Clayton Cowles.
Rasmus Lykke: This Saturday was Free Comic Book Day, a wonderful tradition that has run for many years, with a very important focus: Promoting Marvel’s latest event!
I kid, I kid.
It’s a wonderful day, meant to bring in new and relapsed readers to the amazing medium of comics, to spread the joy of reading words AND pictures at the same time! And a good way to make them stick around is by introducing them to a big, important story, featuring characters they’re already familiar with. Like the Avengers, X-Men and… The Eternals?
The Eternals are clearly the odd group out and it makes sense that Gillen and Weaver spend so much of their story focusing on them, as they’re the ones that need the most introduction, to get people invested and hyped for “Judgment Day”.
So, Stephanie, my question is simple: Does the story work? Are you hyped for Judgment Day?
Stephanie Burt: I am so not the target audience for a freebie designed to introduce the X-Men, and I’m already semi-hyped for an event that involves my favorite heroes, written by someone whose stories I like and trust.
I am, however, the target audience for anything that introduces the Eternals, since I know nothing about them. They seem like jerks.
Hope Springs Eternals
Rasmus: This is true.
Being eternal often means being a jerk, because they’re (pretty much) as old as the Earth and unchanging in all that time. Though that does seem to be changing lately, in the current Eternals title. But back to the current story! What actually happens in the story?
Stephanie: Long ago, before human beings ever were, the Eternals hung out with Odin and explored the tropical forest and found some “thinky monkeys” whose psionic powers could assimilate us all if left unchecked, like the Brood or the Phalanx. One of the Eternals, Uranos, looks like Apocalypse dressed for a guest shot in a Conan comic, big and blue and bald and leather-and-steel. He frowns a lot and Does What Must Be Done, which in this case means burning the monkeys to death. Odin is sad.
Also, Uranos tells Odin in advance not because Asgardians get to veto Eternals (they don’t) but because Uranos doesn’t want Odin to sic “your Avengers” on him. One million years ago. I guess Cap wasn’t the First Avenger after all?
Rasmus: Very much not!
Jason Aaron is doing a lot of work over in the main Avengers book to make Avengers 1.000.000 BC happen, to varying degrees of success.
Gillen has also touched on this in one of the Eternals one-shots, which showed that the Eternals and the Avengers have had bad blood for literally millenia. Hopefully that won’t come up any time soon and lead to huge battles between the two groups! I’m sure they’ve worked it all out and are respectful of each other, right?
Stephanie: I wish the (very cool looking, black-background) text boxes had told us more about that particular millenia-old conflict. Instead we just get a text box to explain that Eternals call all costumed heroes “Avengers.” Who coined the term? (Why are they speaking English?)
I jest, kinda. The anti-thinky-ape genocide leads up to a modern-day fight with the present-day Avengers against an unusually silly kaiju in Minnesota Vikings colors with giant Wolverine-style claws. It’s a fight scene with a ton of moving bodies. It must have taken an eternity for Dustin Weaver to draw. And it looks great. It also looks like a 1970s throwback, because it’s got all those word balloons concealing the art. I hope Weaver and Gracia aren’t miffed at having their work obscured that way.
Rasmus: I certainly hope not, because they’re both doing amazing work here.
Weaver doesn’t do a lot of mainstream comics anymore, so it’s nice to see his work featured like this. He handles every moment with the expertise we expect, making the grand moments grand and the smaller moments suitably intimate. And Gracia’s coloring has become a bedrock of the big mutant books at Marvel, for good reason. He’s wonderful at setting a mood, without overpowering the line art.
Speaking of overpowering, then the Eternals show up and take out the kaiju swiftly, because… Well, it’s what they do.
Stephanie: The kaiju is, in Eternals terms, Deviance, and the Eternals live to put down Excess Deviance. It says so right in the captions, and then again in Sersi’s dialogue: Iron Man worries about her, and then… she flirts with him? “Thanks for your concern, you sweetie. It was a deviant, suffering an out of control mutation, and we really don’t like out of control mutation… When something deviates too much we have to put it down.”
In the Eternals’ eyes either Krakoa, the living island, or the Krakoan nation, or some essential part of it– like mutant resurrection– might be an out of control mutation. And the Eternals now know about resurrection, thanks to an Eternal super-spy called Jack of Knives. They steals on to Krakoa, gets the info, and then reports back to their Eternal boss, Druig, who speculates that the mutants on Krakoa might have to go the way of the thinky monkeys.
It’s a very clean setup, honestly. I’ve now met four recognizable Eternals characters, with distinct personalities: Sersi, who dresses like Psylocke and wants to be seen as a hero by other heroes; Jack of Knives (sssssh); Uranus, the grim one; and Druig, the schemer. And I already dislike them. Rasmus, was I supposed to dislike them? Is this introductory story supposed to be a Meet the Villains affair?
Rasmus: I kinda think so, yeah.
Though, to be fair, we’re mostly shown the “bad” Eternals. Sersi and Ikaris (unnamed, but the guy that arrives with Sersi) are good guys, when not overtaken by their need to follow the Eternals code. Jack of Knives might be more of a mercenary type of character, but Druig and Uranos are definitely not nice people. Uranos sees pretty much anyone that’s not an Eternal as excess deviance.
Interestingly, we don’t even meet the current leader of the Eternals. Perhaps the most famous Eternal of all: Thanos.
So yeah, currently, the Eternals look like they’re going to be the villains of Judgment Day, trying to wipe out the mutants, with the Avengers caught in the middle.
With Gillen writing it, I’m excited about seeing where it goes from here. It all seems very epic.
Which might help explain why I find the next story so underwhelming, because it’s quite a whiplash coming from Avengers vs. Eternals. vs. X-Men to a teenage girl and a “sore loser. Vampire.” clashing in a back alley over a video game.
Gamer Tag
Stephanie: A purple-haired cool kid named Brielle defends her pal Jayden, who won a video game tournament, from a mean dude with dreadlocks named Eturnal, who resents Jayden’s victory enough to bite him. Eturnal (who is probably not an Eternal) is a vampire, Brielle figures it out and kicks his rear end with a silver bracelet, because vampires hate silver, and then Brielle goes home to her mom, who worries about her and reveals that she’s Blade’s kid.
Rasmus: I honestly don’t have much to say about this short story. It’s… fine. The work is competent. It’s not bad or anything, it’s just very bland. Maybe I’m just not invested enough in Blade as a character to be intrigued by the reveal that he has a daughter or maybe it’s that this story is sandwiched between two much more interesting stories, I don’t know.
Did it work better for you, Stephanie?
Stephanie: Very much so. I know absolutely zippo nada nil about Blade except that he’s a vampire who fights vampires and has a sword and works in the modern era alongside regular-old non-undead superheroes and also he’s possibly the first African American superhero to headline a successful Hollywood film, back in the 1990s, which I guess means I know something?
Anyway, honestly, this story’s sort of my jam: the next generation, teen heroes, being regular kids with regular problems except that they also fight vampires. Low-stakes setup compared to the Eternals story, but that’s OK. It’s fun.
It’s also, I think, full of insider gamer jokes. I showed it to my sixteen year old, who doesn’t read comics right now (he used to read a lot of them, and may again) but does go to Smash Bros tournament, and he had many opinions about the custom controllers and the systems they connote: apparently the art’s just not quite consistent in its attention ton controller details. It does, though, have cool physics stuff: if you’re going to throw a silver ring at a vampire you need to give the projectile enough weight that it makes the right arc…
Hey, we forgot to describe the plot, or the characters. Blade has a daughter, Brielle, who fights a vampire at a video game tournament. Brielle’s mom has some bladed weapons Blade gave her, and she wants to use them to keep Brielle safe. That’s it. Honestly, for an intro, that’s enough. Lovely angles and closeups, expressive faces, cinematic in a good way. I’ll read the comic that comes out of this one, honestly, just to see where Brielle and her mom go next.
Solve for X
Rasmus: So in the first story in this comic, the X-Men only feature for basically a cameo. We’re told they exist and then later that they’ve conquered death. But we don’t really get a reason why anyone should care if the Eternals wipe them out (except, y’know, genocide is bad). But in this story, Duggan and Lolli provide a damn good reason why humans might want to protect them, even if only for selfish reasons. The mutants have a miracle drug and Mary Jane Watson is on TV to promote it, while a sinister monologue speaks about making sure the mutants don’t get to keep winning.
Stephanie: Aye, it’s a wee bit of monologuing from a science lass! A science lass who’s gone to the bad, preparing humanity for “the necessary violence to come.” And she just happens to explain the setup for the Krakoan era (mutant nation on a mutant island, wonder drugs, resurrections, still “hated and feared.” If you haven’t been following current X-comics, here’s what you need to know. If you have, you’ll recognize visual and verbal callbacks to House of X/ Powers of X, including the tag line from back in 2019: “When two aggressive species share the same environment…”
The monologue also tells us that mutants have the ability to “solve for death,” which can’t be what she means: to solve for something means to find its value in an equation. How valuable is comic book death? Is it positive or negative? Or, hey, imaginary?
Rasmus: So at the end, it’s revealed that the sinister monologuing is done by robot Moira McTaggart, who has had a heel turn after the events of Inferno and has become an enemy to mutants everywhere. But I’ll be honest and say, I don’t remember her becoming a robot. What did I miss, Stephanie?
Stephanie: You missed X Deaths of Wolverine no. 5! In which she emerged from her tomb as a masterwork of aluminum and villainy. Our pals wrote about it, too! But she’s not just a robot: she’s a shapeshifting, personality-absorbing robot. Which makes her, hey!, a baddie whose powers overlap with the powers her scary son Proteus exercised when he was a villain. Now he’s a pink hero who helps resurrect mutants, and she’s a bot who wants to kill them all. For which she’ll need an invite to this year’s Hellfire Gala, which either is or isn’t an event comic of its own.
Moira as a scheming murdery villain doesn’t interest me nearly as much as morally complicated Moira from HoX/PoX, but she does make a good narrator. And “Who will you be wearing” is a good horror line.
Rasmus: Agreed, on both counts!
Still, it is enough to make me interested in reading more.
At the end of the day, these Marvel FCBD issues are meant to drum up interest in upcoming stories and on that count, I think it mostly works for me. I’m a huge Gillen fan and like Valerio Schiti a whole lot too, so Judgment Day was already an easy sell.
Bloodline: Daughter of Blade is not for me. Nothing in this short interests me and I’m not a big enough fan of Blade to check it out.
The final story works both as another preview of things to come in Judgment Day, but also as a set-up for the upcoming Hellfire Gala, an event I was otherwise not very interested in (despite last year’s very interesting mini-event), but am now definitely going to check out.
So overall, this issue worked for me. What about you?
Stephanie: In reverse order, I have been introduced to a mini-event I’m certain to follow anyway– the Hellfire Gala 2022, with guest disguised baddie Moira– so that’s nice but not for me. I have been introduced to a mother-and-daughter vampire-slaying team who seem new to Marvel and whom I want to follow, so that’s a win! And I have been introduced to the Eternals, who are going to fight characters I already follow in the biggest event of the summer. So, yeah, a success. Worth every penny? And more.
X-Traneous Thoughts
- The blue-in-black caption boxes in the lead story really make lemonade out of the lemon that is a Prologue and Introduction Story: they’re all about how every story is a prologue, except the last one. Also very meta. Very Gillen.
- The Blade spinoff so far has an all-Black cast. Neat. It’s also set in Atlanta, a big city that could use more Marvel heroes.
- Matteo Lolli’s image of Captain America’s shield just crumpling up around his head like a pillowcase? Priceless.
- Krakoan reads FCBD (i.e. free comic book day)
Rasmus Skov Lykke
Rasmus Skov Lykke will write for food (or, in a pinch, money). When not writing, he spends his time with his wife, their daughter and their cats, usually thinking about writing.
Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Her podcast about superhero role playing games is Team-Up Moves, with Fiona Hopkins; her latest book of poems is We Are Mermaids. Her nose still hurts from that thing with the gate.
