It’s the first ever Concert of Champions, a festival bringing together the Marvel Universe’s biggest and brightest musical stars! Headliners include Dazzler, K-pop sensation Luna Snow, interdimensional rockstar Lila Cheney and Spider-Gwen. But who – or what? – is the mysterious new metal band Deep Void, and what are their sinister intentions? Concert of Champions #1 is written by Jason Loo, drawn by by Rafael Loureiro and Ruairi Coleman, colored by Yen Nitro and Fer Sifuentes-Sujo, and lettered by Ariana Maher.
Adam Reck: I lucked out in the virtual presale queue and got tickets to Concert of Champions! Anyone else score tix and wanna dish about the show?
Stephanie Burt: I was hoping someone would come out with me. It’s all the way out in Orange County, though. Somewhere near Irvine?
Latonya “Penn” Pennington: I wasn’t interested in the concert until I saw Luna Snow on the bill! Glad I managed to score last-minute tix! Loved seeing Lila Cheney and Dazzler, too!
Troubling Trichotillomania
Penn: Adam, I gotta say that I didn’t know what trichotillomania was until I looked it up. I also didn’t expect Dazzler to have this disorder until I saw the page with Dazzler alone in her trailer. Ariana Maher’s lettering and Jason Loo’s writing for Dazzler’s internal monologue gave a good peek inside her head.
Adam: I had to term-search it myself! It’s a bold choice for what could’ve just been a wishy-washy concert issue to have Dazzler deal with the emotional fallout of the events of Jason Loo’s recent miniseries. Dazzler is clearly stressed after multiple attempts on her life and wearing wigs to hide her hair-pulling.
Stephanie: You had me searching the comic to see if the word occurred there (it does not). There’s some neat wordplay here though (“it’s been a lot,” said on an actual lot, between trailers). And supervillains up to their old trichs (I’ll show myself out now). As for Ali, it’s not the first nor the fifth time she’s been stressed out and barely holding it together, but I think I’d rather see her as someone who escapes from her troubled off-stage life by trying to get it all done on stage. Someone who can do it with a broken heart, as it were. I’m also not sure a new reader would get that she’s been pulling out her own hair, rather than (for example) recovering from a scalp injury, or from brain surgery, or from a cybernetic implant gone wrong? Maybe I missed something, but every Marvel comic could be someone’s first.
Adam: I blame this on the fact that while Concert of Champions would have made a worthwhile epilogue/fifth and final issue to the recent mini, Marvel’s gonna Marvel and of course put out a standalone one-shot instead. So readers should be forgiven if they have no clue whatsoever what’s been going on with Alison Blaire.
Petty Beef
Adam: Our pop stars seem to want to be friends, but the stress of their lives is bubbling over into their interactions, or lack thereof.
Penn: Given that Dazzler is in a bad place, I am not surprised that she snapped at Luna Snow when Dazzler slipped on Luna’s ice sculpture/railing and lost control of her powers. Dazzler clearly wants to avoid anything or anyone that reminds her of her harrowing experiences from her solo series (which I haven’t read). She can barely prepare for the festival, which sucks since she is one of the headlining acts.
Stephanie: Yes. It’s a Dazzler book, really: It’s Alison Blaire who gets emotional beats and ends up with tough decisions to make. Luna Snow’s super-popular, from the rising generation that takes K-Pop at least as seriously as anything in English cooked (or coked) up in L.A.
I felt as if Dazzler, disturbed and even undermined by Luna’s popularity, stood for Big Two cape comics, American to a fault, disturbed and even commercially undermined by the cooler, more popular (with the Youth) phenomena of comics and games and popular culture from Korea. And China, and India, and Japan. Alison just “isn’t ready,” as she says. Will she ever be ready? Or does she play primarily to her aging longtime fans? Of whom I’m maybe one.
Though really I want Lila Cheney to go back on stage and play more. And do more. And rock harder. And steal this planet again. And get a haircut that doesn’t remind me of Rogue: white stripe in black. And an outfit that doesn’t remind me of Rogue: green with white trim, form-fitting. Why would Lila Cheney make those choices? She used to want to stand out!
Adam: Lila’s recent status relegation to Alison’s best friend, when she was always the bigger star, is confusing but lines up with recent stories. As for the Dazz/Luna tension, I think we can ascribe a lot to it, but it’s simply not on the page.
Deep Void Does a Diskhord Cover
Adam: The festival has some other fun cameos in the lineup. I particularly enjoyed Shark-Girl and DJ forming a new group “She Attaxx.” Doop is on the bill. Sugar Kane is a deep cut from the “Poptopia” era of Joe Casey’s Uncanny X-Men. Which begs the question, why do the villains of this issue, Deep Void, bear such a striking resemblance to the other Cthulu-summoning death metal band from New Mutants Vol. 3: Diskhord? They do literally the same thing. They even look similar. I’m just very confused why Jason didn’t use them.
Stephanie: I’d like to believe that Ian MacKaye (from real-life Dischord Records) got involved, but there’s no way. I’d also like to believe that She Attaxx, a keytar, drums and vocals duet, derive from the synthesizer-driven music of Le Tigre and solo Kathleen Hanna. I’d like to believe a lot of other things that almost certainly aren’t true. I do, however, believe that Jason Loo knows the Thunderbolts continuity in which Angar the Screamer teams up with Ruby Thursday more or better than he knows or cares about the (underrated!) Abnett and Lanning New Mutants.
Or else that fans who aren’t us — i.e. who know other Marvel stuff as well or better than they know X-stuff — will certainly recognize Angar and Ruby Thursday and some Doombots before they remember that one band from one arc. And in the kind of comic that tries to fill up with callbacks, that’s important.
On the other hand, as a reader who wants to know why the supporting characters do the things they do, can anyone tell me why Forearm, one or more Doombots, and Angar the Screamer have joined the same band? Do they just generally want to take over the world with a tentacle friend? Or do they have some motivation in common, which previous iterations of these fun villains would not?
Penn: Adam, I gotta say, Deep Void does look a lot like the Diskhord group you mentioned in the ComicsXF Slack. Maybe they didn’t want to use Diskhord because they are affiliated with X-Men and they want to keep X-Men stuff out of this? Anyway, I loved Luna Snow and Dazzler setting aside their beef to work together to creatively beat them by combining their powers.
Stephanie: I liked the way it looked. I liked most of the art choices here! I like the way the crowd scenes move, and the meditative early pages look like they’re focused on someone who’s deeply unhappy. I like Shark-Girl. And I like Jeff the Landshark on Dazzler’s phone’s lock screen. I love the appearance of Quentin Quire lookalikes in the crowd (they’re Deep Void fans, of course). And what appears to be Chameleon/Chameleon Boy/Reep Daggle from the Legion of Super-Heroes in the crowd (seriously). I can see the instruments as real instruments, too: We watch the fingers that play them. And the arms (including Forearm’s four arms — guy finally has a job for which he’s qualified). Visually this comic, well, rocks. Loureiro and Coleman and Nitro should illustrate more rock shows disrupted by villains and heroes. I’d buy the concert T-shirts, as long as they came in ladies’ XL.
But. Adam, Penn, did anything at all about this comic book surprise you? Sometimes cape comics with creaky plots give us fun dialogue. But here the heroes tell you just what they are doing, like they’re speaking their subtexts: “I’ve never seen myself shine bigger and brighter than this!” sounds like something our Ali would think, but not like something she’d ever say, except in a script for a children’s show. And her lyrics — “I want to quit but I can’t … I’ll rise above, I’ll stand and fight/Because the world needs so much hope tonight?” I’m sorry. I do not believe in these words as parts of a Dazzler song, and I’m a little bit sad that we get a data page with the lyrics, every last syllable, when we could have had another page of Lila doing anything at all. Or another page of Spider-Gwen, who gets the comic’s last, and best, line of dialogue: “I know it’s a faux pas to wear a band’s T-shirt at their own show, but it’s a rad gift I get just for being in the band!”
Adam: No, unfortunately aside from Dazzler’s hair pulling, there wasn’t much new here to offer. To your point about the lyrics, Steph, this is another thing pulled from Loo’s recent mini, and the lyrics often are quite literal about what’s happening in the story, as opposed to seeming more like actual song lyrics.
Penn: I wish we could actually hear the song Luna Snow, Dazzler and Lila Cheney performed together. The lyrics look neat.
Stephanie: Hard disagree on the lyrics, but I’d hear it, too. Plus, there are wonderful Dazzler videos out there already, right? I love this one. There are great stories about rock bands and rock shows and rock rivalries to be told, stories that haven’t been told before, at least not in comics. Dark metal band with sketchy, cultlike fans wants to summon demon at the big concert by singing in Latin. Sky opens up above band, revealing demon with tentacles. Heroes announce their plans to fight demon and band, but cannot win unless they figure out how to team up and combine their powers. Then they win. Feels like a first draft, the kind where the editor tells the author to come back when they can add a twist or three. Or like an old Saturday morning cartoon. Maybe I shouldn’t want more from this kind of book, but Marvel has regularly given us more. With one-shots and annuals, even. I was hoping we’d get the Boygenius of team-up acts, but this one feels more like the Asia. Maybe it’s just the heat of the moment.
X-traneous Thoughts
- Also, does anyone in the Marvel office read Latin? Or know anyone who does? Comics don’t have to get their dead languages right, but it’s not that hard to ask.
- Notable exclusion from this festival? Brick Springstern and the Tenth Avenue Band, Marvel’s version of Bruce Springsteen (AKA Bruce Springhorn) and the E Street Band who premiered in Transformers #14!
Buy Concert of Champions #1 here. (Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, ComicsXF may earn from qualifying purchases.)
Adam Reck is the cartoonist behind Bish & Jubez as well as the co-host of Battle Of The Atom. Follow him @adamreck.bsky.social.
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.
Latonya "Penn" Pennington is a freelance contributor whose comics criticism can be found at Women Write About Comics, Comic Book Herald, Newsarama and Shelfdust, among others. Follow them @wordsfromapenn.com on Bluesky.
