G.O.D.S. #1 review

G.O.D.S. it’s long

Oh, you want more? Well, the first issue of Jonathan Hickman and Valerio Schiti’s new Marvel series is pretty entertaining, certainly more to my taste than most Hickman-led books. For one thing, the comic story isn’t constantly interrrupted by dull infographics. For two, we meet an engaging new lead character.

Sure, he looks like a cross between Gambit, Dr Strange and Jason Wyngarde, but his personality is all his own. He’s a little world weary – he’s very, very old – but cheery, even witty. And we know he’s not Stephen Strange cos the good Doctor is in here with Wyn, bookending the meat of the book, which is set 10 years ago.

The flashback introduces us properly to Wyn and his equally striking wife Aiko. They work for opposing firms.

Assisting Wyn is Dmitri.

There’s an awful lot of exposition and I can’t say many of the details have stuck with this Reader-That-Am; I believe loads of people lap this stuff up, but to me it feels like maths. Happily, the infodumps come wrapped in fun dialogue, and there’s a big, fun fight with extradimensional deities at the centre of the book. I understand that Wyn and Dmitri are basically the Magic Police – despite Dmitri being a tech guy with a flat Mother Box – and a big deal. So why haven’t we seen or heard of them previously? They’ve been busy.

So many words! But Hickman knows what he’s doing, he’s ‘aving a larf. This, the wordiest panel in the comic, is a feature, not a bug.

I’ve seen a fair few pages of this issue previously, Marvel having dumped sides in apparently random comics over the last month or so… they’re much better in context.

By the end of the issue we’ve seen the leads in action, observed their ties to the familiar heroes of the Marvel Universe and seen that there’s a bigger picture than we knew.

Which is my only real problem with this project – do we need more gods in Marvel’s already overstuffed cosmology? Another layer of celestial nonsense? We already have the Asgardian, Norse and Egyptian pantheons, the Eternals alongside them, the Celestials above them, and now we learn that The-Powers-That-Be and The-Natural-Order-of-Things (it’s exhausting just typing it all out) outrank them all. Which makes the man and woman on the street in the Marvel Universe ants… it all feels so big it’s difficult to care.

But there is stuff I really like in here – the relationship between Wyn and Aiko is lovely, they’re like a (more) twisted Mr and Mrs Smith. The Planetary-style secret history vibe. The Curiosity Incubator. Cameos by some of the Marvel U’s more esoteric folk. And there’s a wonderful scene in which we see Wyn and Dmitri at work, dealing with a couple of British magical creatures with an appetite for human flesh.

‘We would never do vat.‘ Love it.

I also love the art by Schiti with colourist Marte Gracia – the storytelling is smooth, the characters attractive and awful as required, the mood suitably off kilter. A scene between Wyn and Aiko involves six pages of nine-panel grids and it never looks dull. The designs for them, and Dmitri, are excellent, telling us something about their roles and personalities. Well, mostly – Dmitri’s snazzy sci-suit doesn’t hint at his annoying smartarse ways. The body language, the facial expressions, the action moments… Schiti’s work is superb. Gracia’s colouring complements and finishes the visual storytelling, being neither drab – as was the fashion at Marvel for a long while – or over-the-top bright.

The lettering is done in the Ultimates lower case style, which is so very, very not my favourite – it feels like everyone is whispering. Still, I got used to it and I must commend Travis Lanham on surviving the word count.

Mateus Manhanini brings us a pretty darn great cover, giving us our first look at Wyn, whose full name is Very Silly Indeed. Just pretend he doesn’t remind you of Gambit tossing one of those silly playing cards.

All in all, I enjoyed this debut, although the sheer length meant I kept turning pages hoping for the end. I think I’ll enjoy subsequent issues more purely because the high concepts will be in more digestible chunks. And hopefully the character interaction, which was the best thing about G.O.D.S. #1, will take up plenty of space. And maybe we’ll even learn what G.O.D.S. stands for.