Dan Slott has been getting great reviews for his work at Marvel over the last year, but it's yet to translate into particularly impressive sales.  Hopefully the big relaunch for She-Hulk will do the job. 

In the meantime, though, Slott and Paul Pelletier bring us a Great Lakes Avengers miniseries, cheekily titled GLA.  It's been a while since we've seen these bozos, who weren't exactly prominent to start with, so this is probably going to go down as another cult success.  It's good, though.

The Great Lakes Avengers were created by John Byrne back when he was working on West Coast Avengers in the late-1980s.  Basically, they were a bunch of hick superheroes with ideas above their station, who were encouraged by Hawkeye for a bit (largely to annoy the real Avengers, from what I remember).  They're loveable losers whose powers just about qualify them as something more than a total joke.

Slott's story is really about team leader Mr Immortal, a man whose only superpower is to come back from the dead very quickly.  Essentially a really good healing factor, this is actually quite a useful power, and he could have done all sorts of productive things with it.  Instead, because he's a nitwit, he decided to become a superhero, armed solely with the power to get killed regularly.  You can imagine how that's worked out for him.

The tone is much darker than in Slott's other recent Marvel work, but it's still definitely played for laughs.  Even so, Slott is writing a proper story around these guys rather than just treating them as a vehicle for jokes.  Mr Immortal comes across as a sympathetic idiot who could have been mildly successful if only he wasn't so hopelessly deluded about his place in the pecking order.  He's a minor league talent who's convinced himself that he'd be a star if only he had the opportunity.  His reach exceeds his grasp, which gives us something to relate to besides his black comedy gimmickry.

Paul Pelletier's art works well on these stories.  He has the look of a traditional superhero artist, combined with an eye for comedy that lets him shift tone without missing a beat when the story calls for it.  The GLA's gallery of momentos - the head of a robot snowman and a handful of press cuttings - is wonderfully pathetic, simply for the little touches like putting the head behind a completely superfluous display rope.

Another winning book from Slott, anyway.  It'll sell sod all, because it's a GLA miniseries, but it's definitely worth picking up.

Rating: A

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