The return of Marvel Comics Presents is one of Marvel's stranger decisions of recent years.

The original MCP anthology ran for an impressive 175 issues back in the early nineties.  It was a fortnightly title, with four eight-page stories in each issue, usually headlined by a serial starring Wolverine or Ghost Rider.  The rest of the issue would generally be taken up with something mildly offbeat about a couple of obscure characters, and a throwaway story to renew the trademark on an obscure national hero from Contest of Champions.

Frankly, it wasn't very good.  About the only story anyone really remembers from MCP was Barry Windsor-Smith's "Weapon X", and even that was over-extended as a serial.  The series generally ranged from forgettable to mediocre.  But in fairness to the creators who worked on it (many of whom were rookies), the eight-page serial is an unforgiving format.  There's not much room to work with. 

Well, this is not the early nineties, and nobody has been able to make an anthology title work in years.  Today's Marvel output often shows a tenuous grasp on how to compress a story into 22 pages, let alone eight.  And yet they've chosen to bring Marvel Comics Presents back, armed with no big-name lead characters (a planned Wolverine serial was reassigned to his solo title), and a monthly schedule.  Eight pages a fortnight was often on the slow side.  But eight pages a month?  That's the equivalent of taking a three-issue miniseries and spreading it out over a year.  Are they mad?

On the strength of issue #1, with the best will in the world, the answer to that question seems to be "Yes, stark raving mental."

The lead story is Marc Guggenheim's "Vanguard", which seems to be about a New York homicide detective investigating a mysterious killing where the witnesses have seen a very unlikely Marvel character running around.  This is a bold choice of lead strip; it has no familiar characters at all, other than one who's mentioned in the last panel and certainly wouldn't be anyone's idea of a likely protagonist.  Dave Wilkins produces some reasonably atmospheric art, although his interiors seem a little spartan to me, and his female lead, Stacy Dolan, apparently thinks that murder investigations are best conducted while dressed for clubbing.

But it's not very well paced at eight pages.  Half the running space is given over to three vaguely cryptic prologues.  It would make a very good first eight pages of a longer story.  As a chapter in its own right, though, it doesn't get much further than presenting some off-the-peg characters and a murkily defined mystery.  The cliffhanger is a neat twist, I'll grant, but there's considerable room for improvement.

Kathryn and Stuart Immonen's Hellcat story, "The Girl Who Could Be You", has had a lot of good reviews.  I have to say, I don't get it.  The art is beautiful, of course, but the story is a weird curio and the pacing is just bizarre.  Again, this isn't an eight-page story.  It's the first eight pages of a longer story.  The plot, as near as I can make out, involves Patsy Walker forcing open her old diary, which somehow or other causes some doppelgangers to appear right at the end of the story.  Patsy spends the entire issue talking to herself in the style of a girls' comic character with a really weird back story (which, admittedly, is what she is), and a quarter of the running time is squandered on a pretty but utterly irrelevant fashion show.

I have no clue what this was trying to do, and it came across as some bizarre piece of postmodern irony that soared over my head and collided painfully with the wall.  I'm utterly mystified by it.  I don't get it at all.  I think it's trying to play somehow with Patsy's original "girl next door" concept from back in the fifties, and play up the absurd contrast with what she became, but quite what point it's trying to make, I have no idea.  It's certainly got a distinctive voice, but what on earth is it saying?

Stuart Moore and Clayton Henry's "Unfriendly Neighborhood" is an eight-page short about Spider-Man meeting a load of Spider-Man from other universes, in the style of the Captain Britain Corps.  It's a dream scene, of course, and it's an idea that's been done much better in many other comics.  The best that can be said about this is that it just about manages to stretch out the thin idea to eight pages.

Rich Koslowski and Andrea Di Vito's "Weapon Omega" is the only serial that really seems to accept the realities of eight pages a month, and dutifully ploughs into its story.  It gets points for decent pacing, but can't quite overcome the problem of being saddled with dreary non-character Michael Pointer.  Pointer is the nameless schmuck who Brian Bendis introduced as a host for the Collective in New Avengers, and who then turned up as the new Guardian in Omega Flight, where his role was mainly to embody the fact that the team was a horrible distortion of Alpha Flight.  As a character, he's really not very interesting at all - he bemoans his fate and he angsts a lot.  Big deal.

Koslowski makes reasonably good use of the USAgent as a foil for the anodyne Pointer, and Di Vito illustrates the story perfectly well.  But it's a Michael Pointer story, and nobody has yet given me a reason to care about the guy.

Finally, writer/artist Nelson produces a story about the Thing and Alicia Masters.  There's no plot here; it's just Alicia musing on why she loves Ben for eight pages.  But it's a sweet little piece, with some nicely judged moments, and it's certainly the best thing in this issue.  It doesn't really have anything new to say about their relationship, but as a restatement and reminder of what we all knew already, it's absolutely fine.

Overall, though, it's not a great start.  I can just about see some of these stories working at eight pages a fortnight.  But eight pages a month really does seem absurd.  As I've said many times before, serialised comics are paced in time, not just in page count, and this series seems alarmingly misjudged.

Rating: C+

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