The Icon imprint makes its debut with Powers #1. 

The lingering doubt remains that Marvel aren't entirely sure quite why they've got a creator-owned imprint, other than to keep Brian Bendis happy (which, to be fair, is probably reason enough).  There's no Marvel logo anywhere to be found on this book, and it's not exactly easy to find information about Icon on Marvel's website either.  One wonders whether Marvel have even noticed that, after they went to all that trouble to invent a completely incomprehensible age-rating system, Powers has no cover rating at all - even though it plainly merits a mature readers label.

In any event, the Icon version of Powers is pretty much indistinguishable from the Image version, save for the latest overhaul of the plot set-up.  For those of you who aren't familiar the book, Powers is a genre hybrid between superhero and police procedural.  Ex-superhero Christian Walker and his partner Deena Pilgrim investigate murders related to the superhero community.

At the end of the last series, a particularly powerful superhuman went nuts and caused genocidal chaos.  The government has reacted by banning superpowers altogether, which is where this series picks up.  Several months have gone by, and while the renumbering from issue #1 certainly wasn't strictly necessary, it does provide the suitable sense of a new season.

The set-up is that the ban isn't really working out.  The heroes are all nice, law-abiding chaps, so they packed up and went home.  The villains, on the other hand, just ignored it and ploughed on regardless.  Since the police don't really have any particularly effective weapons to use against them, everything's just got an awful lot worse.

The parallel with the anti-gun control argument is pretty obvious, although flawed, since you can't control superpowers - the equivalent would be to make guns freely available but make it illegal to use them, which is effectively the position the USA already has.  The idea's pretty interesting as a way of ratcheting up the tension, although Bendis overplays it somewhat.  If things are going so horribly wrong, wouldn't there be a few more vigilante heroes defying the ban - or wouldn't the idea just have been abandoned by now?  It's already a comprehensive failure by the time the story starts, so why is the government sticking with it? 

Presumably these are the stories that the book's going to be getting to, but without seeing how we ended up in this mess, the set-up comes across as a little contrived.  We're joining the story in Act 2, and it would have helped to join at a stage where the ban was still arguably doing the job.

Still, despite the problems with the set-up, the strengths of the book - Oeming's storytelling, Bendis' dialogue and characters - remain impressive.  And shaking up the setting is a good idea up to a point, since the series could easily have degenerated into formula after a while.  The current direction keeps the spirit of the original idea while still changing the workings enough to keep it fresh.

A good start for the new arc, but there are glitches here that stop the new direction from entirely convincing me.

Rating: B+

back | continue