‘Savage Avengers #1’ Review
Written by David Pepose | Art by Carlos Magno | Published by Marvel Comics
Some books you don’t need, you don’t even want, until someone thinks them up and you think ‘oh yes’. If that involves Conan the Barbarian front and centre on the cover then even better. We are, of course, talking about Savage Avengers. The first run of the book which recently ended had all the usual big guns, Wolverine, Punisher, Venom, etc, the usual anti-heroes you’d expect. It was great fun. Not Shakespeare, but great fun. So, why not double down on the concept and play around with both the group dynamics and the members of that group, leaving Conan front and centre again.
David Pepose and Carlos Magno, show us what you got.
We kick off as you would expect, with absolutely no subtlety at all. A mysterious figure is on the prowl, Predator-style, while Conan slices and dices his way through some worshippers of the god Set, as Anti-Venom and Elektra-Daredevil investigate the detonation of a madbomb and the destruction that followed. The Predator guy turns out to be one of the Deathlok Army, who has been searching for Conan, to punish him for crimes against the timestream. Throw in Weapon H, showing a mugger the error of his ways, and the morose (as always) Black Knight, Dane Whitman, drowning his sorrows, and our cast is complete. Oops, my mistake, that’s Cloak and Dagger over there on that rooftop, NOW we’re complete.
Conan, meanwhile, is finding that defeating a Deathlok is not an easy task. Slice him up, his nanotechnology adapts and repairs him. For once, a big sword isn’t enough, and Conan looks like he is going to lose. Until the madbomb is set off, and all our cast are thrown together, deciding that the Deathlok cyborg is their common enemy. To be fair to the Deathlok, he holds his own against the lot of them for quite some time, until Elektra spots a weakness, and Conan lives up to his other name Conan the Destroyer by fatally wounding the Deathlok. Sort of. A time portal opens, and everyone is sucked through, ending up in…Conan’s own time. We seem to be in the Hyborian Age. Good for Conan, bad for everyone else. Except the Deathlok hiding in the shadows, obviously.
Well, that was like a really fast rollercoaster ride. You think you enjoyed it, but it went by so fast you can’t be sure. There was no let-up in Pepose’s script, the pacing was snappy from the first page to the last. The script did feel, to me, a little too overstacked with information. Characters were just thrown into the mix for no real reason, whereas it would have made more sense to have some build-up and a little bit more by way of introduction. Not one for new readers, they wouldn’t know who some of these characters are, and the book never explains who they are either. If you are happy to just run with things, then you won’t mind, but to most I just felt two issues worth of stories was squished down to one, leaving a lot of useful stuff on the cutting room floor.
Carlos Magno, however, did a very good job of interpreting a slightly over-written script. He had a lot to pack in, and some panels do indeed look a little busy, but on balance the story reads well, is paced nicely, and looks very nice indeed. Espen Grundetjern’s darker hues colouring add to a nice darker atmospheric take. I think it looks better overall than it reads. Not to say I dislike it of course, as the concept is sound, the characters interesting, and the direction in which the book is going looks to be fun and interesting. Maybe it just needs to find its feet, and the pacing will settle down.
I hope so, as I’d hate to upset Crom if I was David Pepose. Bad things tend to happen.
