Savage Avengers #1 is back with a fast-paced set up that knows exactly who its intended audience is. While the adult in me prefers a little more time spent on building towards the main story arc, the 13-year-old in me, the one who loves a good John Carter of Mars or Conan the Cimmerian yarn, was quite pleased.
While reading, there were simply things I had to accept as I’m a little out of the loop with individual storylines. A new Daredevil?… Okay! A madbomb? Why not! I don’t know what that is, but it sounds dangerous, and the Black Knight seems to know and that’s good enough for me. Details like that (whether to catch us up or specify the dangers) seem unimportant, because a bigger danger is here: Deathlok has come for Conan. Thankfully, a random assortment of heroes are within the vicinity – enough to make a team: Anti-Venom, Daredevil, Weapon H, The Black Knight, Cloak and Dagger (always a favorite of mine), and, of course, Conan. Typing those out, that is pretty random! In their fight with Deathlok, Conan doesn’t become the only one displaced by time, and thus begins the true adventure.
Yes, the book speeds through, pausing from the action only briefly to lay a little story groundwork for each new team member. I won’t spoil any of them (I’ll leave some material for the reader.), but there are enough dramatics sprinkled in by writer David Pepose that as the issue progresses, those story beats should have time to breathe. Artist Carlos Magno is kept pretty busy; there are very few pages that aren’t full of hefty amounts of action, especially as the issue races forward and a lot of the panels contain several characters. It all looks and feels pretty awesome which means big kudos to colorist Espen Grundetjern, mixing and matching all of the jumping around so that it all feels like part of the same story while cutting between multiple environments.
Above all, this book is a Conan book that all of these characters are guesting in, and I really dig that, because you really feel it. I know Conan hasn’t been in the Marvel Universe long, with even less time spent having been injected into the future, but I read recently that Marvel is giving up Conan, so this may be the last hoorah for Conan in the worlds of Marvel. A fun final adventure for our Destroyer seems to be underway.
Creative Team: David Pepose (writer), Carlos Magno (artist), Espen Grundetjern (color artist), VC’s Travis Lanham (letterer), Nick Russell (production design), Matthew Murray (editor), Martin Buro and Matthew Murray (assistant editors), Annalise Bissa (associate editor)
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Click here to purchase.
