Welcome back to the Marvel Rundown! This week, we take a look at the return of Dwayne Taylor in a SPOILER-FREE review of Night Thrasher #1, alongside a rapid review of Fall of the House of X #2 in the classic Rapid Rundown.
What did you think of this week’s batch of fresh Marvel Comics, True Believers? The Beat wants to hear from you! Give us a shout-out, here in the comment section or over on social media @comicsbeat, and let us know what you’re thinking.
Night Thrasher #1
Writer: J. Holtham
Artist: Nelson Daniel
Colors: Matt Milla
Letters: Travis Lanham
Cover Artist: Alan Quah
There’s a generation of Marvel fans who hold the Fabian Nicieza/Mark Bagley/Darick Robertson New Warriors run in high esteem. For them, it’s their Marv Wolfman/George Perez Teen Titans or Paul Levitz/Keith Giffen Legion of Super Heroes run. In the opening pages of J. Holtham and Nelson Daniel’s Night Thrasher #1, you can tell Holtham is one of those readers. For better and worse, this books is meant as a love letter for those fans.
Holtham has a deep affection for that run of books. He knows these characters inside and out and all of the stories surrounding them. He brings Dwayne Turner aka Night Thrasher back to New York after an extended absence. His Night Thrasher is a man removed from this former world. He wrestles the weirdness of a person coming back from the dead. When dead you’re cut off from everything so why try to go back to that life?
That reality and how most of the former cast members of New Warriors moved on carries the real emotional weight of this issue. Taylor has no interest in being Night Thrasher or living that life anymore. He only does so at the end because of a genuine threat. When the threat turns out to be a former team mate, there’s genuine rage and disappointment between those two characters. A short story at the end where Silhouette, another ex-New Warrior, brings her brother to their dying father’s bedside feels rooted in real emotion.
Holtham is less successful when he uses deeper New Warriors lore to elicit an emotional response. Night Thrasher attends the funeral of a character with ties to that team. For older readers, it is probably a moment of sadness. Anyone who didn’t read those comics? It reads like a plot device to get Night Thrasher back to New York. Additionally newer readers are asked to care about things like Night Thrasher and Silhouette’s damaged relationship or the closing of the Taylor Foundation. There’s no reason to be invested in those moments if you have no context for them.
Drawing this issue is Nelson Daniel. Daniel has drawn books for Marvel in the past but he did a lengthy run on the IDW Judge Dredd book about a decade ago. Daniel is a good fit for this book. Figure drawing wise he takes after folks like Howard Chaykin and Walt Simonson, though he doesn’t have the inventiveness of those artist’s page layouts. He draws really solid figures that move with weight on the page. It serves the fight sequence at the end of the book well and his bulky depiction of the Night Thrasher armor, in line with his portrayal of Judge Dredd, is a lot of fun. He’s less exciting at the quieter moments or tense arguments which are most of the issue.
Look, if you’re a die hard 90s era New Warriors fan, this book is for you. If you don’t know the difference between Speedball and Nova, this might not be the best entrance.
VERDICT: Browse
Rapid Rundown!
- Fall of the House of X # 2
- If there’s a single word to describe this second issue of the Fall of the House of X it is messy. Gerry Duggan’s script is erratically paced and jumps abruptly between several semi-related plots. There is too much going on and without the urgency of the weekly format of the original House of X it is hard to track those threads between issues. None of the many different stories in this series have the space they need to be as dramatic or portentous as they aim to be. Even Lucas Werneck’s electric art can’t make things work. On some pages, there are massive leaps in time from one panel to another while other pages are broken down into multiple tiny actions. Pages are so busy with character and motion it’s a headache to read. Bryan Valenza’s colors cast each page with an orange glow that makes everything feel on the verge of bursting to flames. Thematically appropriate but unpleasant. VC’s Travis Lanham does the letters here and they are just about the only thing that work. While I’ve liked the Krakoa era more than I’ve disliked it, the last year and a half of X-Men titles have been rudderless and this messy finale feels like all the flaws of the line amped to 11. I am optimistic about what comes next but this and its sister series, Rise of the Powers of X, are shaping up to end the Krakoan age with a whimper. —TR
Next Week: Alien: Black, White, and Blood #1 and Edge of Spider-Verse #1!
