Angela: Asgard's Assassin #1

I've been a bit frustrated with DC and Marvel the last few years. DC for their New 52 that has clearly been destined from the start to get rebooted into something else. Marvel for their stubborn insistence that they don't need a reboot, but continued "reboots that aren't reboots" in the face of that lie. However, Marvel has taken some truly credible steps in recent years. One of those is faithful and even loving comic adaptations of known prose novels. Another is what will hopefully be great handling of the Star Wars line. And the last is being willing to play with other properties.

They dabbled in this before, allowing Dynamite to do an Avengers/Invaders storyline, but this agreement with Angela...I don't completely understand it, but their willingness to tie an independent character that has always looked like their Valkyries so completely to Thor is...I'm not sure. Is it "interesting" or is it "horrific?" Are they going to treat this character with the same sort of professionalism that Dark Horse, Dynamite and IDW use on licensed properties? Or are they going to mire her in the Thor tales so thoroughly as to make her utterly useless on her own? Maybe Gaiman is okay with that- again, I'm not sure how this deal works.

So now they're doing Angela: Asgard's Assassin. The plot thus far can be summed up like this: Angela's walking across limbo with an unknown baby, and eventually fights foes who can track angels, in order to save an angel she loves. And then there's a significant reveal at the end. Yep, that's pretty much it.

I have to say this for the art: it's a nice mix of typical Angela tales and the Marvel style. It's beautifully done, but I must admit I was having a hard time telling what I was looking at in some spots. I think that was intentional though. This book had to fight past my own bias against the mounds of Big Two dreck from the last few years, but even trying to put that aside, I couldn't read this without feeling like I was reading Red Sonja Lite.

Overall, I was not impressed. If the first arc makes it into trade paperback, I may check that out just to see how they did, but I'm not going to pursue the individual issues for this. For taking a chance on integrating a non-Marvel character into Marvel, one star. For doing it with commitment (although it's clear they're keeping it just separate enough that it won't overly affect things if she disappears from Marvel- but they can't be blamed for taking that precaution) one star. For beautiful art, one star. For Red Sonja Lite- minus one star. That's it- two stars.

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