Waiting for the Trade – Heroes for Hire

Why I bought this: Basically because Black Cat is in it and it was in the discount bin for $4 on Free Comic Book Day when everything in the store was 20-percent off including already discounted items. If it wasn’t practically free I’d have probably ignored it forever because I had sampled the first few issues of this series around Civil War and it quickly became apparent that Felicia was just standing around in the background with nothing to do in this series.

The Plot: Let’s do a back-story/cast list first because these are some obscure characters. Heroes for Hire was the company name of Power Man and Iron Fist’s partnership in the 80s. They often double-dated the Daughters of the Dragon, who are: Misty Knight an African-American P.I. with a bionic arm; and female Samurai Colleen Wing. The Daughters apparently had a title no one was buying by this same creative team, so Marvel used the popularity of the Civil War crossover to add cult-favorites Shang Chi (aka Master of Kung Fu) and Black Cat (female cat burglar and former love interest of Spider-man) to the title, along with a few super-villains who used the registration act to reform/get on the government payroll; and then relaunched the Dragons title as this book. The former villains in the cast are Tarantula, Humbug and Orka. Tarantula is traditionally a male Spider-man villain and national hero of a fictional South American dictatorship with poison spiked boots, but this one is a girl who seems to be a martial artist with spiked boots (sans poison I think but the writers really never tell us much about her or her abilities). Humbug appeared in exactly one issue of Web of Spider-man in the 80s as a joke villain who used the sounds of insects amplified in a tape recorder to commit robberies. In this series he has the superpower of talking to bugs. Orka is a long-time Namor-foe with Hulk-class strength and in some appearances growing powers plus of course he’s aquatic since he’s a Namor foe. The team is registered with the government but privatized by the Daughters and works as an extension of their P.I./bounty hunter business.

Got all that? Then let’s hit the chapter breakdowns with spoilers.

Chapter 1 – A small child comes to HforH and says that super-villains stole his robot, so they send Humbug off with the kid to investigate and we get some comedy with the two of them. Meanwhile a rabbi asks the team to investigate a series of diamond robberies by cyborgs. Humbug discovers the kid’s robot is an abandoned Doombot and it has now been reprogrammed by the Headman (a group of lame evil scientists that usually bother the Defenders). Humbug and his talking bugs fare about as well as you’d expect and get captured. Meanwhile the human members of the team take down the cyborg-henchman and clues at the scene lead them to a boat where they encounter the Lethal Legion (Avengers foes traditionally led by Grim Reaper, this is a trim-downed roster that includes Reaper, longtime member Man-Ape and a cyborg named Saboteur). The heroes lose that fight pretty quickly too and in Adam West Batman-villain fashion Reaper locks them in a boat full of bombs on a direct course to impact the Statue of Liberty.

Chapter 2 – The heroes are unable to disarm the bomb but Misty radios Orka for help, who busts through the wall, grabs the bomb and disposes of it underwater. Meanwhile the Headman have severed Humbug’s head and attached it to a box. (Their whole shtick is head-transplants. And somehow they think this will enable them to conquer the world. Hence my earlier lame villains comment). Anyway he sends some bugs to get the rest of the team to come help. Meanwhile Grim Reaper kills Saboteur for no discernible reason when he notices the bomb never went off, at which point the female members of HforH bust in and defeat them in a short battle. And then Misty tortures Reaper for information but it’s played for laughs so I guess that makes it okay then. Elsewhere Shang Chi and Orka attempt to rescue Humbug only for the Doombot to blow a whole through Orka’s chest.

Chapter 3 – Orka dies and Shang Chi completely loses it, dismantling the Doombot and pummeling the Headmen into submission. Later Paladin (heroic mercenary with low level super strength and guns) approaches the team with a new mission: go to the Savage Land and apprehend Devil Dinosaur and Moon Boy (a red T-Rex and a monkey-man).

Chapter 4 – We get a recap of Paladin betraying the team in Civil War but if they want this assignment (which is actually just to apprehend Moon Boy as some scientists think his DNA has the cure for cancer) they have to work with him. While the Savage Land is usually used just for simple A-list hero meets dinosaurs stories, in this book it is presented more like Kong Island with an entire eco-system of over-sized dangerous threats that these mostly human urban heroes are way out of their league dealing with. And it’s not even dinosaurs: its flocks of giant butterflies, and a tribe of gorilla’s lusting after Colleen, and a pack sabre-toothed hyenas and a swarm of giant beetles; and by the end the team is scattered and isolated and mostly in a bad-place although Shang Chi and Tarantula hook-up after beating back the hyenas.

Chapter 5 – Humbug, who was presumed dead after the Giant Beetles got him, wakes up naked among a hive of various giant insects. Moon Boy saves Colleen and Misty from the apes, and they repay him by trying to kidnap him to fulfill their contract. This combined with Misty’s casual torture earlier really makes her just about the most unlikable protagonist I’ve read about in quite some time. Devil Dinosaur comes to save Moon Boy and is about to eat Misty and Colleen (and good for him!) when Humbug and his swarm manage to drive him back long enough for the team to regroup and escape. Humbug informs the team they need to go back to New York because the giant bugs in Antarctica somehow psychically know about the events of World War Hulk including stuff that happened in outer-space, and the book ends by plugging that crossover because you know this team of third stringers who had no counter-strategy for over-sized butterflies is going to be real useful in attempting to stop the Hulk.

Critical Thoughts – While these stories have some entertaining moments, they are also endemic of many of my criticisms of current Marvel: namely that most of the heroes are far from heroic, while any villain who isn’t A-list is treated as a joke. 

Of the villains in the book, the only one treated as a serious threat is the malfunctioning Doombot. And even that is kind of a WTF moment. Since when are Doom’s laser blasts powerful enough to blow holes clean through borderline class 100 level characters? Because if they are that strong then why hasn’t he killed Thing 40 years ago? Obviously this ties back into the Orka isn’t an A-list character so he must be D-list because there’s no middle ground anymore. Never-mind that I have an old Defenders comic where he battles the Hulk to a draw, or an Avengers comic where it takes a significant effort by the entire team to defeat him. Nope, in new Marvel since he’s not an A-list character then clearly he can be killed in one shot by Doom, because Doom is A-list, even though it’s not even really Doom—it’s a malfunctioning Doombot.

Ditto the Grim Reaper and the Lethal Legion. These are traditional Avengers foes. True they haven’t been used in years, but grab an Avengers book in the 70s thru 90s and Reaper is clearly presented as the Avengers #3 villain. And yea, I discussed in my Avengers Assemble review that once Reaper was depowered back to being just a human with tech weapons then he’s not really in the Avengers class proper, but he still shouldn’t be losing to the Daughters of the Dragon in a one page battle. Nor made the pitiful butt of the comedy torture.

This brings up two more points. For the writers-only-know what reason Reaper is presented as a “terrorist” in this book. They use that word several times; and admittedly if he wants to blow up the Statue of Liberty it fits. But I defy anyone to explain when Reaper has ever been a terrorist or even a traditional criminal. All of his prior appearances are based on his obsession with his brother Wonder-man: first trying to kill the Avengers for causing his brother’s death (in the line of duty), then trying to kill Vision for using Wonder-Man’s brain patterns and then trying to kill Wonder-man after his resurrection. To my knowledge he’s never been a bank robber, terrorist or traditional criminal in any of his appearances over the last 40 years, but why should that matter; after he’s not A-list.

Furthermore if the terrorist thing is in there just to justify the comedic torture then it fails twice as hard. I didn’t buy arguments from Bush and Cheney in real-life that torture is an acceptable tool in stopping terrorism, so I sure as Hell don’t buy them from my comic book superheroes, who should be representing a higher standard than real life, not a lower one.

Finally as a Black Cat fan, I have to note she still has no point in this book. Go back and read my plot summary and you’ll see her name doesn’t come up once, so why the heck is she on the cover of this trade?

So what did I like in this? The humor with Humbug and the kid and later with the Headman works for the most part. Chapter 4 is a real highlight with a new take on the Savage Land. If you can successfully pull of a tonal comparison to the original King Kong film you’re doing something right. Finally the art is better than average with the splash page of Orka’s death and Shang Chi’s bad-ass reaction to it standing out as particular dramatic highlights in the art.

Grade: C-. This is tough to grade because while my criticisms are many and serious, they are as I said from the top endemic of the Marvel brand as a whole lately and not just this book. So are we grading it against the Jim Shooter era? Because then it fails pretty hard as pretty much anything not written by DnA or Dan Slott tends to do. Or are we comparing it to current Marvel? In which case it’s just another below average story with misplace priorities in a company filled with them lately. Certainly some of what the writers do here really works (again the comedy with Humbug and the Savage Land chapter, plus the finales of each chapter are for the most part properly dramatic.) Yet in other parts the writing is clearly lacking. I read this whole thing and I have no idea who Tarantula is or what her powers are, nor why Felicia and Shang Chi are even on this team. I would certainly advise against paying full price for this or even going out of your way to read it; but if you see it a discount bin for $3 like I did then it isn’t completely terrible.