THE ORDER #4

By: Tony Whitt
Review Date: Tuesday, May 21, 2002

As a big DEFENDERS fan, it really pains me to see how poorly the team's been treated in the past few years. First we had Erik Larsen's appallingly over-the-top run which seemed aimed at turning the team into a second-string joke. Now the founders of the team - Dr. Strange, the Sub-Mariner, the Hulk, and the Silver Surfer - have been cursed by a dying enemy to protect Earth, a task they have found feasible only by seizing command of it. Sigh.

This series really has the potential for greatness - it's got no less than Kurt Busiek doing half the writing, for heaven's sakes - but it's not. I won't go so far as to blame co-writer Jo Duffy for those problems, but I can't help feeling there's a very late seventies-early eighties feel to this script. Had this storyline appeared back in the DEFENDERS heyday in the early eighties, it wouldn't have felt at all out of place. It has all of the corny humor you'd expect from such a script - there's even a reference to PASSIONS, if things weren't bad enough - and while the idea of gathering each Order member's female analogue to fight them is an interesting one, it's also a thinly veiled way of getting together one of those guest casts that books from that time period always seemed to enjoy featuring. And while Busiek's fingerprints are plain as day -no one else would devote an entire six pages to reminding us about a character's former incarnations - it never achieves the epic feeling á la AVENGERS FOREVER that it seems to be striving for. And there's one other thing: Papa Hagg, Nighthawk's mystic advisor. If there's anything that screams "seventies throwback" louder, it's an African-American character who speaks in dialect so thick you can smell the chitlins cooking.

On the plus side, there's something vaguely appealing about seeing three of the most egocentric heroes of the Marvel Universe acting completely without restraint to live up to their fullest potential arrogance - and something vaguely disturbing about seeing the Bruce Banner side of the Hulk agreeing with their agenda. This shift in their personas from superheroes to super-dictators is so completely in keeping with these characters that it's surprising that no earlier writer thought of it. Dr. Strange always had the potential to be an anti-hero (even with the blue cowl), whereas Namor's never been convincing being anything but an anti-hero. As for the Silver Surfer, anyone able to stomach the appetites of Galactus for all those years would have no problem turning to such an extreme solution to do what he thought was right.


But the rest of the book still retains that seventies-eighties feel, even in the artwork. Dan Jurgens' layouts recall the AVENGERS series of old, way back when Ultron first threatened the team and Hank Pym was still well-adjusted. It's not bad, of course - Jurgens is never bad - but it does tend to reinforce the feeling that we're reading an alternate history of the past rather than a tale told in today's world, references to PASSIONS notwithstanding. Whether this book can shake off the shackles of yesterday and become as dark as a modern title should be is yet to be seen.