Review: The Fearless Defenders, Vol. 2: The Most Fabulous Fighting Team of All

The Fearless Defenders, Vol. 2: The Most Fabulous Fighting Team of All by Cullen Bunn

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



Excuse me while I use this review to rant for a few minutes.

There's a lot of desire for diversity in books, especially in comics as of late. The desires are not completely unreasonable, although I think that there's a broader discussion that needs to take place regarding the genre, the history, the expectations, and so on. The better news, however, is that we have a comic right here that hits a lot of those marks - diversity in character set, in gender, in race, in sexuality, and it does so without calling attention to itself or coming across as some sort of attempt to check off different boxes. It's a marvelous series that knows what it's trying to do and has a keen sense of the tropes it's aping and understands that comics are often supposed to be fun romps.

So that's why Marvel cancelled it, right?

No, Marvel cancelled it because sales dropped significantly, in part because it was a difficult draw in some senses, with characters that only hardcore comics readers would know and with plots that intentionally bordered on the absurd. That's what made it fun and drew in people like me, but I also get why it might not have caught fire with a lot of others. It's a shame, because it definitely felt like a comic that I could point to and say "this is what we should be striving for" in a lot of ways, from character to casting to plot. Instead, well...

I get that the industry is in trouble in some regards. It's just a shame there's not more room for a team-up that's off-kilter a bit. No, there's no foul-mouthed raccoon, but that doesn't mean that Valkyrie couldn't be the next Gamora, either, right?

And I suppose we'll never know.



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