By Kevin Grevioux, Mat Broome, Roberto Castro, Sean Parsons, Álvaro López, Lorenzo Ruggiero, John Rauch, David Lanphear, Blambot’s Nate Piekos, Kaare Andrews, Juan Doe & various (MARVEL)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-2409-2 (TPB), 978-1-3024-0664-6 (Digital edition)
This book includes Discriminatory Content included for dramatic effect.
Marvel Comics was an early champion of civil rights in the Sixties, adding characters of colour to every aspect of their expanding universe despite potential fallout and lost sales from states and regions upholding segregation and supporting Jim Crow laws. As racists retreated and retrenched on all fronts, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, Gene Colan and the liberal rest grew bolder. Actual black heroes were created: role models to confront Nazis like the Hatemonger (Fantastic Four #21, December 1963), homegrown supremacists like The Sons of the Serpent (beginning in The Avengers #32, September 1966) and other bigots.
A entire sub-strand evolved in-world, depicting mutants as allegories and analogues for all manner of intolerance, exclusion, and prejudice – albeit with the safety net of distance coming from the fact that they weren’t “really real”. Ultimately, however, issues of race (and gender, and eventually even sexuality) were confronted head on in groundbreaking and controversial series like The Truth – Red, White and Black or Panther’s Quest and The Panther vs The Klan. These explored actual societal problems in comic book contexts but by employing the readers’ shared experience (Stan Lee often called the MU “the world outside your window”), stories of merit and meaning addressed worthy topics through a shielding lens of fantasy.
Such was definitely the case with Adam: Legend of the Blue Marvel, a 5-issue miniseries from 2009 written by actor/screenwriter/director Kevin Grevioux (Batman, Blade, Iron Man, ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction) and brought to life by pencillers Mat Broome & Roberto Castro, inkers Sean Parsons, Álvaro López & Lorenzo Ruggiero, with colourists John Rauch & Ruggiero, letterers David Lanphear & Blambot’s Nate Piekos, and additional input from Kaare Andrews, Juan Doe and others.
Although mostly-overlooked at time of publication, its protagonist – one of the most powerful and smartest heroes in the Marvel Universe – has since become a stalwart elder statesman of the continuity who largely deals with cosmos-level threats as an occasional Avenger and founding member of multiversal saviours The Ultimates.
The tale itself is simply told and begins as a formidable Avengers squad including Iron Man, The Wasp, Yellowjacket, Wonder Man, Black Widow, Ms Marvel (Carol Danvers), Ares, She-Hulk and Sentry is utterly overwhelmed by a mystery villain who thrashes them all before vanishing. The scene shifts then to 4th June 1962, where the self-same villain – Anti-Man – cataclysmically battles cloaked-&-helmeted hero The Blue Marvel. As a city crumbles around them, the hero – beloved by citizens after only mere months as a crusading superhero – exerts his greatest efforts to defeat his foe. However, when the hero emerges bruised and battered from the rubble, the world changes in an instant as news cameras capture his shredded costume and the negro skin exposed beneath it…
By August 1st, the Pentagon and President Kennedy’s administration have formed a response. With a febrile atmosphere caused by the growing civil rights movement, and fearing the secession of already truculent southern states, the President caves in to his advisors (who include savants and specialists who will be instrumental in forming future US policy on superhumans and especially the growing mutant population) on the mystery man so many Americans no longer respect or trust…
Security services have identified Blue Marvel as a leading American of colour: segregated college sporting star and Korean war hero Dr Adam Brashear, who has worked quietly but brilliantly as physicist in Washington DC since coming home. The fact that the mightiest person on Earth has been exposed as NOT WHITE presents terrifying possible outcomes in a bitterly divided and inherently racist nation. With his advisors all predicting civil war and worse, Jack Kennedy makes his most pragmatic, shameful decision and secretly asks the patriot to quit and disappear…
Decades later as Avengers and Fantastic Four scour Earth’s records for clues to Anti-Man, occasional references are found to a short-lived but long-forgotten hero named Blue Marvel. Now a desperate search begins to find out what happened to him before the ferocious antimatter menace returns to fulfil his promise to end the world…
By use of cunning backwriting and inspired “historical” in-filling, the tragedy, betrayal and ultimate triumphant return of Adam Brashear seeks to set right wrongs done to him in the name of national security. It begins as S.H.I.E.L.D. director Tony Stark unearths and unlocks the “Blue Marvel Protocols”, before interviewing aging agent Dum-Dum Dugan over an issue he was sworn to hush up decades earlier. The result is a trail of unsavoury breadcrumbs and layers of lies including a supposition that Blue Marvel left Earth for a more forgiving cosmos. Instead it all leads to Maryland where the hero and his federally-mandated wife Candace Brashear (AKA Marlene Frazier – Agent 314) have obliviously lived in total secrecy and seclusion since the crisis fizzled out in 1962…
Thus begins a race to restore a broken man’s spirit against a backdrop of impending annihilation as Brashear shares his cancelled hidden past and debt the whole world owes Blue Marvel, as well as the shared origin of his and Anti-Man’s awesome power prior to a decades-delayed final confrontation that demand even greater sacrifices, a degree of redemption and the spectacular return of a forgotten champion…
With covers by Broom, Parsons, Rausch & Juan Doe, the bonus section offers unused covers; Broome’s art process; sketches by Roberto Castro & Broome and Kaare Andrews’ costume designs.
It’s always rewarding when comics’ established continuity can be successfully expanded and much more so when as here, the effort can also make points of social issues. Best of all, this yarn is a ripping Fights ‘n’ Tights spectacle that screams to be read and revered. Go do that, please…
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