By Arpad Okay. Battleworld is no more and the “feminist paradise” of Arcadia, where Singularity called home, is gone. Can Singularity, the girl who literally embodies an entire a universe, recreate the team she once knew now that she lives in our world instead of her own? Our world also has She-Hulk and Captain Marvel and Medusa, just like the other members of Arcadia’s Mightiest Heroes. However, our world is not yet a feminist paradise, and so the heroes are both familiar and totally different from those with the same names found in the previous volume of A-Force. That balance of old and new is to be found everywhere in this year’s All-New All-Different first issue.
Singularity is a pocket universe, a being new to human-born consciousness. To connect with minds like ours, she takes our shape, follows our lead. She becomes a mirror to the humanity she encounters. To Nico Minoru. To Carol Danvers and Jennifer Walters, Ali Blaire and Medusa. The A-Force. In a sense Singularity is a means to measure the good that these able women can achieve. But she is still new to being, well… a being, learning the potential within us but not yet our true reflection. Singularity is innocent, intelligent and playful in a way that reminds me of Excalibur’s Meggan, using her vast metamorphic powers to play among the dolphins at dawn.
Telling the story of a super team from the sidelines is a mature and risky gambit for an ostensibly mainstream title like A-Force. This is a book with She-Hulk and Captain Marvel on the cover and it is told from the perspective of a child who is virtually unknown in the Marvel Universe. Shifting the perspective to what conventionally would be a supporting character is a move used more frequently in an artistic season finale than the pilot episode. And yet from the start A-Force is able to deliver what one expects from an Avengers book, cosmic conflict that only superheroes can solve, from an outsider’s view. I love that, like the reader, Singularity has a world in her mind where she and Carol and Nico all exist together, but none of us are able to cross the gap between that world and the one in which we live.
Another sophisticated take us how the violence inherent in a book like this is shifts its focus from the characters who are clearly heroes and place it on its supporting cast –namely, Singularity. She is neither good nor evil, which makes it a little harder to brand her antagonistic pursuer, the monster Antimatter, as a monster. Antimatter is causing destruction in an attempt to destroy Singularity, but his speech and actions seem almost programmed. Robotic. His reaction to her is magnetic, as if they are polar opposites. Can you blame a robot for being magnetized?
It seems to me that A-Force is more Fantastic Four than it is Avengers. It has high tech Star Trek moments and it has atomic monsters destroying downtown New York. Beyond that it has heroes who are open minded towards alien cultures and approach outsiders with diplomacy and charity. The thing is, the Fantastic Four’s atomic family is neither All-New nor All-Different. Families beyond the year 2000 are no longer a closed circuit bound by genealogy. We choose our family. So does A-Force. Friends so tight they together can support the weight of the world.
Saving the multiverse, Squad Goals.
Marvel Comics/$3.99
Written by G. Willow Wilson.
Art by Jorge Molina.
Colors by Laura Martin.
Lettered by VC’s Cory Petit.
7 out of 10
