Issue #1 – 50 Years of SHIELD: Quake
Title: Quake: SHIELD 50th Anniversary #1
Writers: Patrick Kindlon & Matthew Rosenberg
Artists: Daniel Warren Johnson, Jason Keith (color), David Nakayama (cover)
The Buzz: SHIELD is 50 years old! To celebrate, Marvel have put out a series of one-shot comics in honour of five iconic SHIELD agents, combining mythos from the Agents of SHIELD & Agent Carter TV shows, and from the comics themselves. The characters in question are Mockingbird, Melinda May, Quake, Peggy Carter and Nick Fury – though there are also cameos and guest appearances from many others.
All You Need To Know: In the comics, Daisy Johnson (Quake) is the daughter of a super-villain, and one of (old, original) Nick Fury’s protegees. She is a top-level SHIELD agent who, despite her young age, took over from Fury as Director of SHIELD. In the TV series Agents of SHIELD, cheerful hacker Skye (no last name) appeared to be an original character with no ties to Marvel continuity until the middle of Season 2, in which her exposure to alien technology gave her earthquake-like powers, marking her as an Inhuman, and her long-lost supervillain father revealed that her real name was Daisy…
Story: This one-shot doesn’t do quite as good a job as the Cavalry and Mockingbird titles in combining the elements of the TV show with established Marvel canon – the Daisy here shows little of the wit and personality of Chloe Bennet’s Skye. What we get is a generic origin story of a young SHIELD agent who is unexpectedly flung into the field with the Avengers with little to no prep, because Captain America Believes In Her. For fans of the show, it’s cute to see a different interpretation of Jianying as a maternal figure to Inhumans, but the rest of the story is very heavy handed.
No one is written especially well – Hawkeye and Storm display no recognisable personality at all, Iron Man is a complete dick (not out of character, but lazy writing) and Captain America is smug and irresponsible. His supportive speech at the end about how he wanted Daisy on the team to be the token human and provide a ‘conscience’ for the superpowered group is both cheesy and selfish, in no way making up for the fact that he deliberately sent her into the field without any parameters for what she was supposed to achieve. For a comic called Quake, it was a disappointing that we barely saw Johnson use her powers, and the only times she did, they were fuck-ups. Though, it has to be said, that thing where she accidentally made the monster vomit on Captain America was slightly awesome.
Art: I liked the cover version of Quake more than the internals, which are quite dark and uninteresting in their layouts. I liked that Daisy is drawn as a character rather than a girrrrrl, all practical military business rather than glamour poses. On the other hand, Captain America’s face is weirdly goofy.
But What Did I Miss?: As a flashback story, this doesn’t require any prep, and is a perfectly good standalone issue in that regard. On the other hand, it has none of the crossover appeal of Mockingbird or the Cavalry, and regardless whether the point of this project is to draw comics readers to Agents of SHIELD, or to draw Agents of SHIELD fans to reading comics, I think the mark has been well and truly missed with this one.
Would Read Issue 2?: Not with any enthusiasm.
Read it if you Like: old-fashioned interpretations of the Avengers, military comics I guess.
Previously reviewed this year:
Thor #1 (2014)
Spider-Woman #1 (2014)
All-New Captain America #1 (2014)
Captain America & the Mighty Avengers #1 (2014)
S.H.I.E.L.D. #1 (2014)
The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #1 (2015)
Bitch Planet #1 (2014)
Secret Six #1 (2014)
Operation: S.I.N. #1
Spider-Gwen #1
Curb Stomp #1
Jem & the Holograms #1
Silk #1
Issue #1 – Convergence Special – Oracle, JLI, Batgirl
Issue #1 – Battleworld Special: Lady Kate, Ms America & Inferno
X-Men ’92 #1
Giant-Sized Little Marvels: AvX #1 (2015)
Runaways #1 (2015)
Loki, Agent of Asgard #1 (2014)
Fresh Romance #1
All-New Hawkeye #1
Black Canary #1
The Wicked and the Divine #1 (2014)
Bombshells #1
Captain Marvel & the Carol Corps #1
50 Years of SHIELD: Mockingbird #1
50 Years of SHIELD: (Don’t Call Her…) The Cavalry #1
