Secret Wars: Giant-Size Little Marvel #1 - Review

Written by Skottie Young. Art by Skottie Young. Colors by Jean-Fracois Beaulieu
Published by Marvel Comics, 6/3/2015
Rating: 5/5
Worth the $3.99?: Yes. Absolutely, yes.

This may have been one of the funniest week's of Marvel books in recent memory. The star of the show was Skottie Young's "Giant Size Little Marvel." What was it? Basically a Saturday morning cartoon version of the Marvel Universe.

It even starts out with a opening tune that sets up the Kingdom's place in the Battleworld (you can bet I sang it out loud as I was reading) and keeps that absurd tune throughout.
Where the original Avengers vs X-Men involved fights, death battles, and an all an out violent match between Marvel's two premiere super-teams, this story has the Avengers and the X-Men going head to head.... to win customers for their food carts. It's basically  a one upsmanship contest between Captain America and Cyclops.

This book is basically the most self-referential Marvel story ever written. It comes down to the details. Daredevil orders the "Diablo Nachos" (while facing the wrong direction, of course). Deadpool and Spider-Man complain that the Storm pulled off a "make it rain joke" even though Spider-Man thought they "were the funny ones." And Tony Stark meets the new kid, Spider-Gwen, but gets called out by her on how it's creepy for a kid to have a goatee.

And I would be remiss if I didn't give Mr.
Young credit for the high quality of the bad puns throughout the issue. Cyclops gets an eye pun and Thor gets some "hammer time." It's fantastic.

But perhaps the part where my gut was most busted, was the last page. They stop when they see that someone new has moved into "the old Richard's house." At this point, the two teams stop to see if the new kids on the block are (as Wolverine puts it) "Mutants? Science Freaks?" At this point they spin around to see....  the Maximov twins. And as Cyclops and Captain America both call "dibs" I wet myself a little bit from laughter. It's that voice of being self-aware of the audience (and their knowledge of the comics and movie versions of these characters) that really made this book shine.

One moment worth noting in terms of the larger Secret Wars. Across all the books that I've been able to read, there has been a distinctive lack of the Fantastic Four. Thanks to the main Secret Wars story (**SPOILERS FOR ISSUE 3 AHEAD**) we know where the 616 Sue Storm, Johnny Storm, and Reed Richards are, but we've seen no alternate versions of these characters or Doom. In this safe little world, the Richards' house has been abandoned (presumably for a while since it's referred to as "the old Richard's house") so they're not here either. Was that something Doom did? Did he round them all up? Kill them? It stands to reason that he would want to snuff out his biggest rivals and so this line created an odd darkness in an otherwise lighthearted book.

BOTTOM LINE

This book is funny. It's well written, drawn in a great silly style that we've gotten used to after seeing Skottie Young's drawing grace the variants of basically every book in the Marvel catalogue. If you're up for something that doesn't take itself seriously in any way, shape, or form, then this book is for you.




Did you like the Little Marvel absurdity? Looking forward to issue 2? I know I am. Let me know what you think in the comments below!