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By Jason Bourgeois
It's always nice when old things come back from the dead. Zombies are awesome. The Phoenix is the best. But best of all is always when a comic we love crawls out of the cancellation graveyard.
A number of years ago, one of my favourite comicbook companies that wasn't one of the Big Two bought the farm, CrossGen Comics. The story of why they're gone is a long one, and not quite what I'm interested in.
Just as long of a story is how they came back. The short version is, Disney bought up the CrossGen properties on the cheap after they closed up shop, and eventually they decided to buy a comic company, namely Marvel themselves. And so a marriage was made in Miami.
There's a lot you could say about asking Marvel, one of CrossGen's chief rivals, and a big part in why they may have failed, now being in control of these properties. The subject is rife with irony, but that's always the way of things, isn't it? The big companies do their thing, squash the littler ones underneath their mighty heels, then gobble up the juicy bits. How often has that happened? So attacking Marvel for that is a bit silly. I would have personally loved to still see the real CrossGen alive and thriving today, but it's a tough market. And I am not smart enough to know just how much Marvel screwed things up for them.
Whatever. Things happened, and here we are, like the situation or not. The announcement for CrossGen to make its return was far more exciting to me than Marvel's announcement that they would be finally bringing Marvelman back into publication. That's cool, and huge for other people, but I am way more interested in CrossGen. We all have our quirks.
So, CrossGen has returned, is it good?
With only two titles, it's hard to declare it as a triumphant return, but as a way of testing the waters, I would have to say yes, for the most part.
The two titles, at least in name, should be familiar to fans of CrossGen; Sigil and Ruse. The contents on the other hand, are a whole other matter.
Ruse was one of CG's big hit books. Everyone seemed to love it. It was pretty much Sherlock Holmes with the serial numbers filed off, but it had its own style, and made Watson an attractive blonde woman. Oh, and there were superpowers and mysticism in the background, so those kept things different. The superpowers are gone, but pretty much everything remains. The biggest difference is in moving the story from a distant planet in a distant future that just so happened to be similar to Victorian England, and plopping them in actual Victorian England.
It's a smart move to leave almost nothing changed about Ruse. The book worked. It was also smart to bring back original writer Mark Waid, as the creative shift at CG when he left turned off a lot of people. I think Marvel did almost everything right with this book.
The artwork is a little off, but almost anyone would be after Butch Guice or Mike Perkins. It's not bad, but it could be better. Everyone is still very recognisable though, it's just a little off.
The story also doesn't quite leap up and grab you, but again it's solid stuff that did tell a good setup story, and made things interesting enough to keep me going. It isn't a home run, but it's hard to complain about a perfectly competent comic. But not standing out can be dangerous in today's market.
Sigil, on the other hand, is a complete recreation from the ground up. The original was a giant, sprawling, science fiction epic. The new version, not so much.
The only thing carried over is the name of the main character, Sam Rey. Except even that's different, changed from the male Samandahl Rey, to the teenaged female, Samantha Rey. And instead of running around a space-faring empire, we're in...high school.
Sigil is being used to reintroduce the core concept of the symbol of power that was integral to the original CrossGen, the sigil. It appears on this young girl's body, and grants her magical powers. And as a consequence, she is drawn into adventures that span space and time. She starts off by crashing into a power struggle with other sigil bearers, that just so happen to be 18th century pirates.
This book can be used to explore almost any idea from the original CG titles, reintroduce them, and hopefully spin them off into future books. I long for Samantha to wind up in the distant future and meet her descendant Sam, if I'm being honest.
The writing and art are both solid, and while things might seem a little generic with the students at Sam's school, they're mostly incidental to the title, as the thrust of the action is with the pirates and Sam discovering her powers. The bullies are a means to an end, and they serve that function well enough.
Both titles are well done, but not the greatest thing. They don't really need to be, but they do need to be good, and draw in old and new readers. Drawing a line under everything that came before, and making something new is the best route Marvel could have taken, and they also did right by not making them part of the Marvel Universe. Let these characters exist and breathe in their own universe, and be special on their own, without the help of Spider-Man.
I hope their just plain competence doesn't keep them too under the radar though, since they are good, solid books, and should be read by lots of people. If you're looking for something not quite super-heroes, but still high adventure, or just good writing, you ought to check out the rebirth of CrossGen. We need more variety like this.
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