Secret Warriors 10

With enough chocolate and coffee in my tank to make a silverback gorilla jittery and paranoid I'm going to review Secret Warriors 10 written by Jonathan Hickman and drawn by Alessandro Vitti. As much as I'm enjoying the unfettered exploits of everyone's favourite fascist liberal Nick Fury I am whole heartedly sick of a habit that Marvel has siding main stories that should take place in the favour of concentrating on what should be a support story. The latest storyline 'God of Fear, God of War' centres on the relationship between Ares, Greek God of War, Tactical expert in the Dark Avengers and ex-construction worker and his son Phobos Greek God of Fear, also known as Alexander and member of Nick Furies Secret Warriors. It's a good story. In issue nine there was a bucket of action thrown over some nice characterization and some serious head pounding of everyone's favourite punch bags the Dark Avengers. A side plot involving Nick Fury being smug and mysterious was thrown in to what I thought would be a good line up to issue 10. No. Nick Fury's story was sent off to be finished in a one shot so we could all read about a story of divine puberty. In issue 10 (Spoilers here for all you who give a shit) we a told a tale of Alex growing up in an endless war in the heavens, killing his dad (who doesn't seem to mind) and then being told he has to earn his spurs by standing in front of three gods and saying 'Yep' I'm the God Of Fear'. This is all handled surprisingly well (despite that fact that he's just killed his own dad THE GOD OF WAR and they all want him to prove himself still); the story does seem like a tour of what life is like in the world of the gods, the dialogue and the emotional beats are all in the right place and make sense when you step back and realise you're reading about immortal beings and what passes for politics in their world. The end does what the end of every good comic does and leaves you dangling of a cliff waiting to be rescued by the next issue. The art is crisp and well paced. But... I would rather have had this story either blended in better with the main attraction or spin off into its own mini series, took the contents of the one shot and poured them into this issue. You see as good as it is issue ten has more padding than is strictly necessary and it shows. We don?t need page sized recaps of Alex's top ten moments in life and I definitely don't need a recap of what happened in issue 8. We do need a finer balance between characters and story. What annoys me the most is that it's still a bloody good read but it's like finding out your meat and potato pie is mainly potato. Oh and sticking Thor on the cover when there is no Thor in the book, bit misleading.