Comic Review: Champions (2019-) #1

Champions #1

Marvel Comics

Writer: Jim Zub

Artist: Steven Cummings

Before starting this review, it should be noted that I have not read previous Champions runs, and as such am using this as a jumping on point as a #1, so I’m reviewing this from a new reader perspective.

The first obvious comment to make about Champions #1 is that it’s rather crowded. The full roster of the team (split into three for three separate simultaneous missions at the start) is introduced in the first two pages and consists of 15 teenage superheroes (well, 14 and a dog, Sparky). Around half of these characters, I am at least slightly familiar with, with the other half being characters I haven’t heard of before.

The plot largely centres around about half the team, all characters from the previous run (Miles Morales, Kamala Khan, Amadeus Cho, Viv Vision, RiRi Williams, and Sam Alexander), with the other half of the Champions roster having a couple of lines of plot-irrelevant dialogue each and having at most a handful of panels in which they use their powers, and those panels aren’t at all relevant to the overarching plot. Of those core characters, the only meaningful interactions that seem to occur are short arguments between two characters at a time. The characterization of each individual character is incredibly difficult to gauge properly as the book spreads its page count thin trying to balance introducing an expanded team with giving every main Champions member a reasonable level of page space.

This gripe leads me directly into the plot, or rather, the lack of much of a plot. The actual story of this arc seems to really only concern the events of the third of the three missions, with the other two essentially being irrelevant the moment they’re over. All three missions take up the first 9 pages, with about half of this page space being for the first two missions. In essence, this renders about a quarter of the whole issue superfluous to the plot. The rest of the issue essentially consists of the short arguments I mentioned earlier, which are sort-of relevant to the plot, loosely. Only about two pages of this book feel like impactful, plot-important pages, one of these being the very last page. Every other page feels like it consists either of attempting to introduce characters or showing characters arguing, presumably in order to set up the premise of there being group tension.

The art for this issue feels somewhat weak, but I’m not sure if I can blame Cummings. In the panels where we get close-ups of characters faces the expressions are detailed and much better at conveying the emotions of the characters, but a lot of the issue involves multiple characters together at once, and then the facial expressions get lost. For the most part, the art is competent, but there are very few panels where it really shines through and feels rather generic for the majority of the book. There are parts of the book where I can see how good the art could be, but for the most part, it feels like it’s dragged down by the existing issues of the writing.

As a closing comment, this book might be perfectly fine as a continuation of Zub’s previous run. However, if this is the case it really begs the question of who decided that this issue should become a #1, because this is not a new reader friendly issue.