Volume 32: Marvel 1602

Marvel 1602

Author: Neil Gaiman  | Illustrators: Andy Kubert / Richard Isanove

"Sir Nicholas is our intelligencer, Doctor. All the plots and counterplots, all the words whispered and knives in the dark are his to unravel and employ. He does his job well —"

Also known simply as 1602, the eight-issue miniseries places a number of Marvel's most popular (and overused) heroes in the year 1602; not in a dodgy time travel scenario, but in an alternative telling wherein they exist separately in various roles and across various lands, but mostly in Elizabethan England. It's how the beginnings of the extended Marvel Universe might've been had it happened in a more distant time period, a kind of comic book 'what if...?' story.

Not all reinterpretations of characters are instantly recognisable. Some of the names are even changed by various degrees of subtlety in a bid to keep readers guessing (e.g. Count Otto von Doom, although it's one of the easier ones). So as not to spoil the surprise for anyone who would rather not know which characters actually feature in the book, I've left off the relevant labels on this post, instead using 'Crossover' as a basic coverall term.

It's difficult to explain why the story bored me without venturing into spoiler territory, so I'll say only that the coming together of different parties and the uncovering of truths about each one weren't at all interesting to me, stretched as thin as they were... and I'm confused about why the flying reptiles were there. I know there are people who adore everything Gaiman writes, regardless of its quality, but more cautious and/or frugal fans of his work might want to attempt borrowing from a library before throwing actual money down.

This is the part where I once again wish that from day one of this blog I'd decided to give separate scores for story and art, because Andy Kubert's art and Richard Isanove's colouring are both wonderful, achieved in the same manner as it was in Volume 26: Wolverine: Origin (for the record, it'd get five big thumbs both times), but my scores need to reflect true feelings about the book's re-readability so that in the future it can be an accurate guide as to which volumes to keep and which to dispose of. With that in mind...

The book collects together the entire first Marvel 1602 story, i.e. #1-8.

Verdict: