Fearless #4 // Review
Marvel’s all-woman anthology draws to a close with the fourth issue of Fearless. The final chapter in the series features the last part of Seanan McGuire’s “Campfire Song” series drawn with clever poise by Claire Roe. Tini Howard tells a tale of Namora in and out of Atlantis brought to the page with a smart sense of layout by artist Rosi Kampe. Writer Trina Robbins rounds out the final issue of the series with a pair of short shorts drawn by Marguerite Sauvage.
McGuire’s Campfire Song wraps-up in style. The writer’s work has placed a few women together who haven’t really had much of a chance to spend time together in comic books. She’s taken a somewhat disparate group of people from the X-Men, the. Fantastic Four and the Avengers and placed them together in a story that makes their team-up feel totally natural. Roe’s art gives equal balance to wit and action in a really fun story.
Howard’s story gives Namora center stage. She rarely has had the opportunity to do so, appearing in a story in which she heads off to explore things after a fight with her Golden Age father. It’s a fun, little excursion that...like so many other throwaway one-shot stories in this series really makes a strong case for a lesser-known female superhero having her own series. Namora has a compelling action heroine personality that comes across quite vividly with the refreshing depths of Kampe’s visuals.
The idea to end the series with a couple of short shorts turns out to have been a good one as Robbins delivers a couple of interesting little narratives to the page with the aid of artist Sauvage. The best of the two stories involve a panel discussion at a comic book convention. Women who worked on old Marvels in the Golden Age discuss their work in a bright, little bit of history the echoes and mirrors the work of the women on the current series while simultaneously telling an entirely new microfiction story. Robbins’ works at the end of the series feel like they could be the foundation for an exciting direction for Marvel as well. The short 2-3 page narratives so rarely make it to the page, but there’s no reason more little bits like this couldn’t come to inhabit the backs of issues to experiment with ideas that might not make it into a larger project. As with so much else in Fearless, it seems unlikely that Marvel is really going to take advantage of what it has access to.
The final issue of Fearless wraps-up what really should be the first in several such series. There’s a lot of great female talent drawn-into working with Marvel. Fearless has been an excellent opportunity to get a concentrated look at all the women working with the company. And some of the characters who might otherwise get overlooked. Sadly, anthology series just don’t sell as well as they had in earlier eras, and this sort of thing is likely to exist as a bit of trivia in the long and winding history of a company that has come to dominate the pop-cultural landscape.
