The Ambassadors // Review
The basic premise is outlined pretty well on the cover of the issue. The planet Earth has a population of 7.8 billion. One woman has superpowers and the ability to give them to six other people. Who gets them? It’s the basic question at the heart of the first issue of The Ambassadors. Writer Mark Millar opens a provocative, little superhero story that asserts itself onto the page courtesy of artist/colorist Frank Quitely. It’s an interesting idea that hits the ground running with a few very clever scenes that are rendered with a highly detailed, gritty realism by a master artist.
Doctor Choon-He Chung addresses an audience in a room filled with dull, red light. She is the only one to appear outside of the red...wearing a form-fitting white body suit emblazoned with the image of the South Korean flag. She’s floating there. She’s also in prison. She and her husband had been working on developing superpowered people. He wanted to develop them and sell them off to the highest bidder. She wants to give the powers to the most deserving people from a number of nations. He never managed to do what he set out to do. She has. And now she’s ready to give it all away to a group of genuinely good people. The biggest militaries of the world are going to be very upset.
Millar’s idea in and of itself is provocative, but it wouldn’t be much without a well-thought-out world beyond the basic premise. The opening issue is framed around a briefing from the Washington, D.C., Department of Extra Normal Operations. The U.S. had been attempting to develop a superman. So had the U.S.S.R. A couple in Korea managed to make it work, and now everything is dangerous. It’s all outlined in clever, even-tempered drama with a few really spectacular visuals. Millar knows what he’s doing from the beginning of the first issue. Whether or not it builds into anything of note remains to be seen.
It’s a six-issue mini-series. Each issue is going to be drawn by a different artist. The first issue is drawn with strikingly realistic detail by Frank Quitely. The artist is a deft hand at a variety of different visuals. Drama has a gravity to it that plays out in facial expressions, lighting, and the framing of the action in the panels. The level of realistic detail in Quitely’s art makes for a particularly impressive handling of powerful telekinetic visuals on a number of different occasions throughout the issue. Quitely is an expert with architectural work as well. There are some landscape shots that are absolutely breathtaking.
DC tried something very similar to this with a mega-crossover back in the late 1980s called Millennium. It stumbled over the weight of the DC Universe and the fact that it was WAY too ambitious to actually live up to what it was trying to do. Millar’s approach weaves together familiar superhero comic tropes with a basic understanding of 20th-century geopolitical concerns to develop something with real potential to be interesting.
