Queen in Black #1 Struggles Under the Weight of its Symbiote Lore
I’ll admit, I’m not a goop guy. Venom largely does nothing for me, I don’t like Knull at all and I found King in Black fairly boring. But I love Al Ewing, and have rarely been disappointed by him. So when there was an All-New mystery Venom, I checked it out, and have largely really enjoyed that run so far as MJ and Venom’s bond has grown into something genuinely touching, and the dumber aspects of the symbiotes I’ve never connected with have lost focus by pairing them with actually interesting characters, like Rick Jones or a cat. So with this newfound goop appreciation, I was willing to give Queen in Black a chance.
As mentioned above, not a goop guy, so I was going into this book and event largely blind on all the Kings in Black and other cosmic nonsense. This issue is pretty exposition heavy, which made it pretty easy to get caught up on the various years of symbiote (and Thor) stories leading into this as Earth gets caught in the crossfire between a war between Hela, now the Queen in Black, and Knull, now a god of light. Unfortunately while the first issue may do a good job of catching you up on the past, it does little to excite you for the future. Knull remains an incredibly dull protagonist, with the vaguest possible “wants to destroy everything” motivation and raw power is not enough to make him interesting.
To Ewing’s credit, he does try to add interesting elements to Knull as the powers of creation granted to him by his weird light powers that let him make Green Lantern-esque constructs (that’s your other book Al!) seem to tempt him away from destroying all reality for a moment, but it’s a brief moment in a 50 page book. I could see it being developed into something interesting by the end, but right now it’s not enough to make me care about Knull. On the other side we have Hela, who is in a fairly similar position, lacking any real clear motivation aside from very generic “want to take over the Earth” stuff. I know she has her own one-shot which may make her more interesting, but it’s the goal of the debut issue of an event to sell me on investing further in the story through tie-ins etc, not the other way around.
The majority of the issue is focused not on our villains, but our heroes of Earth, however. As mentioned before, this movie is very exposition heavy, and the more hero focused scenes aren’t an exception as they piece together what the audience has already learned from the villain focused scenes. It’s unclear if this doubling up is just to make it extra clear what’s going on or just a lack of faith in the audience, but either way it makes for a slog to read through. Ewing has always been great at writing extended casts and giving them all unique voices, and this issue is no different, but what they’re talking about just isn’t interesting. Despite the heavy exposition when the action finally kicks off and Hela’s invasion beings, it’s still not overly clear what this army is trying to achieve, so it really just turns into generic Spider-people vs symbiote action, which is drawn very well by Iban Coello and Ze Carlos but there’s really only so much of it you can look at before tuning out.
There are some good parts in this issue, the character of “Captain Alliance” especially. Basically a space version of Captain America, his character and the others’ interactions with him provide some much needed humour in the book. Ewing continues to write a great MJ and Spider-Man as well as the interaction between them. I will be sad to see Ewing’s time with those characters end now that we know his Venom run ends with this event. Iron Man gets a couple of great scenes too, and I can see this feeding into the ongoing story of Armageddon as Tony takes it upon himself to be in charge of the latest crisis facing Earth. And with Nova and Beta Ray Bill, Ewing isn’t afraid to squeeze in a few cool moments for some favourites with some great help from Iban Coello and Ze Carlos who manage to produce some epic moments in between all the exposition. There’ve been plenty of symbiote armies before, but the Queen in Black team do a pretty good job of adding some variety with the different species infected by symbiotes all having different fun looks. The Rivals synergy is ironic here, because they really do look like the perfect variety of enemies you’d face in a video game, certainly more interesting looking than the Spider-Man games’ attempt at a similar army.
I’ve already mentioned a dislike of King in Black, but one thing it handled well was scale. Knull struck hard and fast, took out some big guns and felt DANGEROUS. With a million tie-ins on the shelves, some of my favourites ironically written by Ewing, there was a real sense of scale to it, and the Marvel Universe felt in danger. Here, it’s the exact opposite, a slow start in one of 3 major Summer events that leave this feeling detached from the larger universe and inessential. The book itself does little to dissuade that notion, feeling inseparable from any of the many other alien invasions of the last few years. Ultimately, Queen in Black is a slow and unexciting start, so deep in lore it has to spend half the issue catching the audience and characters up on it. While there’s hope that, with the set-up out of the way, the rest of the event can turn interesting, there’s not really enough here to keep a new reader coming back for more.
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