Queen in Black: Defenders of Light and Dark is Everything the Main Event Should Have Been
Queen in Black: Defenders of Light and Dark, the first tie-in to the Queen in Black event from event writer Al Ewing and Tom Waltz, feels much more like an event kick-off than the actual Queen in Black #1, and I can’t help but imagine a version that blends in some of the necessary exposition of QiB with Defenders of Light and Dark and makes an actually compelling version of the event. There are even some recurring beats, such as Nova’s attack on Knull in QiB #1, repeated here as the heroes bring the fight to him. With Ewing writing or co-writing nearly every tie-in to this event, it feels like someone should have stepped in and tightened it up a little, leaving the tie-ins to the Thor-focused stories, like Queen in Black: Hela does.
While the main event book gets buried under its own lore and exposition, Defenders of Light and Dark gives you exactly what you need to know and throws you right into the action. Defenders also has one key difference that QiB lacks, a real emotional core, focusing on the duo at the heart of each team, Cloak and Dagger. By anchoring the book on these two heroes, each representative of the dark and light, two experienced heroes that despite their many adventures are fish out of water when it comes to universe ending space events.
Another success of this issue missing from the main event is providing more context to the motivations of our villains, in this case Hela. Tyr reveals what I assume is a twisted version of Hela’s grand plan to try and persuade Beta Ray Bill to join them, claiming they will use the power of the Queen in Black to restore Asgard to the memory of Earth and allow them to return home. A lie I’m sure, but even the lie makes Hela a more interesting villain than QiB itself. Facing the two armies head on also allows a much better sense of threat to the two, as even the two teams specifically created to exploit the weaknesses of the armies struggle against their scale and the power of their leaders.
One thing I find very odd is the artist on this issue of Defenders of Light and Dark, Ze Carlos, is also one of the artists on QiB itself. His style meshes well with Coello on that issue, so it’s hard to know exactly where one begins and the other ends, but it does make me wonder if this was originally conceived as one larger issue and split into two to its detriment, or if Carlos was just brought on to QiB for some last minute help reaching deadlines. Either way, his work is much stronger here and he has a lot more to work with. He does a great job of providing some flair to two battles made up of forces that very intentionally have similar powers, yet each hero is still able to stand out. On the other side, instead of focusing on individual elements of the two enemy factions, each is portrayed almost as a single entity, two massive swarms overcoming our heroes, which really makes the threat feel bigger.
Ultimately, Queen in Black: Defenders of Light and Dark is a much more enjoyable, exciting start to this event that the actual start, making it feel like something that matters by anchoring it on the more human elements of Cloak and Dagger, as well as Beta Ray Bill, instead of being nonstop exposition. With Ewing only credited on the title page, not the cover, I assume this was largely Tom Waltz work, but I can only imagine a world where this was part of the main event instead of a side book, but even now, this provides enough actual excitement and interesting plotlines to continue with the Queen in Black event while the main book left me uncertain.
