A universe-ending threat from the dawn of time, the accumulated efforts of every major cosmic character, and the conclusion of varying long-ignored plot threads, Reckoning War promised to be a star-spanning epic unlike any other.
It had a lot of legacy going into the project, as it set out to answer a question asked some 17 years ago in writer Dan Slott’s She-Hulk run, but that isn’t all: Slott looks to examine, tie-up, or otherwise progress a handful of other characters and concepts that he’s seeded throughout the last 20 or so years of his Marvel work.
Marvel Comics
Reckoning War Part II begins with the Slott-created Gauntlet, a military man who has come into possession of an extraterrestrial robotic arm. Introduced in the early 2000s, the character was primarily left behind by other writers for a decade and a half. Here, tossed into the major intergalactic conflict of the Reckoning War, Gauntlet brutally comes into conflict with significant answers regarding the gauntlet’s origin.
The Cormorant, a sort of (we’re told) unbeatable alien force unto itself, has arrived to piece together a larger suit of armor—armor worn, in parts, by Slott-created characters Southpaw, Gauntlet, and a new-for-this-event Grasshopper. The Cormorant, partnering with Doctor Doom, becomes a hail-Mary force in the endgame of the War.
Marvel Comics
That this entire story–a would-be modern-day Thanos Quest–is introduced and concluded over the course of three pages could be read as illustrative of Reckoning War‘s own problems: a lot of long-established moving parts concluded too quickly and with little fanfare.
Marvel Comics
It can also, however, be read as narrative shorthand, in much the way that Johnny Storm’s cameo-rich space army can be read. By including these massive but untold conflicts within the larger narrative of the war, they become instruments of a forced perspective in the story’s depth of field. As if to say, “see how massive and important this is? This barely compares to the larger thing itself.” It’s a tactic that works, if just barely, and only because we understand the creator’s deep affection for the cameo characters.
Using his natural penchant for carrying meaningful qualities for characters, no matter how small their parts, Slott also reconnects with cosmic forces established or created during his Silver Surfer run, tidies up the lives and relationships of the main characters, and solves the problem of a depowered Franklin Richards—all of this under the larger “big event” framework.
Marvel Comics
All that said, the lingering feeling of anticlimax is present throughout—even at its most bombastic and thrilling (and it is bombastic and thrilling), very little of what occurs in Reckoning War Part II feels like it’s deserving of the 17 years of foreshadowing—particularly given that the original foreshadowed moment (She-Hulk influence on the War itself) occurred over a handful of panels in the last trade paperback.
Marvel Comics
What Reckoning War—and, indeed, the whole of Slott’s run on Fantastic Four—managed to do was not create an untouchable, masterpiece epic; it elevated the types of day-to-day operations of the team. The book raised its stakes with each successive story, starting with a wedding and ending by rewriting the whole of the cosmic Marvel history. All of this, simply in a day’s work for Marvel’s First Family. Wrapping up all those lingering Slott plotlines—from Gauntlet’s armor to the long-awaited Reckoning War itself—wasn’t an effort to redefine a foreshadowed epic; it was simple housecleaning.
This is to say that the Reckoning War, as a whole, more closely resembles a perfectly tuned conclusion to a long, exceptional run on a book—Slott and his five collaborators manage to bring these iterations of these characters to an emotionally resounding place of closure. It might not have justified the long build-up, but it immaculately and masterfully closes out Slott’s 46 issues on the book.
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