After a lengthy time away, Namor is back in a new extra-sized series this week. He’s been imprisoned for a few years for crimes against the surface world. As the new series starts, we meet the usually arrogant and steadfast anti-hero, totally at peace with being imprisoned. He thinks he deserves and it should be there, even if he’s mistreated. It’s a place Namor hasn’t been pretty much his entire existence, which puts him at his darkest and lowest place imaginable. It’s time for writer Jason Aaron and artists Paul Davidson and Alex Lins to pull him out!
Namor #1 walks the line of two plots. One involves Namor in prison, with the reader mostly inside his head via captions. The other is set when Namor was quite young and not yet king of Atlantis. In this B-Plot, Namor is as arrogant and sure of himself as ever, but he’s also treated poorly due to his skin color.
The juxtaposition of an older Namor broken and alone versus a young Namor confident and alone is not lost on the reader. This drives an interesting narrative about a man who was always an outsider and one his people detested, but now he seems to think he deserves it. Due to these threads, you can easily connect with Namor, and you’ll root for him even knowing he’s in prison for violent acts.
The flashbacks are a joy.
Credit: Marvel
That’s partly due to the brutality Namor faces. Davidson draws the scenes in the present and does a great job making Namor look haggard and weak. He’s given a drop of water every few weeks, yet that drop still keeps him strong. This reminds us of how powerful he is, and a few times, we see Namor have the chance to escape, but he chooses not to. These scenes do a lot to make him seem like he’s done his time.
Meanwhile, Lins draws the flashbacks, and young Namor is cute and emphatic. Lins gives him a bit of a baby face, and along with his green shorts, he’s got a vibe that’s not unlike a tough puppy.
For the most part, the pacing and plotting move at a good clip, although there are a few pages where the captions feel too long and slow the book down to a slog. The narrative gets into an exposition dump when Stingray shows up, and while this information is key to understanding where we go from here, it feels overly expository. Running 30 or so pages, the book feels too long and could have used some tighter pacing.
Namor is a great first issue setting up the Namor of now and how much he’s changed since being a boy. He’s a natural-born king whose people don’t want him, but now they need him, which may return Namor to his once prideful place as an A-tier character. Namor soars in the way it captures Namor as an outcast and the familiarity with his life-in-transition existence.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login