Minor Threats vol. 1: A Quick End to a Long Beginning

It was just another night at the Lower Lair, a supervillain bar in Twilight City’s run-down Redport district, when word broke that Kid Dusk had been murdered.  Not only was he the sidekick to one of the city’s most prominent superheroes, The Insomniac, but he was also done in by that hero’s nemesis, Stickman.  Now The Insomniac and his superhero compatriots, The Continuum, are tearing the city apart trying to find the villain and they’re not particularly concerned with who gets crushed along the way.  That’s a problem for Frankie Follis, former supervillain and current bartender at the Lower Lair, which is why she’s decided to rope in some of her fellow D-listers and take out the Stickman before things get any worse.

“Minor Threats” is one of those series that conjures up its own superhero-and-villain mythos that’s built on the decades-upon-decades of work done at Marvel, DC, and elsewhere.  Sometimes this can be a ticket to exploring the history of the genre in new and interesting ways (“Astro City”) and other times it can be a dull exercise in self-congratulatory spot-the-reference navel gazing (“Black Hammer”).  This miniseries is closer to the former than the latter, thankfully, as co-writers Patton Oswalt and Jordan Blum are trying to do something new with this setup.

It’s a story where our protagonists aren’t just outcasts because they’re supervillains, but they’re doubly so because the villains don’t want anything to do with them.  So what we’ve got here is a story where the lowest of the low try to break free of their station and the bad times that come along with it.  It largely works because Oswalt and Blum give us interesting characters who’re easy to sympathize with, and are struggling towards making a better life for themselves.  That they’re struggling against characters who are a lot less sympathetic than them doesn’t hurt either.

Helping things immensely is that the writers have fashioned an appreciably dense story out of this four-issue miniseries.  They cram a lot of detail – character, setting, and backstory – into the limited space they have and it largely works.  There’s very little wasted space here with each page being filled with oddball concepts or bits of history that beg to be explored elsewhere (which they will be – more on that in a bit).

Illustrating all of this is Scott Hepburn who shows himself to be more than up to the challenge of rendering all of the ideas that the co-writers throw at him.  He’s called upon to create an entire city of superheroes and villains, showcase their past and present exploits, and render them with enough emotion to get the reader invested in their struggle.  I’m glad to say that Hepburn pulls this off with aplomb and it’s easily the best work I’ve seen from this comics journeyman.

Though the story told in this first volume wraps up with enough closure to be satisfying, it also leaves the door open for future stories in this newly-established superhero universe.  Which are coming in the form of the spinoff “The Alternates” and proper follow-up “Fastest Way Down.”  While I’ve mentioned these before in the solicitation write-ups, I can now say that this first volume was good enough to convince me to check them out when they arrive.  The basic idea behind “Minor Threats” may have been done before, but it’s done particularly well here.