Champions - Mark Waid [2017]
- Change the World - Ms. Marvel quits the Avengers, realizing their mission doesn't align with her morals. Teaming with the young Nova and Miles Morales, she enlists Amadeus Cho's Hulk, Viv Vision, and the young Cyclops from the past to form a new sort of supergroup that doesn't "punch down" or use "unjust force" and tries to help disenfranchised and oppressed people find long-term solutions. Applying superheroics to real-world problems like slave trafficking and systematic racism in small-town law enforcement turns out to be trickier than at first thought, but Waid does a great job envisioning what an inspired superhuman might do to combat true injustice. It's got humor, action, and just a tiny bit of romance. [4]
- The Freelancer Lifestyle - The super-social justice warriors go up against a super group of sadists that proudly "punch down," the Freelancers, in the service of landlords and other corporate bad guys. (The whole book is a thinly-veiled but well-meaning political allegory.) This part of the book is well done, but then the volume suffers, and greatly, from both "ongoing team comic features lots of characters who have their own titles" syndrome and, worse, "big world-changing Marvel event" syndrome. So in one story, Ms. Marvel is missing, but we never get any closure on where she was, and then she's back. In another story, a tonal disconnect, they search for survivors in Las Vegas, which apparently Hydra has leveled in the totally ludicrous "Captain America, Agent of Hydra" storyline. New characters come and go. In one issue, Viv is kept prisoner by her father, Vision, for breaking curfew, but then no mention of that is made again. And so on. Waid's writing is fine; through not fault of his, there's just too much going on for this to be a coherent volume. [3.5]
- Champion For a Day - Although the blurb on the back cites a big "membership drive," that's far from the focus of the story. The lion's share of this volume is about Viv Vision's new human form and the replacement synthetic Viv that Vision has created to replace her (which all happened in, of course, another title). However, we also get introduced to the new Falcon (genetically infused with Redwing to be a human-bird hybrid), Red Locust (later just Locust), and see Patriot and Ironheart, Iron Man's protégée. When the Viv storyline wraps, that's the end of Waid's fun, and intelligently progressive, run. Also included in this volume is "Champions: Monsters Unleashed," by Jeremy Whitley, in which they team up with the Freelancers against some giant monsters. [4]
