Alias was wonderful. It was maybe the first of it’s kind(?): A Marvel comic that took place firmly in the Marvel Universe, but featured a character none of us had ever heard of and yet she had ties to all the major heroes.
Marvel had done this with Sentry, but they explained that everyone forgot him precisely because that was the power of the Void inside him: To erase memories.
Jessica Jones, on the other hand, just quit being a superhero because she was an alcoholic.
The comic moves very slowly, so I’ll be writing about it in broad terms and large chunks of issues.
Issue #1 drops us right into her world. And we know the comic is very different from what we’ve seen before because the first word of the first panel is…
A client is in Jessica’s office. He gets unruly.
And she casually tosses him through her own glass door.
Look at that sequence above: It has “noir” pacing. Nothing is rushed. It’s like the creators know you’ll stay for the next panel and don’t have to show everything all at once.
When the police arrive, we’re shown a picture of Jessica in a costume with an older (mid-1980s) lineup of the The Avengers.
I’ll admit, when I first read this issue I had to start looking her up. I figured I must have missed something. Bendis just casuallly drops this into the comic–with no explanation or context.
But I wasn’t alone in my confusion: The cops didn’t remember her, either.
She then gets drunk and bangs Luke Cage, who calls himself the “N” word with the “ga” at the end.
Yeah. This is a different comic than any I’ve read before.
At the end of issue #1, she’s hired to tail a big, beefy blonde man who turns out to be Captain America.
And because she’s on the clock, she films his outfit change.