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Reed Richards: Drunk Flier or Sinister Frame-up? The truth is in here!

The truth can be a beautiful and terrifying thing. Beautiful in the way that it reveals the nature of things, and terrifying because of the same reason. In a day and age where we have an overload of stimuli about the ‘truth’ of people and celebrities in particular, Marvel and writer Cary Bates felt that it was time that the level of exposure that we give to exposing celebrities at their worst, the same rules apply to the Superhuman community. And they have begun that with the new mini-series True Believers. Along with artist Paul Gulacy, Bates has created a super-team of sorts whose sole purpose is to expose the truth about people who hold power, whether it’s government or super-power, and put it on their website. The members of this team are all subversives who have dedicated themselves to this cause under the guidance of Payback, aka Mavis Trent, who is working from the inside of one of those arenas of power: She’s a agent of SHIELD! And in True Believers #2, she starts dishing out some goods on possibly the most respected and certainly the cleanest superhero in the world! But is it truth… or fact?

Last issue, Payback went undercover to expose an underground ‘Bikini Fight Club’ of kidnapped prostitutes who were given Mutant Grown Hormone (the drug MGH) and forced to fight in a mud pit for the amusement of a group of politicians and fat-cats who wore superhero costumes. The truth was exposed and they caught themselves a senator. At the end of the issue, they had sent a message to Reed Richards and the rest of the Fantastic Four that was going to be posted on their website and exposed to the world if Richards couldn’t refute it. Apparently, he couldn’t, because at the opening of this issue, there’s a mugshot of Richards who had been arrested for flying the Fantasitcar under the influence. Of course, the media is all over it. On a particular show, of course, two sides of the issue debate whether this was an act of deliberate maliciousness or if it was a beneficent exposure of a scandal between ‘registered’ superheroes and the New York Police to cover the incident up. In the midst of all of this, Mavis is talking with a therapist about her own issues… like that she may be haunted by the spirit of her dead father. She discusses her own past about how her father worked for R&D at Oscorp, but was dismissed for divulging company secrets. She knows that her father was framed, but she can’t prove it yet.

After the session, she returns to her day job at SHIELD and discovers that Reed Richards was indeed flying drunk, but not for the reason she thought he was when she and a surveillance expert go over the Richards incident frame-by-frame. She then, under the guise of Payback, goes to visit The Baxter Building, where at first is made very unwelcome by the ever-lovin’ Thing, but then Reed comes in to break it up. He’s such a good guy! See? Anyway, she presents him with evidence that Reed was framed when an obsessed Fantastic Four wannabe called Surge shot him with an ’alcohol delivery pellet’ and then called the cops on him. Well, Payback decides that it’s time for dishing out some, and the FF and the rest of the True Believers help out with the sting. After that’s said and done, and Reed is vindicated, it’s back to the shrink for Mavis, who reveals that her father was killed when his car suspiciously explodes, thus creating her search for the truth. But she also reveals something entirely different at the end. Essentially, it’s a side of her we haven’t seen before.

I really wish this wasn’t a mini, because I’m really liking this series a lot. There’s a lot of mystery here that is going to be really hard to unearth with only five issues, and there’s a lot of social commentary at work here as well. In our celebrity-worshipping culture, we’ve come to thrive on the exposure of misdeeds of those we ourselves have put on pedestals. I’m not going to turn this into a rant because I’m part of it too. I read the celeb blogs and I laugh and get enraged at some of this insanity the same as most of you do. And I think that Bates is trying to underline how pathetically dependent on this search for sleaze we’ve all become in America. It also is a comic that is tight, well-written and well-executed on all fronts. Gulacy’s art shows hints of the photorealism of someone like Steve Epting but also the square-jawed lines of Klaus Janson. While it’s not as good as either of them, it’s certainly near that level.

I also love that the series itself is a play on the age of Lee, Kirby and Ditko and that in itself is a statement on the halcyon days of innocence that are no longer with us. For better or worse, those days are past, and True Believers is part of the future. And the future would certainly be a cooler place if more series were done as well as this. 

True Believers #2
“Payback is a Bitch Part Two: Daddy Issues”
Written by Cary Bates
Art by Paul Gulacy
Colors by Rain Beredo
Letters by Artmonkeys’ Dave Lanphear

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