30 Days of Marvel Day 6: Favourite Organization
I’m not 100% sure what that means, but I’m just going to go ahead and assume that SHIELD qualifies because I want to talk about SHIELD. It’s a bit of a hilarious choice because SHIELD has the most arbitrary and self-contradictory continuity in town. One day they’re affiliated with the US government, the next they’re overseen by the United Nations. Basically it all depends on what’s most expedient for whoever is writing and by the time that Jonathan Hickman’s miniseries about their secret history is done, it won’t matter for shit.
Anyway, I’ve pretty much always loved spy fiction and political intrigue so SHIELD as a concept I love to death, but most of the time I only really get my fix from Invincible Iron Man. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is predictably my favourite anime series of all time, and if there’s ever going to be a worthy analogue in mainstream western comics it’s gonna be SHIELD based because they basically have the monopoly on badass military/spy chicks. Maria Hill, Natalia Romanova, Victoria Hand. I know all about Queen and Country, and some day I promise that I will read it but you’re never going to see thermoptic camouflage or sentient tanks with the voices of children there. SHIELD is the kind of place where that could and should happen.
There’s at least two different SHIELD comics in my head, and the most relevant one is basically some kind of hybrid of Gotham Central, Fringe, and The L Word Queen and Country. I should probably be ashamed, but I’m not. Now to find another tangent to wrap this up with, because if I keep going down that road this entry is just going to turn into Maria Hill/Victoria Hand femslash. So how about that SHIELD miniseries Jonathan Hickman is writing? Pretty damn good for a bunch of dead white guys fighting for control of a secret society, am I right?
I don’t really know quite where to start in talking about why you should read SHIELD, but the fact that it introduced Howard Stark as being even more of a BAMF than his son right around when John Slattery played him in Iron Man 2 is a good one. It’s kind of like Planetary for Marvel if it had Leonardo DaVinci and David Bowie Nikola Tesla in it. Which is basically all the reason anyone should ever need to read it.
