Mark Waid

S.H.I.E.L.D., Volume 1

Dimitris Papastergiou

It was ok. Just ok. Maybe at some points I liked it, but most of it was just ok. Nothing to be excited about. Nothing to do with the TV series (dunno if that's good or bad actually..) But.. my main problem was that it had to do with ONE, two at the most members of the Shield and a bunch superheroes all over the place guest-starring in every issue.

I really can't stress this enough, I don't want to read about superheroes in a title called SHIELD. I want to read about the Agents of Shield, be that the ones on the tv show? or from the comics? I don't care. Just don't give me superheroes teaming up with a member from the shield to crack cases and then having the classic "save the day" ending with a "HUGE" threat being solved and whatnot. Nope. 

Artwork was good but I wanted more from the story as I said, which was from the beginning a cliché thing to follow. I wish Waid just stopped using heroes in this title. I love Waid's work. And I am a huge fan of his Daredevil, but this just didn't do anything for me.

Hope it gets better with not so many heroes all over the place in every single issue and more Shield agents trying to do what they do. 

Till the next one.

Nessa Luna

A couple of days ago, I was at this comic store in Haarlem where I saw this Agents of Shield comic. Since I loved the TV show, I decided to buy it and read it almost as soon as I got home. In case you don't know who the Agents of Shield are, they are a group of special agents put together by Phil Coulson himself. In this comic we have Melinda May, Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons; in the TV show (the first season at least) Grant Ward and Daisy 'Skye' Johnson are added.

I was so happy to see my two favourites, Fitzsimmons, on the cover - because they are honestly my favourite two of the whole team (okay with Daisy added) and I loved to see them in comic form. Other characters we met were Spiderman, Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch, Heimdall and Dr. Strange; and I was so happy to see that Wanda was in one of these comics (which is obviously my favourite comic out of the six that are in this volume). We also see some characters that haven't been introduced into the cinematic universe (yet) like Valkyrie and Ms. Marvel. I have started reading Ms. Marvel's comics and I honestly loved them, so I was super happy to see her make an appearance.

There is a storyline in this volume, that you can see very obviously in the first, third, fifth and sixth comic, the others are just inbetween tasks that the agents need to solve. I was very intrigued by this storyline, especially when Wanda got involved (yeah sorry, I can't help it, I love her). What I didn't like that much though is something I'll put under a spoiler tag. (view spoiler)[Those people with magical powers got shot down by that guy with the special gun and those anti-magic bullets, but afterwards we don't see what happened to them. We don't see if they got cured, if the bullets were removed safely or not. That's just the one thing I really wanted to know. (hide spoiler)]

Of course this volume consists of six different comics, and some of the comics had different artists, which you can see very obviously because the drawing style is so different from the rest. It didn't bother me that much, but it's something that I noticed. Maybe they tried their best to make it look similar to each other, or maybe they just have similar drawing styles, which I think is good. My favourite is the one in the first comic, because it looks so detailed and though the characters don't really look like their TV show counterparts, I did recognise all of them!

So yeah, in the end, I thought this first volume of S.H.I.E.L.D. was amazing, and I'll certainly be purchasing the next volume as soon as it gets out (according to Goodreads that's next month!). Do you watch Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and love it? Do you want to try out Marvel comics? Then you could try out this one as a starter! (Don't worry, any of the characters you don't know you can look up on the internet, that's what I do).

My opinion on this book in one gif:

Izza

3 stars | I was a bit disappointed with this graphic novel. Since it's 'based' on the TV show, I expected to find the same characters, but it's mostly only Coulson, Fitz, Jemma and once in a while May popped in. Also, Jemma and Fitz are nothing like they are in AoS, and it killed me because I always need more Fitzsimmons in my life!

S.H.I.E.L.D., Volume 1

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