Monica Rambeau: Photon #3 - Marvel Comics

MONICA RAMBEAU: PHOTON No. 3, April 2023

Leaping all over the place from Monica Rambeau’s supposed home with ‘husband’ Doctor Voodoo, through to the Sorcerer Supreme’s Sanctum Sanctorum and then on into deep space, Eve L. Ewing’s narrative for this comic probably infuriated its audience as much as the Avengers did Photon by wrongly insisting that the superheroine’s mother had died “a while ago now.” True, all this “topsy-turvy” nonsense is eventually revealed to be as a result of “the universe… folding in on itself.” But that arguably doesn’t explain what is actually happening to the former Captain Marvel, nor why her apparently deceased parent is able to simply call her up on the mobile phone; “Mama?! How totally not surprised I am to hear from you.”

Similarly as frustrating as the gobbledegook plot though, is the American author’s heavy reliance upon sheer blind luck helping the titular character find, and then later aid, a mysteriously 'invisible' race of green-skinned aliens who also just happen to be able to decipher the Stone of Hala. This incredible journey across the stars alone debatably contains more contrivances than most comic books contain, especially when it's made clear that the human mutate just happens to be the only person who can connect with the ancient relic’s energy signature in the first place. However, once Rambeau has arrived from her “self-discovery journey” the protagonist discovers that she is handily able to transform into yet another form of energy so her eyes can properly see all the “stellar nurseries full of embryonic stars” and spot the Guardian Hall of the Charos veiled “deep inside a forgotten corner of the cosmos.”

Such manufactured moments must surely have increasingly grated upon the audience’s nerves, and only get worse when it turns out that the one resident from amongst the “group of wanderers” who might help Monica is dying from a chest tumour. Once again Roger Stern’s co-creation just happens to be able to perform the necessary x-ray scan required to locate the life-threatening growth and replicate the low-level radiation therapy treatment necessary to immediately cure them. Indeed, literally within seconds of Photon blasting her terminally ill patient with her super-powers, artists Ivan Fiorelli & Luca Maresca are proficiently pencilling the diminutively sized extra-terrestrial miraculously back up on its feet ready to “refer to some notes from the Grandmothers” as to how the Stone of Hala works.

The regular cover art of "MONICA RAMBEAU" #3 by Lucas Werneck

Monica Rambeau: Photon #2 - Marvel Comics

MONICA RAMBEAU: PHOTON No. 2, March 2023

Despite Eve L. Ewing desperately attempting to tap into the success of the much-lauded Stern-Buscema-Palmer years on “The Avengers”, her script for Issue Two of “Monica Rambeau: Photon” most likely landed with a disappointing thud when it first hit the spinner-racks in January 2023. In fact, this twenty-page periodical’s “topsy-turvy” storyline is debatably so unfollowable as it sucks the audience “across the infinite cosmos into the wrong corner of fragmented space-time", that many a perusing bibliophile probably popped it straight back into its empty pocket once they realised that at best this book’s guest stars were just the creations of the ever obtrusive Beyonder.

Foremost of these frustrations is arguably the way in which the “associate professor” attempts to create an aura of mystery within this comic by simply not explaining why anything is happening, and randomly throwing the titular character into one bizarre situation after another. True, this technique does initially work when the former Captain Marvel attempts to stop a flaming meteor from exploding into New Orleans and strangely finds herself unable to detonate the deadly satellite with her formidable super-powers. However, by the time Photon is depicted inexplicably battling a giant-sized crocodile in the Bayous of Lousiana whilst the rest of the Earth’s mightiest heroes idly stand by watching from the deck of a land-stranded yacht, the audiences’ heads are probably spinning as badly as Rambeau’s purportedly is.

Indeed, so little of the plot actually makes sense by this stage, including the gobbledegook dialogue of an entirely reimagined Beyonder, that many a Marvelite doubtless needed a rest and moved on to something else before soldiering on through this comic’s final few scenes; “Imagine my surprise in discovering that the one with the great power was also one enshrouded in a tremendous yearning. A being at the nexus of cosmic ability and tumbling, cacophonous wants.”

Disappointingly, artists Ivan Fiorelli and Luca Maresca don’t seem able to do much with the narrative either, even though the pair do a reasonable job in replicating the look of the Avengers from the mid-Eighties. The illustrators’ doe-eyed, gossamer-wearing central antagonist is especially disconcerting, appearing far too cartoony amongst some of the more ‘realistic’ figures. Whilst Monica appears to wear nothing but a bedazzled, open mouthed expression across her face for the entirely of the book.

Writer: Eve L. Ewing, Artists: Ivan Fiorelli & Luca Maresca, and Color Artist: Carlos Lopez