No, not the TV Show

It would be fair to say that Alias suffered from being called Alias at a time when all anyone thought of when you’d say Alias was the television show. The comic, having nothing to do with the television show, seems somewhat overlooked now.

Alias, at the outset and in its wrap-up, was one of the best titles to come out of the MAX imprint (with Supreme Power coming in a close second). The character Jessica Jones was created as a sort of response to the Purple Man, and the entire run of Alias is a response to the trauma of adding a character to Marvel continuity. By the end of the series, allusions to this are being made directly by the Purple Man himself, comments the characters trapped within the narrative perceive as meaningless. Unfortunately, Marvel has seen fit to to keep the trade paperback of the fourth volume of Alias out of print, so you’re going to have to read this some other way since the price on the copies still available online has reached absurd levels.

This series came out of the build-up to Decimation and Civil War. Alias was written by Brian Michael Bendis during the writing he was doing in Daredevil, only in Alias he says fuck a lot more. I get the feeling it was created with the hopes that it would provide a realistic look at the kind of after-effect an encounter with a super-villian would be, and follows the injection of Jessica Jones into Marvel continuity.

Jessica Jones, aka The Huntress or just “Jewel” got her powers when a canister of gas flew into the family car moments before a car accident killed the rest of her family. Yeah, it’s a lame origin story. But in some sense there’s something else going on here, and it’s not just Bendis getting to say fuck a lot: Alias is about dealing with the aftermath of an impossible event, about recovering identity. Alias is also about the masks we hide behind, and the power behind those masks. It’s well written, involving numerous figures from the Marvel universe without ever losing sight of Jessica’s own internal struggle. In the first story arc, Jessica is brought into a case (she runs her own detective agency after leaving a life of caped crusader-ishness behind) that threatens to expose Captain America’s identity. Early on the reader learns she’s connected to the Avengers, but it isn’t until the end of the last story arc that the whole sordid mess becomes clear.

And as the series progresses, it becomes obvious that Jessica is a very tortured soul, for it’s her own past that’s haunting her. (Honestly, there’s an entire
story arc about J. J. Jameson’s ward that I recommend skipping just to get to the final story arc.) In parts the storyline seems overly preachy, and for several issues there’s little beyond the standard neo-noir crime drama dressed up with mutant powers. But this opens in a big way, maintains a solid storyline for 15 issues or so, and by issue 22 it’s back on track for the rest of the run.

(Well, what do you expect? It’s still Marvel, so there’s gotta be little bits of ‘suck’ thrown in so they don’t confuse their primary fan-base.)

So, in short, this is an overlooked series that asks some difficult questions via the incredible power wielded by the Purple Man in the last story arc, and the beginning and end of this series makes getting through the slump in the middle well worth your time. Even still, it feels like punches are pulled – the last storyarc threatens to go into some disturbing possibilities but it’s the thought that counts, and at the end of the day Brian Michael Bendis succeeds in developing a very different kind of superhero while remaining within a shared world in which most of the moving parts (i.e. the standard underwear pervert crew) remain two-dimensional in character and composition.

Torrent: Alias (#1-28)