Invisible Woman #5 // Review
Things have become hopelessly complicated for Sue Storm. Her ability to simply turn invisible has been such an asset to her over the years. However, there are so many things the invisibility and hard-light force fields CAN’T for a hero who is trying to save the lives of so many as she discovers in the final issue of the five-part Invisible Woman mini-series. Writer Mark Waid wraps things up quite nicely in an issue drawn by Mattia De Iulis.
There’s a plane filled with hostages that could get blown out of the sky at any moment. It would be kind of a lot to process that much alone, but Sue Storm is also being held at gunpoint by former SHIELD agent Maria Hill. There’s a whole lot to have to explain. Then there’s almost certainly going to be some kind of crazy attempt to save the passengers in mid-air that is almost certainly going to stretch Sue’s powers under pressure. Marvel might just get its own incarnation of an invisible jet as Sue searches for an explosive. A chapter on Sue’s past closes in suitably dramatic fashion.
Waid’s story finally has a chance to settle down into a respectable amount of complexity for a spy story. The action sequences are creative enough, and the sense of tension is maintained straight through the end of the issue, delivering readers to a moody epilog that feels more or less satisfying. Waid’s biggest accomplishment here seems to have been the ability to keep Sue from looking totally invulnerable in the face of everything that’s taken place throughout the series. It’s been an exciting, little experiment that’s given some appealing depth to Sue. Waid could have done more with it, though.
De Iulis’ delivery of the action feels powerfully kinetic, but the more interesting visuals here are the moody, dramatic moments. The clean surfaces of De Iulis’ work feels refreshing, but it’s still a bit too antiseptic to feel like it’s actually happening in a real world. The world he’s bringing to the page kind of feels like a video game, which is okay, but it lacks the kind of impact that more gritty and brutal visuals might have brought to the final issue in the mini-series.
Invisible Woman-as-spy seems to have been a nice enough experiment that could prove to be that much more interesting in future outings now that Waid has established the basic premise of the series. The balance between a personality of a galaxy-class superhero interacting with strange alien life forms by day and international espionage by night seems like a fun one to explore. It hasn’t been the thrust of Waid’s series, but now that the Invisible spy has come into full view, there is real potential for further fusion if Marvel wants to explore it in greater detail. Sue Storm is a fascinating character for Marvel-style espionage stories. Given the right fusion of spy and superhero, the character’s own series could easily have the right appeal for an ongoing series.
