Monsters Unleashed! – The Complete Story

So, here we have Marvel’s latest big event, and it was quite a bit of fun. With a different artist handling each issue, some pretty solid writing on the part of Cullen Bunn, and a well prepared event delivered on time and scheduled, Monsters Unleashed was a great event from start to finish. Each artist had their own time to shine in monster-filled splash pages and you can really tell everyone involved in making this thing were having a blast making this series. Between the tie-ins and this core series we got plenty of fun, tightly paced action with our heroes and an army of monsters, old and new, while the story had a focus on Kei and Elsa Bloodstone I quite liked.

Yeah, it sucks just how badly Marvel is using events to push their own content right now, but at least this was a fun little side adventure that didn’t ask for much of its readers and was solely designed to entertain. So no, it wasn’t perfect, there’s annoying little aspects and details to the whole thing especially given the larger picture of Marvel’s production and silly, transparent rules, and there are minor issues with pacing and structure, but overall, by the standards of modern crossovers especially in the last couple of years, this was a really fun event that avoided a lot of pratfalls other events typically fall for.

So Monsters Unleashed doesn’t drag itself out or create any needless changes or forced reboots. Aside from some general destruction or chaos, all that really happens here is that we get a new character in Kei Kawade. For something like this, that’s fine, and even refreshing. This wasn’t the most important event in our heroes lives, but it was part of the adventure. Marvel’s superheroes being superheroes. It all feels refreshing, which isn’t really a compliment so much as a huge problem with Modern Marvel outside of Monsters Unleashed, but there you have it.

What feels like a typical story out of the Silver Age comes across as fresh and new in today’s comic climate. It’s not a good sign that this sort of stuff feels unusual, but it is a great sign that this was made. Hopefully this is the first step in Marvel steering their ship back on course, towards a more typical dynamic behind superheroes doing hero things, fighting each other a little less, and cutting out some of the overwrought nonsense that has plagued Marvel far too often as of late.

To that end, I do recommend you check out Monsters Unleashed for yourself. It was a lot of fun, totally worth your time, and indeed, was a graveyard smash.