In order to provide some background, The Union is a miniseries from Marvel Comics starring that rarest thing: a largely new cast of characters. These new characters are heroes drawn from every member state of the United Kingdoms. The team gets thrown into turmoil when their leader, Britain's greatest hero, Britannia gets killed and is replaced by the working-class British hero, Union Jack (the only established Marvel hero in this comic).
The writer on this series is Paul Grist, a British comic book writer and artist, whose love for the character of Union Jack is well known. His most well-known series, Jack Staff, is basically a Union Jack comic book with the serial number filed off. The problem is that this the same thing is true for The Union. Instead of developing the characters who, you know, are supposed to be the main characters, Jack is clearly the main character and most of the time, the Union kind of stands there in the background while he does his thing.
Some of this is clearly the work of pandemic. Originally, the Union was going to be part of Marvel's Empyre crossover only to be hastily rewritten to be part of The King in Black crossover when COVID-19 disrupted the publishing schedule. Strictly speaking, only the first issue crosses over with The King in Black with rest of the series time skipping to after the event, ostensibly to set up the characters and their world. Still, we have a work that was supposed to be part of one story hastily rewritten to be part of another.
Except it doesn't work out that way. Ironically, The Union might have been better if it had just stayed a straight crossover because at least having generic space aliens as the villains might have given the series more space to focus on The Union. As it stands the main characters of the series in this order: 1) Union Jack, 2) a British parliamentarian attached to the team (seriously this guy is the secondary protagonist), 2) a z-list British super villain, 4) a tech billionaire who is helping to finance the Union and who, to no one's surprise, will turn out to be evil, and 5) The Union --- you know, the characters who the book is named after but who don't actually do much.
And I think this is the problem: As I read more, I get an increasing sense that some people has Marvel has kind of thrown it's hands up and given up on creating new characters. Which from a sales point of view I can kind of understand. The comic book market has traditionally been unkind to new character ideas. Why do anything new, when you can have success doing 100 versions of the same character. (See the Flash, Spider-Man, Captain America, and Ghost Rider for particularly bad offenders though pretty much every major superhero has a backup version).
But part of me wonders if it this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It does not strike me as a coincidence that all the A-list talent is put on books with established characters and books with new characters get, well, writers and artists who are not as polished. These books don't sell as well, the executives say new characters don't sell, and thus only put their least experienced writers and artists on what few books do feature new characters. In the case of The Union, Paul Grist is, admittedly, an experienced comic-book writer but he is also know for having a highly experimental writing style and, more importantly, drawing his own comics. In other words, putting him on a traditionally written comic which he is not drawing was not exactly an ideal choice.
I have to get The Union credit for one thing. At least, it tries to give the character's their own corner of the Marvel Universe complete with an original supporting cast and rogue's gallery. If The Union's flaw is spending to much time on everyone but the main characters (and it is), at least it's better then some of Marvel's other recent attempts to launch new characters where not enough time is spent on creating original characters to populate the heroes world. For instance, recent series Mosaic and, even more so, Monsters Unleashed seemed to spend a lot of their time having the protagonists fight established Marvel villains and bumping into established Marvel heroes then taking their characters into new territory in their limited time.
So how to fix this? It might be interesting if someone at Marvel wnet up to one of the A-list writers and "Pitch us something original, your own idea for a superhero." They could even sweeten the pot a little: offer some sort fo profit sharing or royalty program. Jonathan Hickman or Jason Aaron ultimately can only do so much with the Avengers and the X-Men: I'd like to see what they'd do with characters who don't have such a massive weight of continuity on their back. But thats only possible if the publisher's don't settle for yet another new Spider-Man and are willing to take a chance on finding the next Spider-Man.
