Welcome to Marvel A-Z, the project I have chosen for myself where I read through the entirety of Marvel Unlimited in alphabetical order by creator. At the end of my previous post, I mentioned that I would be taking some time to read through Daniel Acuña’s work. As I mentioned at the start of the project, I had initially just been tweeting my thoughts on the creators, and got up to Saladin Ahmed until I decided to go with something a little more formal. So up until now, all posts have been on comics I already read. But on that initial read, I had skipped Acuña, mistakenly thinking he only illustrated covers. I have since learned the follow of my ways, and aimed to rectify the absense, with a thorough Acuña reading.
I hadn’t quite anticipated it taking over a month, but, well, here we are. I’m not quite sure how this entry’s going to go; Acuña is the first artist I’ve looked at who has a longer run at Marvel and I have less experience considering the art side of things than the narrative. (And please call me out if I say something that’s flat out wrong.) But we’ll see how it goes I guess.
Daniel Acuña started his career in Europe, then moved into superhero comics with covers for Marvel’s reprints of Alan Moore’s Marvelman. He went on to do more covers, and signed a 2-year exclusive with DC in 2005; in 2007, he signed an exclusive contract with Marvel. He did a few more covers, and his first interior work was…
Eternals (1-5, w/ Charlie and Daniel Knauf, 2008)
In addition to pencils, Acuña does his own inks and coloring. Generally (at this stage anyway) he blends colors, and saves the heavier inks for the outline of characters. The result is some really striking color mixes and a “larger than life” feel. The downside, however, is that it’s a style that tends to work better for tableaus than action scenes.
That said, it’s an approach that really works for the subject matter. The Eternals were originally a Jack Kirby creation; the idea was that thousands of years ago, aliens called Celestials visited earth and turned humans into Deviants and Eternals. At the start of this particular series (a continuation of a reboot that began with an earlier series written by Neil Gaiman), they are re-forming after being brainwashed into thinking they were ordinary people. So they’re coping with that change in identity, preparing for a Celestial judgement of Earth, and dealing with dissension in their own ranks. The blend of elevated people in an ordinary world fits Acuña’s approach nicely.
This page illustrates what I mean; the characters stand out as bright and colorful, while also being somewhat muted, especially by the more mundane world around them. And at the same time, the action seems a bit disjointed, not quite flowing from panel to panel.
The rest of the series is much the same, so I’ll close out this section with a flashback image from issue #4; it’s an interesting choice on the writers’ part to do the fight with Apocalypse as a one panel flashback, but it looks really nice.
After a few random X-Men-related issues, Acuña’s next major arc is…
X-Men Legacy (written by Mike Carey, Annual #1, issues 228-230, 2009). The story here is that Cyclops has asked Rogue to help the students learn to use their powers; Rogue is uncertain if that’s what she wants to do. Then a baddie named Emplate, a mutant who enjoys eating the bone marrow of other mutants, abducts a student (named Bling!; the exclamation mark is part of the name) and Rogue initiates a solo rescue. In the process, she comes to terms with her feelings about Scott’s offer. At four issues, it’s a little drawn out, but that’s not really Acuña’s fault.
At the same time, I’m not very fond of how he displays the X-Men in this arc. For example, below, the blending on Rogue’s skin tone feels off, which is a problem when she’s and showing a fair bit of skin (for her) and moreover is the lead character we’ll see the most of.
On the other hand, while Eternals establishes that the godly is part of Acuña’s wheelhouse, this arc shows that he’s equally apt when it comes to the grotesque and otherworldly. Check out his depiction of Emplate, and henchthing DOA:
I was going to wrap this section up there, but the establishing shot of Emplate’s base in the next issue is too good:
Black Widow. (1-5, Marjorie M. Liu, 2010) Someone’s out to get Black Widow, in a plot that involves leaking information to the Avengers and her long-hidden family. Black Widow solo series occupy a fairly unique subgenre niche at Marvel; they’re generally spy stories, which means a lot of James Bond-esque espionage and spectacle, but also have a sort of melancholy to them that other spy-adjacent heroes lack (It might be a gender issue, or even a Russian stereotype issue, but we’ll look into that another time.). And Acuña is well suited for both styles; his nature scenes in Natasha’s flashbacks are particularly good:
From Black Widow #2 and #5, respectively.
From here, Acuña has a series of covers, and a few other short runs. For example, here’s a Captain America issue where Winter Soldier held the position (again fitting the spy theme), a Wolverine arc where he fights a demonic possession (lending itself to the grotesque and strange), and two issues of the Avengers I’m including only to illustrate how much I dislike Bendis’ dialogue.
From Captain America #611, Captain America punches some Nazis; From Wolverine # 8, Jason Aaron takes the joke Too Far; From Avengers #18, somehow Bendis manages to take it Even Further. His next major run, however, is Uncanny Avengers.
Uncanny Avengers (#6-11;13;18-22; 25; 1-5, with Rick Remender, 2013-2015). The series relaunched at one point, which is why it jumps from issue 25 back to 1. Uncanny Avengers, under Remender, was an interesting book. The remit was to explore shared threats to the Avengers and X-Men, and it followed on the heels of Remender’s well-received X-Force run. But in practice, it usually felt more like an Avengers B-book, with Rogue along. Acuna’s art coincided with a very long arc involving characters with ties to Apocalypse and Kang the Conqueror, and another arc involving the High Evolutionary after the reboot.
Here, there’s a distinct shift in Acuña’s style (although it did crop up a bit in earlier work). While before he seemed to be associated with books suited for his approach, this is more standard superhero fare. I’m speculating wildly, but I suspect his approach to comic art is fairly time-consuming, leading to both the delays in this title and what appears to be a clear streamlining of his style. It’s not bad at all, and it’s still striking (particularly in the color use), but it feels like a move from where we started.
Sam Wilson: Captain America (#1-3, 7, 11-13, 18; 21; Captain America 7; Assault on Pleasant Hill: Omega; Secret Empire 0, 8; written by Nick Spencer; 2015-2017)
I decided to lump together all the work Acuña did with Nick Spencer. It’s more or less all part of the same story, albeit one I hadn’t read before. Dipping in and out makes it seem like kind of a mess, but I guess I’ll give it a full perusal if I somehow reach “S” one day. Generally, the art here follows the pattern as Uncanny Avengers, with some streamlined work and some really nice spreads as well.
The above image is from the Civil War II crossover. The plot of that event is not improved by setting it to a montage.
And finally, we finish up with Acuña’s latest work (at least, latest available on Marvel Unlimited):
Black Panther (#1-5, with Ta-nehisi Coates, 2018). It feels a little in medias res, but the plot seems to be Star Wars, but with Black Panther. It rarely gets as splashy as, say, that page above from Secret Invasion #0, but it’s mostly good. The issue Acuña sometimes has with fight scenes and dynamism comes up, though, especially since Coates has a predilection for near-silent fight scenes. Or maybe I’m just bad at reading comics, which is sadly at least as probable.
And that’s Daniel Acuña; he does some great things with colour, and I think he works best with stories geared towards larger than life figures or the bizarre, but all in all, it’s a nice body of work. No promises for how long until the next post, which is going to be on another figure I inadvertently skipped the first time, Art Adams and his *checks notes* 30 years of work at Marvel. Yeah, this one might take a while.
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