Review: The Great Ten by Tony Bedard, Scott McDaniel, and Andy Owens

I've long had a thing for non-American superhero teams. There's just something about seeing the inherently American sensibilities of the superhero genre filtered through another culture's ideologies. (Even if it's often for an American publisher, by an American writer!) Did you know that the first two comic books I ever collected were Alpha Flight (Canada's premier superhero team) and Justice League Europe?

So as soon as it was announced, I wanted to read The Great Ten, a miniseries chronicling China's superhero team. It is a testament to the very long list of uncollected comic books I want to buy that I am now finally reading it, almost exactly a decade after it began release.

The Great Ten was created by Grant Morrison and J. G. Jones, and originally appeared in 52. They then appeared here and there before finally getting their own series written by Tony Bedard and drawn by Scott McDaniel (whose work on Green Arrow was so-so). The Great Ten are not "superheroes" technically, but "super-functionaries"-- government bureaucrats with powers. Each member of the Great Ten gets their own spotlight issue... except that if look at the covers, you'll see that the numbering goes "6 of 10"... "7 of 10"... "8 of 9"... "9 of 9"... Whoops. One assumes that the sales just weren't there to support a ten-issue miniseries. Bedard deals with this by having issue #9 focus on two of them, and justifies that choice by putting them in a relationship.

The problem with The Great Ten is that it's serving too many masters. As set up by Bedard, each issue has to do three things: 1) give a flashback origin story for its focal character, 2) give its focal character an adventure in the present day, and 3) advance an ongoing storyline about the old gods returning to China to destroy communism. I think you could do two of these things in an issue, but not three; they jockey for space. We do get potted biographies of each of the Great Ten... but their present-day adventures are rarely character-ful, and we barely get to see how the members of the team interact with each other-- surely one of the primary joys of team books! (And Bedard should know, as someone who did a good job on three different team books I've read: R.E.B.E.L.S., the post-Simone Birds of Prey, and the Legion of Super-Heroes threeboot. Though, on the other hand, he also co-wrote Team 7.)

Sometimes the overarching story gets crowded out by the characters. It feels like the initial attack of the gods goes on for five or six issues, but nothing actually happens. The political turns that come later in the story are confusing and rushed. (Part of the issue might be that McDaniel's politicians all look the same.)

On the other hand, the characters often get short shrift because they can't play key roles in issues that don't focus on them. Celestial Archer defects to help the gods in #2, but switches back basically off-panel. Many of the characters get neat stuff to do in their own focal issues, but there's no room for them to do anything but stand there in the other ones, like Accomplished Perfect Physician, Thundermind (here given a Clark/Lois-esque relationship with a fellow teacher), and Ghost Fox Killer.* Others have backstories that could be interesting, but there's no room for the characters to do much in the present, so they don't leave much of an impression: the Immortal Man-in-Darkness, Seven Deadly Brothers, and Shaolin Robot. I wonder if the book would have been better off a series of done-in-one stories balancing origin flashbacks with present-day escapades.

This is, I think, Morrison and Jones's fault, not Bedard's, but the gender make-up of the team is pretty bad, with just two out of the Great Ten being women. This is exacerbated by Mother of Champion's power being super-reproduction! Whenever there's a crisis, she has sex with a man, and gives birth to twenty-five superpowered babies that age ten years every day: a quickly formed, disposable fighting force. Um, wow. It's actually kind of interesting, perhaps, but squicky given the history of weird pregnancies in superhero comics and sci-fi in general... and c'mon, 20% women and half of their power is reproducing!

I actually didn't mind Scott McDaniel's art. I have often struggled with his faces in the past, but found them mostly improved here, and he has a good sense of storytelling. Maybe he had more time on this book than he did, say, Countdown: Arena?

The final issue, despite its rushed nature, is kind of neat, in that we get substantive interactions between two different characters, Socialist Red Guardsman and Mother of Champions, and a bit of an emotional arc. Plus there's a very unconventional ending. I don't know if it passes the smell test, but Bedard is clearly trying to imagine how a different country would treat superpowers, and the final issue in particular hinges on the rejection of American-style individualism in favor of communalism in a way that's hard to imagine of a more traditional DC book.

I liked that, and kind of wished the book had done more of it. But also, as a non-Chinese person reading a book entirely by non-Chinese people, I wondered how much The Great Ten was really capturing Chinese values, and how much of it was caricature. (DC would later hire a Chinese-American writer for its next China-focused superhero story, New Super-Man, which I hope to read someday.)

Frustratingly, though I don't think The Great Ten quite worked on its own, it's a very good piece of set-up. I think you could run years of adventures off the hooks Bedard came up with for this volume! But because of the book's (probable) poor sales, those were never to be.

The Great Ten was originally published in nine issues (Jan.-Sept. 2010). The story was written by Tony Bedard, pencilled by Scott McDaniel, inked by Andy Owens, colored by the Hories, lettered by Steve Wands, and edited by Michael Siglain.

* A ghost that kills foxes? A ghost fox that kills? A killer of ghost foxes?