The Avengers in The Veracity Trap goes full meta on the Marvel universe
The Avengers in The Veracity Trap, the latest original graphic novel from Abrams ComicArts’ MarvelArts line, is a love letter to the geeky chaos of Marvel comics, where anything could happen and usually did. Written by Eisner Award-winning designer Chip Kidd and drawn by Michael Cho, whose work has spanned Marvel and DC’s most legendary characters, Veracity Trap opens with a classic Avengers setup: Loki on the rampage, an army of monsters, and a brawl in Asgard. But what seems like a standard super-team slugfest quickly unravels into a confrontation, not just with a villain, but with reality itself.
It’s a fitting twist for a franchise that has never been afraid to invert its canon. When Stan Lee and Jack Kirby published The Avengers #1 in 1963, the pair embraced the mess of mashing up Thor, Iron Man, Hulk, Ant-Man, and the Wasp into one team. Conflicts were epic but still personal, and Lee and Kirby embraced that tension. Through it all, they poked fun at themselves with illustrated cameos meant to remind readers that this was all, ultimately, a story being told.
Cho and Kidd pick up Marvel’s meta thread in Veracity Trap. What if the truth behind the story — behind heroism itself — was the real threat? Cho’s artwork taps directly into the bold lines of Silver Age comics, while Kidd’s writing challenges the foundations of their mythos without losing sight of the fun. Much like MarvelArts’ previous big swing, Alex Ross’ Fantastic Four: Full Circle, the whole package looks to level up the experience of what you might find in a monthly.
“When Chip first sent me his story treatment, I was about three paragraphs in before I started laughing and saying, ‘This is BONKERS!'” Cho recalls in an email to Polygon. “His story takes so many unexpected turns, and I was cackling with delight at the metafictional aspects of his tale. Of course, after I finished reading that pitch, I immediately started wondering, ‘How the hell am I going to draw this?!’ and started sweating the details. It’s one thing to read a crazy, metaverse-spanning story… it’s completely another to actually break it down into little pictures that make the story make sense. Hopefully, I succeeded!
Below, Polygon is thrilled to unravel a few of the threads waiting in The Veracity Trap, with Cho providing a splash of commentary that pulls back the curtain on his and Kidd’s pop experiment. Check out the pages below ahead of the book’s release on Tuesday.
Cho: I love Thor, but I’ve always struggled with drawing him. It wasn’t until this book that I finally figured out how to draw him. This image is actually my favorite drawing of Thor ever, as it comes closest to what I pictured in my head. And of course, it’s completely Jack Kirby inspired, but then, the entire book is my love letter to Jack Kirby.
Cho: I kind of love the old nicknames that Avengers used for each other. Thor being called Goldilocks always made me smile, so I’m glad Chip used it in the script. It shows that they’re pals, and crack on each other just like us lesser mortals. I also love Hulk’s line on this page.
Cho: This page is full of great dialogue from Thor and when I read it, I was cracking up. Chip did such a fantastic job on it and I can also imagine him cackling as he wrote it. There were many other inside jokes that didn’t make the cut during rewrites and dialogue tweaks. My challenge here was to throw in some visual interest, rather than just draw a bunch of heads looking at the reader. The bottom panel is my favourite, with Hulk’s reaction.
Really, really inside-baseball note: When I was drawing Thor’s expression in this panel, I was thinking about how Alicia Masters looked in [Fantastic Four #49] when she was pleading to the Silver Surfer about why humans shouldn’t be consumed by Galactus. It’s the panel where she goes, “We have hearts…we have souls! Can you not see that? Are you as blind as I?!” Deep cut, I know, but that’s how my brain works.
Cho: Again, another page of hilarious dialogue. I personally loved the “we are almost never in register!” line the most.
Cho: When I read Chip’s script, this is the page that made my eyes go wide, as I knew then that this story was going to be nuts! My real studio doesn’t quite look as big as this, but it had to be big and have high ceilings to accommodate a later fight scene. The art on the walls is a mix of some of my favourite Kirby posters and real world artwork on my walls. The small cowboy drawing below the word balloon in panel 4 is actually a drawing of me, by my friend Darwyn Cooke, given to me as a Christmas present. It’s also an inside joke which is too complicated to explain.
The Avengers in The Veracity Trap is out now.