The other side of the Marvel Universe
I'd been back into reading comics for about a year when I first picked up a copy of an Alias trade paperback. When I quit reading in the mid-1990s' comics were artist driven, focused on men with big muscles and even bigger guns blowing away aliens and embracing women with huge... ah, ummm... huge tracts of land. What had happened since I was gone is that comics went back to being more character driven, and less action orientated.
Comics were no longer chiefly sold by having a big artist's name on the front cover, though people like Jim Lee are still quite a draw, but rather who was penning the book. Whether it was celebrity writers like director Kevin Smith who came into comics after success in Hollywood, or writers like Brian Michael Bendis who had been working in the industry for awhile but slowly rose to fame with a series of small indie titles.
Alias, no relation to the spy thriller on ABC, is a prime example of the shift in focus for most comics. The story of private detective Jessica Jones Alias is about the side of the Marvel Universe that never gets covered in stories about the Fantastic Four or the other mainstream heroes. Jones has trouble dating, gets drunk and has random sex with cops and Luke Cage. She's sarcastic and has an outsiders perspective to the capes that inhabit her New York City.
It's a book that comic fans will love, the more you know about Marvel the more you'll enjoy the book. However it's also a book that non-comic readers will really enjoy because that continuity is just icing on the cake, and the story is completely unhindered by need for a degree in Spider-man history. Sure knowing who Spider-man and Daredevil are will help, but they're not required. I even got my girlfriend Lydia to read the title, and she really enjoyed it.
All four trade paperbacks are now collected into this one hardcover omnibus edition that includes an extra story and some extra stuff from Bendis. If you're interested it is definitly worth picking up. Also don't misunderstand me, just because things aren't as artist focused as they used to be doesn't mean the art on the book isn't top notch, it is.
