Patsy Walker: Hellcat #1 (Marvel) isn’t bad. It’s got a punchy, stand-alone story by Kathryn Immonen about a C-list heroine as a stranger in a strange land, and it’s got attractive art by David LaFuente Garcia. Immonen takes the “less is more” approach to continuity, focusing on her protagonist’s abilities and personality rather than her convoluted backstory. In other words, she tells you everything you need to know, and barely a scrap more.

Patsy is a refreshingly angst-free heroine, and when Iron Man gives her a gig as the official super-heroine of Alaska, she accepts with a minimum of grumbling. Her mandate is vague, so she follows her (quasi-psychic) intuition to identify a potential trouble spot in the vast, forbiddingly beautiful, largely unpopulated landscape. Trouble is duly found, and that’s about that.

Immonen’s Hellcat seems almost like a Marvel Adventures version of the character. Her noteworthy traits are what they’ve always been when the character as been put to best use – spirited, likeable, a chatterbox, and game for anything. The chatter is cute, but not always coherent. The dialogue seems like it would flow better if it was performed than read off of a page, but there are cute bits.

I also wonder if Immonen might have stripped things down a bit too much. Patsy’s background is positively byzantine. She started as a mainstay of Marvel’s teen romance comic line, resurfaced as a spunky divorcee who became a super-heroine through pure luck and force of will, had a healthy run as a member of Marvel’s weird super-team, The Defenders, got married again, died, and came back to life to resume her career as a super-heroine. There’s no need to reference even a fraction of that, but a sense that she’s an experienced adventurer and had gone through some serious crap with her outgoing optimism intact might have added some appealing layers to the book, which tends to skate on charm.

Now, if you want to read some really delightful Hellcat stories, I strongly recommend you start with the Avengers: The Serpent Crown collection, written by Steve Englehart and drawn by George Perez. This is where Patsy went from wannabe to perfectly legitimate candidate for the Avengers. (I’ve always wondered what would have happened with her fictional career if Englehart had stayed on the title.) Then move on to Essential Defenders Volume 3, by a whole bunch of people. In addition to the best Defenders story ever (Steve Gerber’s bizarre, long-form arc pitting our heroes against the manipulations of the Headmen and an interstellar self-help guru), you’ll also get Hellcat’s introduction to the team, which is followed by a very snappy tale of the Defenders versus a new incarnation of the Zodiac. That arc also features what now might regrettably be called a “bromance” between Nighthawk and Moon Knight, who apparently found abiding solace in the fact that they were both guys with glider capes, sarcastic personalities, and not much else to acquit them.

Well, that was a disappointment. The first issue of Marvel’s Secret Invasion mini-series wasn’t nearly as dreadful as I’d hoped. It’s not good by any standard I currently hold for comics, but it’s far from the stupidest thing I’ve ever read.

What struck me most about it was that all of the soap opera is political instead of interpersonal. Tension comes from differences in philosophy or the suspicion that people they don’t like are Skrulls. (Nobody catches his or her breath long enough to say, “Well, that would explain why you’ve been such an ass for the last three crossovers.”) I miss the days when characters could spew scathing, entirely personal reproaches at each other while fending off alien invaders.

The plot moves surprisingly quickly, with a number of minor characters revealed to be Skrulls, several big explosions, and a handful of other twists of varying levels of impact. With so much stuff happening, there isn’t much room for dialogue to turn execrable. The notable exceptions are scenes with super-geniuses Reed Richards, Tony Stark and Hank Pym. Brian Bendis seems more interested in making everyone talk in a way that he thinks is conversationally natural, so smart people don’t quite come across with that quality intact.

I seem to be in the minority in being generally unimpressed with the pencils of Leinil Francis Yu. It’s hard to create a palpable sense of paranoia when the portrayal of character acting is so weak. Facial expressions are more blank than intriguingly ambiguous. His style and storytelling seem too sketchy for the big set pieces. With so many characters in play and so much happening, an emphasis on clarity and detail would seem to be in order.

For me, the overall effect of reading the book was what I always imagined would result from attending a high-school reunion. It was vaguely interesting to check in with a group that used to matter intensely, but I’m not going to go out of my way to keep up with them.

I will admit that the big reveal that concludes the comic is intriguing enough to incline me to follow what happens in the series through message board conversations, though not actually by means of buying more comics. (If anyone chooses to start an annotations blog, for example, please let me know.) Spoiler-rich link after the cut.

See, this is the kind of thing that I think would be meaningless to the casual reader who’s absorbed the title’s hype but is a virtual buffet for the dedicated Marvel fan. If even, say, two of the characters portrayed in this splash are the genuine articles as opposed to Skrull feints, then there are genuine possibilities of the “Everything you know is wrong” variety. With a good third of the characters rendered here, I can come up with a healthy list of things i wish had never happened to them. While it’s probably 95% misdirecting tease, I have to give Bendis credit for putting at least part of the joke on himself. He wrote a good 70% of the stories I wish could be wiped out of the Scarlet Witch’s personal canon. That doesn’t constitute actual story-generated interest so much as residual fanboy wistfulness, mind you.