Marvel is giving Angela another solo series. Angela #1, written by Wes Craig and drawn by Pere Pérez, arrives in comic shops on 10 February 2027 as an ongoing title, and it sends Heven’s deadliest warrior to New York City to deal with an outbreak of demons. Heven has given her the job of clearing them out, although the interest the demon lord Abraxis is taking in the city suggests the angels may not be entirely innocent bystanders. Employers who hand you a sword and a vague brief rarely are.
The creative team is the interesting part. Craig is best known as the co-creator and artist of Deadly Class and for his own fantasy series Kaya, and this is his Marvel writing debut. He describes Angela as an old-school warrior, stoic and no-nonsense, someone who “doesn’t suffer fools”, which is a fair summary of a character whose idea of small talk is a drawn blade. Pérez, fresh from Amazing Spider-Man: Spider-Versity, promises a book that feels like heavy metal blasting inside your skull, which seems about right for a winged woman hunting demons through Manhattan. The main cover is by Kaare Andrews, with variants by Craig, Mark Brooks, Alexander Lozano and Pérez himself.
Angela has had a more complicated life than most superheroes, and much of the drama happened off the page. She was created by Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane for Spawn #9 in 1993, became the subject of a long and bitter legal fight between the two men, and then followed Gaiman to Marvel, where she turned up at the end of Age of Ultron in 2013 and was later revealed to be Thor’s long-lost sister. Kieron Gillen, Marguerite Bennett, Phil Jiménez and Stephanie Hans gave her a stylish run in Angela: Asgard’s Assassin and its follow-ups, and more recently she has been sharing panels with Doctor Strange in Asgard. She has never quite become a headliner, though.
Here at SFcrowsnest we wish her well. A demon outbreak in New York is hardly a novel idea in a Marvel Universe where Hell’s Kitchen is less a neighbourhood than a job description, but a heavy-metal Angela, drawn by Pérez and written by a man who knows how to make violence look like choreography, could be the push she needs. Marvel says a preview of the first issue is due in the coming weeks.
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