Here is the latest in our year-long look at one cool comic (whether it be a self-contained work, an ongoing comic or a run on a long-running title that featured multiple creative teams on it over the years) a day (in no particular order whatsoever)! Here's the archive of the moments posted so far!

Today we look at Matt Fraction and Barry Kitson's The Order!

Enjoy!

The Order was a spin-off of Marvel's Civil War storyline (you can read about The Order in this week's Comic Book Legends Revealed). It was California's representative in the Fifty State Initiative (where each state in the US got their own government-sponsored/government-trained team).

Writer Matt Fraction used the California setting to do a riff on "superheroes as celebrities" by having the book set in Los Angeles. The conceit of The Order is that all the members of the team are real life "heroes," like notable charity founders, famous pop stars, anti-war protesters, etc. In addition, the powers given to the members of the team would only last for one year.

The book had a very nice mixture of character-based stories as well as some over the top action.

Here is a very cool bit where Fraction plays with the whole "role models" mixed with paparazzi angle...









And then, after having something character based like that, the issue ends with...





That was the kind of book The Order was.

In addition, Fraction would drop details about each character (as these were all new characters) with an interesting "interview format."

Here are samples of interviews from issues #1-6, spotlighting five members of the team as well as their Public Relations manager...













Kitson did strong work on the art, but one of the drawbacks of the book is that Kitson's style is SO distinct that it was hard for fill-in artists (even strong ones like Khari Evans and Javier Saltares) to fill in for him.

Fraction brought a lot of the coolness of this comic along with him to Invincible Iron Man, which is one of Marvel's very best superhero titles right now.