The Order #3-4 (2007)

Calamity (James Wa) gets the spotlight in issue #3, relating his origin to Pepper Potts.  His father was a Japanese baseball player who brought James to the U.S. so that his son could play ball for the major league.  Wa was on his way when a drunk driver hit him and left him paralyzed.  So, he pivoted, became a prosthetics inventor, and created his own “super legs.”

For issue #4, the narrative focus is on Veda, whose origin shows her being interested in the martial arts at a young age, and then becoming a supermodel who donates heavily to a line of charitable orphanages that teach the kids karate.

Pepper is figuring out that the team is being targeted, but doesn’t know by who. We the readers see previously fired Order member, Maul, approached by a man called “The Man From S.H.A.D.O.W.”

He’s appeared in the first two issues, but only in the shadows (pun intended).

There’s also a mystery developing: Just hours after she was fired from The Order in issue #1, Avona, whose power was a psychic connection to a sword, was killed in the subway–and appears to have been stabbed by her own weapon.  That’s her on the autopsy table on the cover of #4.

Team psychic Mulholland Black holds the deceased woman’s heart and finds she can talk to her.

For the action: “Zobos” (technologically enhanced zombie hobos) are on a rampage in Los Angeles.

The team fights them off until SHIELD arrives, and then they wipe them out and “hose them off the streets.” During the debrief, Pepper wonders of the Zobos were created by a larger, more organized threat designed to test The Order’s abilities.  They trace the signal that controlled the zobos and find the place abandoned…Except for The Man from SHADOW’s shades…

The action in this comic is really just a diversion.  It’s the developing lives of the characters that move each issue forward.