Review: New Avengers Vol: 3: Other Worlds and New Avengers Vol. 4: A Perfect World

I've been catching up with Jonathan Hickman's run on the Avengers books—Avengers, featuring the official line-up of Marvel's premier superhero team, and New Avengers, featuring The Illuminati—and I can't begin to tell you how much I've been enjoying the story, particularly this chunk of it, collected in these two collections (11 issues of New Avengers, from #13-#32).

In fact, that was me attempting to begin to tell you how much I've been enjoying it. See? I didn't do that very well at all.

When Brian Michael Bendis first came up with the idea for The Illuminati of the Marvel Universe, its make-up consisted of some of the most influential good guys in the fictional shared universe, all secretly teaming up behind-the-scenes in order to run the world without anyone outside of the group, including their respective teammates and those in their respective spheres of influence, finding out. Generally, they were engaged in pretty murky stuff, the blowback of which usually caused as many huge problems as the group solved, problems that would need a big event story/line-wide crossover to deal with: Shooting The Hulk into space lead to World War Hulk, for example, while destroying a Skrull ship full of Skrulls lead to Secret Invasion, and so on.

The current version of The Illuminati, which has been starring in this book, apparently named New Avengers because that is a more salable title than The Illuminati, consists of Mister Fantastic Reed Richards, Iron Man Tony Stark, Dr. Stephen Strange, Namor, The Black Panther, Black Bolt and Henry "The Beast" McCoy, who has taken his dead mentor Charles Xavier's chair on the team (and Beast is actually a better fit; he may be less of a cunning, scheming bastard than Xavier could be, but he's also another super-genius, able to finish sentences of guys like Richards and Stark).

The single conflict the team has been engaged in since its reformation in the Hickman-written title—aside from interpersonal conflicts, like Black Panther's vow to kill Namor and Namor's not really giving a fuck about The Black Panther, because he's Namor, The Sub-Mariner, "Imperius Rex!!!!"—has been the one of the "incursions."

If you haven't been reading—and you should start doing so immediately; this review will still be here when you're done—here's what that involves. "Everything dies," Reed Richards explains the problem at the beginning of the series (that's actually the title of the first volume, and a phrase one reads over and over and over again in Hickman's books), and everyone accepts that, but Richards refuses to accept the death of the world, the universe and/or the multiverse at an artificially accelerated rate, which seems to be exactly what is currently happening.

The deal is that alternate Earths regularly appear in the skies above other Earths; if the two Earths collide, then both they and their entire universes are destroyed. If one of the two Earths is destroyed, then both universes are spared, at the staggering cost of an entire world.

This puts The Illuminati in something of a spot, as they have to not only solve the problem behind the incursions, but repeatedly stop them from occurring to their own Earth, which, of course, means choosing to destroy a world (and the billions and billions of lives upon it), in order to save their own universe, as well as an alternate universe. And it's not a one-time problem; the incursions are chronic and will keep happening until our protagonists can figure out what exactly is wrong with the Multiverse that is leading to the incursions and then how to fix it.

Theoretically, the math is easy: Kill billions to save trillions and trillions and trillions of others. In practice, it's an awful lot harder than that. The team, made-up of some characters of already rather murky moral alignment (see Civil War, for example) has been dreading the moment when they actually have to choose to destroy a world in order to save two universes, but they have been preparing to do so, stockpiling world-destroying bombs and other weapons, interrogating extra-dimensional prisoner The Black Swan for more information and, thus far, having been lucky enough not to have to pull the trigger to actually end a world. The incursions they have so far faced were all able to be averted by one means or another (The first one, for example, they prevent by using The Inifinity Gauntlet, although that destroyed the Infinity gems in the process).

In the issues collected in these two volumes, their luck runs out, and they are all forced with the impossible choice they've been preparing to make.

While the series has been incredibly consistent, and consistent with Hickman's other, related series—Avengers and Infinity, basically–the art has been less so, for the simple fact that it's easier and less time-consuming to write a comic book script than it is to draw one. So these eleven issues feature the work of four different primary artists, all of whom are good, even great artists, but none of whose style quite blends with that of the others: Simone Bianchi, Rags Morales, Valerio Schiti and Kev Walker (I suppose it helps, however, that there's a lot of jumping around in the Multiverse so, for example, in Bianchi's issues, he draws multiple Illuminati teams on multiple Earths, each with slightly different make-ups).

Bianchi is the first at bat, drawing the first three of these 11 issues. These show the parallel events on different worlds, and how those groups of Illuminati stave off, or attempt to stave off their own incursions. They begin with Reed Richards delivering his "Everything dies" speech, but the groups are slightly different. One Illuminati has two Black Panthers (T'Challa and Shuri) on it, as well as Magneto, not-dead Professor X and not-dead-from-cancer Captain Mar-Vell, for example; another has Hank Pym, Dr. Doom, two Captains Britain and Emma Frost joining constant members like Reed and Stark.

During these Bianchi issues, the Swan instructs the super-geniuses in the group to try and build some sort of way to monitor the Multiverse, which they figure out how to do pretty quickly, and they thus are able to start viewing incursions occurring between other universes that do not involve their own, to see how the potentially infinite versions of themselves solver or, more typically, fail to solve the problem.

Dr. Strange, meanwhile, goes about trying to solve the problem in his own way: Selling his soul to a supernatural entity in exchange for power enough to stop the incursions. Bianchi was an excellent choice for these issues, as he draws pretty good goat-headed creatures and other scary shit.

It's through the monitoring device, however, that our heroes discover a world where they find The Justice League, who, being the Justice League, are, of course, able to avert these apocalyptic incursions, and to do so repeatedly (three times, in fact).

Morales

Morales draws the first batch of these issues, as is probably appropriate, given his history with the DC stable of characters. So Superman (solar-powered, spit-curled, caped strongman "Sun God"), Batman (powerless human being garbed as a dark knight, "The Rider"), The Flash (super-speedster dressed in red and yellow with a lightning bolt motif to her costume, "Boundless"), Martian Manhunter (green-skinned, shape-changing alien "The Jovian"), Green Lantern (flying, light and energy empowered Doctor Spectrum, the Green Lantern analogue from The Squadron Supreme, and the only pre-exising member of The Society) and Dr. Fate (caped and helmed magic-user, "The Norn") are a seemingly unbeatable team, refusing to back down from the impossible problem of the incursions, and triumphing repeatedly.

And then The Illumanti sees something they probably wish they hadn't. Their monitor allows them to see the recent past or future, and they glimpse themselves, in conflict with The Justice League.

Namor, Hulk and Strange? I prefer to think of this as New Defenders, rather than New Avengers.

That takes us into Vol. 4, A Perfect World, in which the events of Avengers Vol. 5: Adapt or Die (Bruce Banner being brought into The Illuminati) and Avengers Vol. 6: Infinite Avengers (Captain America and the rest of Stark's The Avengers finding out about The Illuminati and vowing to take them down) occurred. So the tension is amped up even further.

Not only are they now forced into the position they've been dreading—to destroy a world in order to save their own universe, as well as that world's surrounding universe—they also have to deal with The Justice League in order to do so, and Captain America and The Avengers are going to be coming for them pretty much any minute now.

After an issue spent preparing for the encounter with The Justice League, the new Illuminati meet them on their Earth, and try to figure out how the hell they're going to save both worlds and both universes in a very short period of time or, if that's impossible, which world they'll destroy and how to save the must people (Like, do they evacuate the Justice League's world and move as many inhabitants as possible to Earth-616, or vice versa, or...?).

Tensions are high, especially when the League figure out that The Illuminati happen to have a bomb ready to blow up their world, just in case, and Namor ultimately decides for everyone by hurling a trident at Batman The Rider.

Schiti

And then things get bananas, for four straight issue, each one getting crazier and crazier, ultimately unbelievably so (to the point where I suspect that Secret Wars may very well have a reset button of some sort attached, even if it involves a soft continuity reboot, as one of The Illuminati apparently goes about as far to the dark side as one can go; like, Hitler didn't kill as many people as he does bad).

So, spoilers. Obviously.

After Namor starts the fight, there's no longer any chance of the two teams working together, so they are forced to fight to the death—of one of their worlds, probably. Strange unleashes what he earned while trying to sell his soul, a big-ass Lovecraft-esque, black tendril monster able to push the worlds apart and decimate the Justice League—only Sun God survives it's touch, but he's in a bad way, and Doc Spectrum is off-planet by then—but it's just not enough.

So the time comes to push the button that destroys the other world, and the trigger mechanism is passed from character to character, none of whom can bring themselves to actually use the doomsday device they created. The inconceivably hard choice, even though it sounds easy on paper, or as a hypothetical, is just too much for any of them to actually go through with.

Except, of course, for Namor, who pushes the button as soon as he grabs the trigger mechanism.

The others go from shock to being pretty damned pissed off about it, and Panther seems angry enough to punch Namor...not too surprising, as Panther's ghost dads have been telling him to kill Namor for months now.

And, after a few rounds of fighting, Namor tells The Panther about what he did during Infinity: He told Thaos' forces that the Infinity Gems were hidden in Wakanda, thus bringing destruction to Wakanda (In retalliation for a Wakandian attack on Atlantis, which was in retalliation for Namor's attack during Avengers Vs. X-Men, etc).

Black Pantehr obviously loses his shit, and the two kings fight for reals until The Hulk and the others break them up.

I like this part:

Walker

Um, I don't know, 1939...? Did Reed not read the story where Namor basically beat just beat up New York City and then threw the Empire State Building at a lady holding a baby? (To be fair to Namor, here's his defense: "How dare any of you put yourself--your damned morals--above the lives of every living thing? Thre truth is, you people aren't worth that...and neither am I. Our lives are a pittance." I think that's a large part of what makes Hickman's storyline so compelling. All of the characters are all always right...and always wrong.)

So they've killed a group of all-around decent superheroes, destroyed an alternate world in order to save themselves and another universe and Namor told The Panther about how he kinda sorta sicced an evil alien's invading army on his people and how he can kill them whenever he wants and so they kick Namor out of the club and they realize that when it comes right down to it, none of them is actually strong or cold enough to do the very thing they've spent months preparing to do.

It can't get any worse, can it?

Of course! The last panel of that second-to-last issue shows Reed's incrusion alarm going off: In less than 8 hours, they have to face the exact same dillemma all over again!

In the final issue, thoroughly demoralized and finally realizing that despite the weapons they have to destroy worlds, they can't bring themselves to use them, the members go about preparing for the end of their lives and the end of the world in various, personal ways.

It's a rather elegant issue, which Kev Walker draws quite well, offering some downright poignant scenes, as well as some that are pretty alarming (Is Stark preparing to kill himself?).

But when the doomsday clock runs down, nothing happens. And when they try to figure out why not, Blackbolt asks an obvious question: "Where's Namor?"

Oh, you know, just starting his own Illuminati, one which makes his post-Secret Invasion villainous Illuminati look downright pedestrian:

Walker

Holy shit, Namor just destroyed a second world in an eight-hour period, and is apparently prepared to keep on ending worlds.

So, um, where do we go from here?

I honestly have no idea, which makes this Hickman's Avengers comics even more exciting. I kind of wish I had never even heard of Secret Wars, as it certainly seems to suggest a solution to the incursion problem, which otherwise I wouldn't have thought possible from what we've seen in the books so far, and the "heroes" of New Avengers just keep digging themselves deeper and deeper into holes.

Now, for example, they've got the unsolveable incursion issue to deal with, they also have The Avengers gunning for them (I guess? Or did Captain America's old man-ification give them a stay of fight execution?) and a Namor/Thanos team-up team to fight.

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It's not all fighting, doom, dread and apocalypse in New Avengers, however. As I said, there are some pretty poignant scenes in here, and even a few funny ones. I particularly liked the emergence of sassy Namor during these issues.

Namor sasses Sun God, in a sequence drawn by Schiti

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New Avengers #17 was published in April of 2014, almost a year ago now, right? In January of this year, DC published Superman #38, which the publisher publicized as being the first occurrence of a brand-new power for Superman, "super flare." How does it work?

Well, essentially Superman releases all of the solar energy his cells have stored up at once, in the form of a gigantic explosion of energy with a devastating effect.

It also has the side-effect of completely draining Superman, and rendering him powerless while he recharges.

Morales

It's also basically what Sun God does in a scene in New Avengers #17, by Hickman and Morales. When fighting the Mapmakers—nigh invincible, super-adapting machine intelligences—during an incursion, Sun God takes them all out by flying above them and releasing a huge burst of solar energy that destroys everything around him, save his teammates huddled under a forcefield.

Now I'm not accusing Geoff Johns or anyone at DC of lifting the idea from this issue or anything. These sorts of overlaps occur pretty much constantly in DC and Marvel's respective, cross-pollinating superhero lines. And, it's well worth noting, Sun God and his whole team are not-even-veiled analogues to DC's Superman and The Justice League.

I'm just noting how odd it was to see Sun God apparently win the battle using Superman's brand-new power, is all.

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And on that subject, check out the term The Black Priests use to refer to the apparent future smooshing together of various worlds from The Multiverse in New Avengers #13, drawn by Bianchi:

Bianchi

"Convergence," huh?

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I was maybe halfway through Vol. 3 before I realized that one of the more unlikely characters I could imagine being involved in these sorts of cosmic matters and apocalyptic decision-making has been hanging around for some time now, and is thus at least tacitly complicit in everything The Illuminati does:

Bianchi

Like Blackbolt's brother Maximus The Mad, Lockjaw has been hanging out in The Illuminati's secret headquarters in Necropolis!

Forget what The Avengers, X-Men and Fantastic Four are going to think when they find out about all this, what are The Pet Avengers going to think?!

Review: Avengers Vol. 5: Adapt or Die

This fifth volume of the Jonathan Hickman Avengers title—just the plain, old adjective-less Avengers, not to be confused with The Uncanny Avengers, The New Avengers, Avengers Undercover, Secret Avengers or Avengers World—collects issues #24-#28 of the series, and comprises about three distinct chapters in Hickman's huge, multi-book Avengers epic (Consisting, so far, of this book, its sister title New Avengers and crossover Infinity and, presumably, the upcoming Secret Wars).

It's the first of the post-Infinity collections. That story, a line-wide crossover series by Hickman, still seems like more of an interruption to Hickman's Avengers/New Avengers storyline than a key part of it, although it did move minor plot points and characters around. The events of Infinity are rather explicitly referenced in a conversation about the massive Avengers roster that Captain America and Iron Man engage in during the first of these stories, when Stark tells Cap that "The Avengers helped win an intergalactic war," but warns him their "Avengers Machine" (just a spiral-shaped diagram, really) needs to be flexible and able to grow, to deal with perhaps even bigger threats (the conversation also serves the purpose of explaining why we won't be seeing anymore of Spider-Man and Wolverine in these pages for a while, as they have events in their own books to attend to).

Later, when Bruce Banner confronts Stark about what he's been up to in the two books, Banner points out the big, huge, powerful Avengers roster is actually a pretty good clue that Stark is up to something: "You needed a team so powerful that it could handle any overt threat while you worked on the real problem."

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

The first of the three stories collected here—all apparently drawn by Salvador Larroca and colored by Frank Martin, although three other artists helped out on #24—includes one of my favorite sorts of superhero team scenes, the "everyone just kinda hanging out and doing normal stuff" scene. Sometimes whole issues of superhero comics will consist of a half-dozen of such scenes, generally as opportunities for breath-catching, line-up tweaking and status quo restating between big, dramatic multi-issue arcs.

That's not quite the case here, although some of that does happen. It begins in the year 3030, with Franklin Richards sending a Iron Man back in time to warn the Avengers of something pretty horrible about to happen to them, something only a team as big and full of geniuses and god-like super-beings as this particular Avengers like-up could deal with effectively. Prior to the warning, The Avengers are all just hanging out on Avengers Tower's penthouse, Starbrand and Hawkeye trying to shoot golf balls out of the sky, while Thor works the grill without a shirt on.

Why hasn't that scene made it into the "Cinematic Universe" yet?

Maybe I'm easy, but I really enjoy Thor talking about foodstuffs in his Shakespearean sentence structure, personal font and superhero-like sense of urgency:

As for that threat, it appears to be a runaway planet or, worse, a rogue planet that someone or something apparently fired like a bullet at Earth millions, maybe billions of years ago. And it's up to The Avengers to stop it. Rather than just pushing it out of the way, as DC's Justice League would do, or maybe obliterating it before it gets too close, they have an even weirder, more unique solution to the problem. That's one admirable aspect of Hickman's run: While so much of it is predictable superhero business, Hickman twists its nature and the nature of the solution from the predictable, standard superhero solutions into something different.

This is basically just Superman punching away asteroids or catching a plane, but Hickman turns it into an event requiring time-travel, a dozen super-powered beings, a workshop on Mars, Superman-like strength and magic god hammer and an act o of super-science....while also using it as another clue that Stark is up to something beyond what his teammates in this particular book may think.

Which takes us to the next storyline, where another generic superhero trope occurs: Evil versions of the title characters from an alternate dimension (Stark actually seems somewhat embarrassed when explaining the conflict later).

Hickman's twist? Well, interestingly enough, these Avengers look identical to the original Avengers from the 1960s, with no spikes, chains or black goatees to reveal that they are actually bad guys until Thorr (there's an extra "r" in his universe, apparently), kills a bunch of civilians.

More importantly, it ties into the mega-story driving the two books. These Avengers are plucked from an Earth that has just been destroyed during an "incursion," and their presence on Marvel's Earth, however briefly, provides one more clue to what Stark is up to, as well as the means for this Avengers team's other super-genius to put it all together.

The final story in the volume, is a fairly simple one, but probably the most dramatic of the book...maybe the run so far. Bruce Banner walks into Avengers Tower with a brief case, sits across a table from Tony Stark, and starts laying out the case against Stark he's put together in his head. He knows Stark is up to something, he knows Stark is building incredible, world-destroying weapons and he knows he's apparently working with Reed Richards and others in a re-formed Illuminati (That's a pretty sore subject with Banner, as it was The Illuminati wo, some years ago, decided to capture him and shoot him into space as the most sensible way of dealing with the Hulk problem, which Brian Michael Bendis and the Marvel of the time retconned into a very dire problem, as now Hulk's rampages resulted in civilian deaths all the time instead of, you know, never ever resulting in any civilian deaths. This, of course, lead to the popular "Planet Hulk" storyline and then the pretty damn awesome World War Hulk event series, one of the better of the post-House of M Marvel event series).

He grills Stark, while Stark can't stop asking what is in the brief case. It's a pretty dramatic reveal, adding yet another layer to what is already a dramatic moment, regardless of how well one knows the characters (Like, even you weren't reading Bendis' Illuminati comics, or the Greg Pak and company run on Hulk comics, there's plenty of reason for Bruce Banner to be appalled and furious at Stark and his cabal for 1) Keeping the possible imminent destruction of all reality from the rest of the world and 2) Preparing to do the unthinkable and kill billions of people in order to save trillions and trillions of others. Hickman has essentially created the ultimate moral dilemma here, taking the standard superhero dilemma of whether or not to kill a villain even if one's own moral code forbids the taking of a life, in order to save all of that villain's future victims, but multiplying it so astronomically it's no longer even possible to think of a bigger version of the dilemma (Here further magnified by the fact that it's not a villain being discussed, but an innocent planet).

Thus confronted, Stark has one of two options: Take Banner down, or invite him in. And Banner, of course, has two equally unappealing choices: Join Stark in The Illuminati, or take him down...and assume the burden of saving The Multiverse without the benefit of Stark, Reed Richards and the others.

It's pretty powerful stuff as superhero morality plays go, although I suppose it's worth noting that this particular plotline is continued not in the next volume of Avengers—although that story arc is premised on Captain America remembering The Illuminati, the incursions and the unthinkable moral dilemmas—but New Avengers.

Review: Avengers Vol. 6: Infinite Avengers

I'm afraid I got a little lost while trying to read writer Jonahan Hickman's Avengers books in collected rather than serial form. In my own defense, it's a somewhat challenging series to follow, as Hickman has been writing both Avengers (starring one of the several "official" Avengers teams) and New Avengers (starring "The Illuminati," only a handful of whom have ever actually been Avengers for very long, and only one of whom is currently on an Avengers roster). Both series are somewhat interconnected, and both dovetailed into Hickman's Infinity; parts of the three titles were collected in collections under all three headings during the course of the Infinity storyline.

After reading this and realizing I apparently missed what happened to, like, most of the team—11 of the 17 characters shown on The Avengers "machine" roster don't appear at all in the six issues collected in Avengers Vol. 6—I had to go consult the Internet to realize I missed a collection, Avengers Vol 5: Adapt or Die (Volume 3 was entitled Prelude to Infinity and Vol. 4 was entitled Infinity, so I just assumed Infinite Avengers followed those two; Hickman just really, really loves that word, I guess).

That said, this reads rather satisfactorily as a standalone unit. Yes, events in previous issues and story arcs are alluded to—mainly the one that occurred in New Avengers Vol. 1: Everything Dies, rather than any collection of Avengers—but generous flashbacks explain those events within the pages of this book, which is a good thing (as I forgot some of them) and makes this a much more accessible book than one might expect the sixth volume of such a dense series that's been so deeply entwined with other titles could possibly be.

Captain America is having troubling dreams, which it turns out, are actually memories. He remembers being invited to join The Illuminati—Tony Stark, Reed Richards, Namor, The Black Panther, Dr. Strange and The Beast, who Charles Xavier elected to replace him should he die, as he did in Avengers Vs. X-Men—and they find themselves faced with a difficult, even impossible moral dilemma. They refer to them as "incursions," but, essentially, alternate Earths from alternate universes are regularly coming into collision courses with the Marvel characters' world and, if the two come into contact, both worlds (and the universes those worlds belong to) will be destroyed. The only way to avert the destruction of both Earths and both of those Earths respective universes is to destroy one of the Earths, which means The Illuminati may have to destroy an entire Earth in order to save two entire universes (including theirs).

When the idealistic Cap comes into conflict with his more pragmatic (and, it's well worth noting, particularly for this story, infinitely smarter) colleagues, he convinces them to reform the Infinity Gauntlet and let him try to use that to stop an incursion. He does so, but at the cost of the Infinity Gems; all of them shatter, save the time gem, which disappears.

The others then wipe Captain America's mind via Strange's magic, and kick him out of their cabal. But his subconscious mind remembered, and revealed these events to him in his dreams.

He therefore assembles Black Widow, Hawkeye and Thor, and together with Hyperion and Starbrand, they break into Tony's lab to confront him. Fighting naturally ensues—Cap comes across as rather brutal thug in this scene, punching an un-armored Tony and threatening to beat him bloody for "using" him and contemplating or perhaps having already committed planet-wide genocide—but before either side wins, the broken time gem reappears and hurtles them all into the future.

The remainder of the book consists of the gem periodically appearing and hurtling the team further and further into the future. In each jump, they meet a new team of Avengers of some sort, and, during each jump, one or more of the initial team falls away from the gem, reappearing back in Tony's lab in the present, until, at the climax, it is only Captain America, standing face-to-face with a trio of characters (or versions of the same character, I guess) who exist outside time and have found a way to stop the time gem from shunting Captain America through time.

Hickman has rather often been compared to Grant Morrison, particularly since Hickman inherited the Avengers franchise from Brian Michael Bendis a few years back, and immediately started telling an incredibly ambitious story on a scale as vast as anything Morrison ever wrote for the Distinguished Competition involving their premiere superhero team. (One of the futures visited here is actually rather evocative of at least one aspect of Morrison's 853rd Century from DC One Millions, in which 20th century superhero symbol/sigils are passed down to others, with the accompanying names and powers).

Given that Hickman has also made use of DC analogue characters in his line-up, giving Marvel's Superman Hyperion a particularly large role, it occasionally seems like Hickman is writing Avengers as if he would rather be writing Justice League, an impression that his upcoming Secret Wars, which sounds so much like the climax of Crisis On Infinite Earths with a twist, should only further.

That thought crossed my mind while reading this volume as well, particularly as the other Avengers fall away and Captain America faces characters in the far-flung future alone. The entire conflict between he and The Illuminati revolved around his unwillingness to cross certain moral lines, to sacrifice the lives of many in order to save far more.

He refuses to choose the lesser of two evils and, in his big speech to the time-traveling immortals at the end of time itself, he finally unloads about how sick he is of all the "clever" people telling him that he's just not smart enough to understand:

I don't let people die because it's the lesser of two evils, or expedient, or because it serves the greater good...

I don't compare the act against something else--I see someone who needs help...And I help. You think it's a weakness. You think it's simple...but you're wrong. It's what makes us human...which is exactly what we're supposed to be fighting for. I know who I am.

I rescue the helpless. I raise up the hopeless. I don't measure people's lives...I save them.

That sounds like a rather Superman-like thing to say, doesn't it? And a rather un-Captain American thing to say.

I understand Captain America fell out of the sky into frozen water and went into suspended animation before the United States got around to dropping atomic bombs at the end of the second World War, but Captain America was still a soldier in World War II; how on earth does he make a speech like that without sounding like a giant fucking lying hypocrite?

Nevermind everything he's done since being thawed out and working with the U.S. government and SHIELD, which he briefly lead for a while. Captain America, like America, is all about the lesser of two evils, of committing acts of violence to serve the greater good (In this very story he wasn't trying to "save" Tony from making horrible choices at the beginning, he was threatening to beat him bloody. When he confronts Tony and Tony asks him if he'd like to talk about the mind-wiping, Captain America cuts Tony off a few time sand, when he hears something he doesn't like, he punches him. Hell, at this very story's end, when he returns to the present, Captain America tells the assembled Avengers that they're going "to hunt down each and every member of Reed and Tony's secret society").

Certainly, I don't think Captain America or America itself has ever had to make lesser-of-two-evil choices on the scale that Avengers and New Avengers is forcing upon our heroes—that is, talking about killing billions to save trillions and trillions more—but it's weird to see Cap so virulently opposed to the concept itself. It would seem to be the scale, not the principle, that he's really opposed to, but he articulates it in the sort of absolutist terms of the black-and-white (pre-New 52) DC Comics superheroes, not the terms of the morally gray Marvel heroes.

Superman, faced with two bad choices, will always find a third way to save everyone. Captain America, Iron Man and Reed Richards used to be the same way, at least up until around the turn of the century and, even more so, House of M and Civil War, where dubious moral compromises became the order of the day.

Speaking of finding a third way, this story arc contains a major pivot that leads to the Avengers/Illuminati conflict of the next volume:

Here the third choice is another violent choice, and one that does nothing to address the apocalyptic dilemma of the incursions. Captain America is repeatedly told he can either stand by and let the Illuminati save the world, even if their strategy involves destroying worlds, or he can help them save the world by destroying other worlds, or he can repeat Civil War and try to take Iron Man on and down...and then who saves the world?

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Ha ha, all of that was about the writing, wasn't it? I didn't even mention the artwork. This is a stereotypical review of a comic book on the Internet, isn't it?

Well, the art isn't too terribly interesting, I guess.

It's by pencil artist Leinil Francis Yu, whose work I really rather like, and inker Gerry Glanguilan, with Sunny Gho coloring all buy one issue (which is colored by Matt Milla).

Yu's action scenes involving multiple players are generally just weird panels where a bunch of people pose with their mouths open, but his storytelling is otherwise pretty strong, and he turns what could have been very boring pages, like a Bendisian 16-panel page in which superheroes have a meeting, into much more dynamic and interesting pieces...although I suppose such a page only looks good here if you've seen it done very poorly elsewhere, and Marvel has done a lot of superheroes-having-a-meeting pages very poorly in the past.

Hickman gives Yu a bunch of fun shit to draw, as the jumps to the futures start 48 years into the future and the second-to-last one occurs 50,000 years in the future...before the final issue, which is set outside of time in "Fractured Temporal Space."

Some of the futuristic versions of Avengers are kind of neat, like the holographic version (while others are a bit tired, like the giant mecha Avengers), and there's some weird, creepy stuff with technology going on, as when Captain America has a bug bomb shoved under his eyeball.

I don't really care for Yu's Black Widow, who is ridiculously well-endowed—and usually fairly unzipped—and yet still executes all these crazy flips and such. Maybe her breasts are full of hydrogen or helium...?

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The back cover contains the words "Original Sin Comes Crashing Into Avengers Tower!", which seemed particularly strange to me after I read the volume, as it has absolutely nothing at all to do with Original Sin, although there are probably some parallels to be drawn between Nick Fury's address of moral dilemmas as posed and answered in that book versus Captain America's arguments against such actions as articulated here.

Looking up the original covers on comics.org, the covers of the issues collected herein apparently did bear the Original Sin logo and cover design.

If I had to guess, the tie-in has to do with secrets being remembered...specifically, that The Orb's Watcher eyeball "truth bomb" had a delayed reaction on Captain America, retrieving the memories that Dr. Strange magic-ed away while he was asleep one night.

Interestingly, trade itself reads as if Captain America's dreaming mind retrieved those memories, and makes no mention of The Orb, The Watcher, the truth bomb and exposed secrets. I wonder if anyone picked these issues up specifically because of their "Original Sin" logos and were disappointed to see nothing other than a rather vague, thematic connection between the two storylines.

Review: Avengers World Vol. 1: A.I.M.pire

Marvel’s Avengers line is now so big and full of so many books—five as of the last round of solicitations—that I’m not sure where each book falls in the hierarchy of official Avengers title. Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers and his New Avengers seem to be the A-books at this very moment, with one featuring the real, official Avengers, the other the behind-the-scenes, not-really-Avengers The Illuminati, although the books share at least one character (Iron Man), and have kinda sorta intersected (in Infinity).

So I think that would make Avengers World , which was co-written by Hickman and featuring his cast from the pages of Avengers, the B-title…but just the B-title to the A-title of Avengers, as there seem to be other B-titles, like Uncanny Avengers (Although Uncanny Avengers seems to be the book that’s generating the next big Marvel crossover/event series Axis, which will replace it on the schedule this fall, so maybe Uncanny Avengers is the new A-title…? Hickman should make a chart of the importance of various Avengers titles, given that he’s so in to making charts).

Anyway, this ongoing monthly series takes its name from the first story arc of Hickman's Avengers—and the sub-title of the first Avengers collection—for maximum confusification. This collection, A.I.M.pire (Or, Advanced Idea Mechanics-pire, which loses some of its kick when de-acronymized) opens with a weird short story from the incredibly ridiculously-entitled promotional book, All-New Marvel Now Point One #1. In that, which is written by Nick Spencer, Hickman's co-writer for the rest of the issues appearing in this collection, Captain America Steve Rogers, who ran SHIELD after Norman Osborn’s HAMMER was disbanded, has a meeting with Maria Hill, who is maybe back to being the head of SHIELD again, although I could have sworn one of the two Nick Furys was doing that now (I could use a chart of this too, actually).

They decide that they should maybe work together more, which is kind of a weird conversation, given how many Avengers work regularly with SHIELD and/or have run the organization in the past few years, and, no sooner do they shake on it, then threats start pouring in from all over the world, just as they did in the first few issues of Hickman’s Avengers title.

There’s something incredibly, awesomely insane doing on in Madripoor! Wolverine, Black Widow, Falcon, Shang-Chi—check it out! There’s an abandoned city and weird mystical box thing in Italy, leading to a city of the dead! Get on that, Hawkeye, Spider-Woman, Nightmask and Starbrand! A.I.M.’s island fortress is hyper-evolving, growing in size and architectural and biodiversity sophistication at an impossible rate! You’re up, Smasher, Sunspot and Cannonball!

It eventually starts to coalesce, at least a bit, as some of the threats seem somewhat related, but the book nevertheless carries Hickman’s Morrison’s JLA-style of hyperbolic, apocalyptic world threatening—Madripoor, for example, is revealed to be a city built atop the head of a gigantic dragon, which has just been awoken and is now ready to run amok—and the idea of The Avengers as an army of superheroes under Captain America’s command, splitting up to stamp out fires (forest fires, really) all over the world whenever and wherever they flare up.

Because Hickman’s Avengers book was and is so plot-heavy, and its cast so large, he hasn’t had a whole lot of time to explore the characters, who often appear as remote plot elements or background filler more than characters. For the most part, that isn’t a bad thing in the context of the book. Many of those characters have their own books and appear in so many others—Cap, Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Captain Marvel, Wolverine, Hawkeye, Black Widow—that Hickman doesn’t really need to waste the space on them in the book.

But here there’s a bit more room, and so Spencer and Hickman give us not only more of the sorts of scenes found in Avengers, but longer, character-focused scenes, like Shang-Chi narrating his life-and-death battle with Gorgon, or Smasher remembering more of her childhood during her confrontation with the A.I.M. leadership, or Starbrand re-living the nightmarish aspects of his own origin.

In a very palpable way, this book reads like more of the same of Avengers, which is either a good thing—if you like what you’re reading in Avengers—or a bad thing, if you don’t. Where it differs is that the plot seems slightly less urgent, and there’s a little more room for the characters to breathe, and the dialogue, likely owing to Spencer, is a bit snappier and a bit funnier.

The art was unremarkable, but unremarkable in a good way. Rags Moreales, one of my favorite super-comics artists, draws the prologue from that goofy one-shot, while Stefano Caselli—whose past Avengers experience includes chunks of Avengers Assemble and Avengers: The Initiative draws the five issue of Avengers World proper.

I liked it well enough, but neither artist did anything particularly remarkable with what amounted to work-for-hire jobs. As with a lot of the publisher’s team books of late, particularly since they started accelerating the schedules of their monthlies, this book seemed more like a writer’s book than an artist’s book, or book where the two contributing components develop style, personality and tone in equal measures.

Review: Infinity

This is, however, a terrible cover, saying nothing about the book other than that Thanos is in it, and that he takes excellent care of his teeth for someone obsessed with death.

I really rather enjoyed Infinity, the Jonathan Hickman masterminded and written Marvel crossover/event series.

At least in the form in which I read it, the form of a gigantic, 630-page hardcover collection with the size and scope to truly deserve being called "a graphic novel." Even though it is a collection of serially-published comics: A half-dozen issues each of New Avengers and Infinity and 10 issues of Avengers.

The thing about the modern Marvel event series—DC has temporarily abandoned the field after The New 52, only offering one true big event in favor of smaller, franchise-sized crossovers and line-wide theme months—is that while the publisher does lay out a buffet of comics under the umbrella title of the event, it's up to the reader to basically curate their own experience. If you want to read it monthly, then you can choose to just read Infinity. Or just Infinity and its more important tie-ins (Here, Hickman's two Avengers books). Or everything with the word "Infinity" in the title. Or just the books featuring characters, creators or premises you like with the word "Infinity" in the title. Or some other configuration.

You could also wait for the collection, in which Marvel more-or-less pre-curates your Infinity experience for you. That's what I did with this book; I waited long enough for the dust to settle and the important parts of the story to emerge and get put together between a single set of covers (Yes, it costs a $75 fucking dollars, but that's what public libraries are for, if you feel no particular compulsion to own the book, and you probably shouldn't).

(One could also follow along by simply reading Andrew Wheeler's amusing summaries at Comics Alliance.)

I mention that merely because I suspect my experience of reading it in this particular form—one big, continuous narrative only occasionally broken up by the need to eat or sleep or go to work—made it a much more enjoyable one than it would have been were I reading it in 20-80-page installments once a week or once a month, over the course of half a year or so, likely picking up all sorts of puzzle pieces that I would only later find didn't really have anything to do with the final story (I ran across the Guardians of the Galaxy tie-in issue in the collection Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: Angela, for example; that had almost nothing to do with the story of Infinity, it turns out, and was so insignificant to the story that it merits a two or three-panel dramatization within this collection).

Also, the not paying for it has got to help a lot. I know from reading Secret Invasion and Civil War how frustrating it is to pay too much money for a branded tie-in that has no real import or no real pay-off in the story itself. I suspect that if I had attempted to read Infinity the good old-fashioned, Wednesday Crowd reading way, I would have hated what little I made it through before giving up entirely.

But 600 pages of curated comics, for the free? Yeah, that's a good way to read the story.

The presentation here is pretty unique too, I think. There are two byzantine credits pages at the beginning, saying who did what in which comic book collected—Hickman wrote almost all of it, with Nick Spencer-co-writing a handful of Avengers issues; artists included Mike Deodato, Stefano Caselli, Jim Cheung, Jerome Opena, Dustin Weaver, Leinil Francis Yu and others—but unless you're very diligent, and, for some reason, decide to keep referring back to those credits pages while reading, it's difficult to tell which comic book the section you're reading originated in.

That is, there are no individual covers and story titles and credits demarcating the end of one issue and the beginning of the next. Rather, it's presented like a novel. There will be an all-white page with a chapter title on it—"Orbital," "The Last Lesson," "Plans and Intentions"—and then a few pages of comics before the next chapter. It's all rather seamless.

The artwork, if you're familiar with the names of the above artists, changes noticeably, but also changes so often that a sort of baseline aesthetic is established, and even an experienced reader will likely go a few pages before noticing a different artist is drawing, and generally only, say, when you see the way Yu draws an eyeball, or the way Deodato abuses his computer to drop blurry photos into the backgrounds in the most unnecessary of ways (For example, one panel had a photo of the moon in the back. Just draw a fucking circle! Use a compass if it's too hard! If we see a large, luminous circle in a black sky, we'll figure out it's the moon; we don't need to see all the craters).

The surprisingly seamless (or seam-lite) feel of the artwork may have something to do with the fact that the cast is largely an unfamiliar one. Well, it's large for one thing, and while most of the names are familiar, there are a lot characters in here who aren't exactly Spider-Man and Wolverine (both of whom appear briefly in the opening, and then disappear); there are a lot of Inhumans and space guys and new Hickman creations and Thanos' "The Black Order/Cull Obsidian" (almost none of whom are dark in color or where much black, oddly enough) that I didn't know if they were new or not, because the extremities of the Marvel Universe isn't my bag.

It may also have something to do with the fact that while I named some of the artists who contribute the most work, there are quite a few more, and those weren't counting the inkers and colorists. The book has the look of a studio work; not in the sort of uniform, page-to-page look that a manga studio might be able to produce, sure, but neither in the sort of "All hands on deck! Deadline's in six hours, guys!" look of some of the rougher DC Comics with more than three artists involved.

As for the story, it is appropriately big for a book called Infinity, but also, once it gets going, rather simple.

It involves a convergence of the two plot-lines in Hickman's two ongoing Avengers books, both of which I like quite a bit, from what I've read to them previous to this.

The simpler of the two would seem to be New Avengers, which should really be called The Illuminati, as it features the Brian Michael Bendis-created concept of a cabal of the smartest and most influential Marvel Universe leaders secretly meeting and pulling strings behind the scenes. The current incarnation—Doctor Strange, Namor, The Black Panther, Mister Fantastic, Black Bolt, Iron Man and the X-Men's Beast, the latter of whom is in for the temporarily dead Charles Xavier—are currently trying to secretly deal with a fantastic problem with mind-boggling moral implications.

Apparently, alternate Earths from neighboring dimensions keep appearing close to their own Earth (the one we call 616) and, with no Spectre to push the world's apart, Gardner Fox-style, they have to come up with a solution to save their world. The best they've been able to come up with is to destroy the alternate Earths, before they collide into their own Earth, destroying both.

Namor, who is, remember, a dick, and Black Panther, whose little sister now rules Wakanda as queen and is advised by a bunch of dicks, find their countries at war on account of the events of Avengers Vs. X-Men, which makes playing nicely on the same team somewhat difficult for the pair.

In Hickman's Avengers book, he's introduced the biggest and most powerful Avengers line-up I've seen, in a book that is probably the closest thing to Grant Morrison's '90s run on JLA with Howard Porter, John Dell and occasional fill-in creators that I've yet found. Iron Man invents a sort of Avengers machine to recruit members, and the huge line-up has swelled to include Captain America, Captain Marvel, Thor, Hyperion, The Hulk, Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, Black Widow, The Falcon, Shang-Chi, Hawkeye, Wolverine, former X-Men Sunspot and Cannonball (who have taken the Wally West/Kyle Rayner comic relief/POV character role from JLA), Manifold, a new Smasher, a weird new take on Captain Universe and new characters—or new versions of old characters, in perhaps one case—Abyss, Nightmask, Ex Nihilo and Starbrand. Whew!

Those last four were later additions, and the earlier books of the series have dealt with the already pretty huge Avengers line-up dealing with them, as they showered Earth with "origin bombs" and pulled all kinds of crazy cosmic bullshit.

As for that simple plot that powers Infinity, it goes like this. An ancient race known as The Builders, whom Abyss and Ex Nihilo were kinda sorta in the employ of at one time, are destroying the galaxy, wheat thresher style, on their way to Earth, which they would also like to destroy. "The Galactic Council" (i.e. The Illuminati...but in space!) rally all kinds of Marvel alien races and band together to try to stop The Builders in Star Wars-dwarfing space battle after Star Wars dwarfing space battle, and The Avengers recruit their most powerful recent antagonists (Ex Nihilo, et al) and head into space to join the fight.

Meanwhile, learning that Earth is currently Avengers-free, Thanos decides to attack, with a somewhat ambiguous goal (looking for an Infinity Gem, and/or collecting bags of heads) masking his true goal—to find and kill his son, who is hidden on Earth among the Inhumans.

So it's a war on two fronts, with the away team pretty outmatched, despite entire space empires worth of cosmic help, and the home team dealing with Thanos' armies, lead by the five super-powerful members of the Black Order (this bit actually reminded me a bit of the also decidedly simple, and better than most stories in its class, Fear Itself, at least in the way Thanos' Obsidian generals mirrored the hammer-wielding Worthy).

The remaining Earth heroes and The Illuminati have to deal with the Thanos mess, and hope to hold him off long enough for the space war to wrap up and the other Avengers come back to help beat-up Thanos. Meanwhile, Blackbolt is up to something. And of course, an alternate Earth could materialize at any moment and obliterate the world...or compel the Illuminati to commit planetary genocide.

So lot of big ideas thrown about at machine gun pacing, with clever uses for powers and comic book science being employed as tactics in the course of the wars.

I do hate to keep bringing up Grant Morrison—or at least, Grant Morrison circa the turn of the century—as I get the feeling Hickman gets unfairly compared to him far too often already, but Hickman's take on the various super-characters reminded me quite a bit of Morrison's take on the JLA, in which the characters are very remote and, a few jokes or a single character trait apiece aside, don't have all that much in the form of personalities, but rather are interchangeable soldiers, functionaries who are so caught up in the escalating scales of the threats they face that there's no real need to concern ourselves with any personal conflicts they might be facing.

Are Captains Marvel and America confident, or do they feel out of place fighting among god-like aliens in battles in which worlds live and die? Who cares? They're kinda wrapped up in the fighting of those battles at the moment.

This isn't the case with the Thano/Illuinati side of the plot. Many of the characters have semi-silly magnetic poetry names, and speak in florid pronouncements, but there is a much (relatively) smaller scale to plots like the invasion of a single planet by a single invasion force, for example, or Thanos wanting to kill his son, or Black Bolt not wanting to let Thanos kill a bunch of his people, and so forth. The motivations and conflicts among m any of these characters are still quite grand, but things like wars between nations and geo-political rivals are at least human in scale.

For all of the talk one hears about the unlimited special effects budget of the comics page, I found the art somewhat ill-suited for depicted space battles between armadas of huge space ship. At their best, we get a sense of scale in large drawings of huge numbers of ships, but they don't move, and the artists rarely give us more than establishing shots—there are no dogfights or anything akin to that. The scale here dwarf that of your biggest Star Wars battle, but it doesn't move or sing and thus doesn't thrill like even the most dryly staged and unimaginative Star Wars battle scene.

At best, the space ship fights work in extreme long shot, as we see chunks of gray and white metal in the background, laser beams like Christmas tree lights between them.

The supehero battles are a lot more successful, of course, and Hickman and his collaborators do some weird and strange things with the space team of Avengers. They are outnumbered by their many alien allies—Gladiator, Ronan The Accuser, etc—but appear in the fray with odd bits of armor and masks, occasionally astride weird little vehicles. My favorite out-of-place character in this is probably The Falcon, who gets a big, bizarre, vaguely prehistoric bird-shaped helmet that allows him to participate in space fights.

Also note Spider-Woman on a speeder-bike thingee with Hawkweye behind her, fighting alien spaceships with a bow and arrow in space.

It will come as no surprise to learn that the good guys ultimately win, not even losing any token, temporary casualties as is so often the case in these sorts of crossovers (Well, I'm pretty sure thousands died, but no Avengers). What is surprising is all the stuff that Hickman has his good guys try in the course of winning, some things failing horribly (like a last resort to release a new "Annihilation Wave" from the Negative Zone, a threat so dire it once powered it's own galactic-spanning crossover event series) and some things succeeding remarkably well (like Thor having Mjolnir punch a hole in a seemingly unstoppable villain to inspire a planet full of guys who carry big, blunt weapons).

Again, like Morrison's JLA, the story ends with a sort of exciting, sort of depressing note—as bad as all this might have seemed for our heroes, it was nothing compared to what it could have been, and what it will be next time. The end of the world (or galaxy or universe) doesn't just appear and win or lose once, but it's something that's always coming, more persistently and more insistently each time, and requires constant fighting. Entropy is an inevitability, and superhero fights, like life itself, is basically just a stalling tactic.

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A cheery thought, I know.

So let's end on a fun note. A Lockjaw note.

Lockjaw is, of course, the giant bulldog with a tuning fork on his head and a handsome mustache that serves as the Inhumans' modes of transportation, given his ability to teleport himself and others. He is awesome.

He appears throughout the book, generally in a seemingly small role, as he helps Black Bolt and Black Bolt's brother Maximus The Mad in their bizarre machinations.

Lockjaw: The only reason an Inhumans movie might be a good idea.

He also gets maybe the single most bad-ass scene in the entire series. Here is Lockjaw taking out one of Thanos' generals, Supergiant, all by his bad-ass bulldog self:

Fuck yeah, Lockjaw!

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Hey, is it weird that in a hand-to-hand fight against one of Thanos' generals, the orange guy in gray armor called Blackdwarf, that Black Widow's costume gets torn up a lot more than Shang Chi's?

Ha ha ha ha! No, of course not! He wears spandex and she wears crepe paper. It's a simple matter of the materials they make their costumes out of, and has nothing to do with artists preferring to draw women with their clothes torn off then men with their clothes torn off. Obviously.

Two not-really-reviews: The Punisher Vol. 1 and New Avengers Vol. 1: Everything Dies

I borrowed these two collections from my library a few months ago, and read them both, with the intention of sitting down to review them at some point. In both cases, I kept putting doing so off—not out of a reluctance to write about them or out of procrastination, but simply because it seemed like I always had something else more timely or more pressing to write about, and thus they kept getting pumped further down the old review pile.

In the case of the Punisher book, I did pick it up and sit before my laptop with plans to review here on my blog one weekend afternoon, but then realized that despite having read it only a month or so before that, I had completely forgotten just about everything in it it (The Punisher grew a beard, I think? And there was a lady in it?).

So instead of writing about it that afternoon, I re-read it instead. And then, a few weeks later, I had once again forgotten just about everything that occurred within the story.

At that point, I just gave up and returned the book to the library. I figured if I could read the same graphic novel twice in the course of a summer and remember so little about it's plot, characters or overall quality, well, that fact was a sort of review in and of itself, wasn't it?

Here's all I remember thinking about the book:

1.) I was conflicted about the beard. On the one hand, Frank Castle has that whole military thing going on, so he seems like he might be the kind of guy who shaves every single day, and he even still makes his bed really well.  On the other hand, as a guy who only cares about killing criminals, maybe a beard would be a nice visual signifier that he puts criminal-killing above all else in his life, even personal grooming. Maybe he should have a gigantic beard like one of those guys in that duck show, long, crazy hair with twigs in it, and maybe some flies buzzing around his head that he never takes time to bathe, because he's just too busy killing bad guys.

2.) I think he wore a goofy Punisher shirt that looks like he bought it from a comic shop's clothing rack; like, it had a white skull/Punisher logo with a sorta wash effect on it, rather than wearing, like his superhero costume (In that respect, it reminded me of the Punisher shirt worn in the second of the three terrible Punisher movies). This seemed like a misguided attempt to make the character slightly more realistic, which is just silly; a Vietnam Vet who has killed 45,000 gangsters or so in a city full of superheroes makes The Punisher maybe the least realistic Marvel character of all. Dude's far below Man-Thing and Ghost Rider and Silver Surfer on my list of Marvel characters that could maybe possibly exist in the real world somehow someday. (Looking at the cover above though, maybe it was the Rucka Woman who apprentices with The Punisher who wore the lame Punisher merch shirt? Hey, I said I could barely remember the book!)

3.) Writer Greg Rucka put that same character he writes into every comic he writes in the book: The extremely competent, extremely tough woman haunted by personal demons and blessed with model good looks. I guess it's cool that Rucka is single-handedly trying to introduce as many "strong female characters" into comics as possible, but it's weird he keeps introducing the same one over and over, only varying her hair color and name.

4.) The Punisher fights The Vulture at some point, and The Vulture is not the old bald guy in green, but a young man with a full head of hair who wears red. All I really remember about this encounter is that I really hate hate hated Brian Hitch's cover for the issue that had the Vulture/Punisher fight in it.

Look at Hitch's Vulture:

He's just, like, a guy. In a red track suit. With some streamers on his jacket. And these streamers allow him to fly, I guess...? Or maybe he has superpowers, and the streamers are just for show? What a dumb cover image.

But it was just Hitch's version of the Vulture. The one inside, the one drawn by artist Marco Checcetto (whom I remember nothing of, so he was neither spectacular nor terrible), had, like, scary eyes and claws and fuller wings and looked like a super-villain monster man.

Did any of you guys make it farther into Rucka's Punisher run than I did, and manage to maintain memory of it? Is it worth starting over again some day, and reading all of it? I kinda want to get to the War Zone conclusion, where I think he fights the Marvel Universe, but not sure it's worth reading too many boring comics to get to it.

As for the New Avengers book, I really rather liked that one, but I let so much time elapse between reading it and considering reviewing it that I felt I'd have to re-read it to do even a half-way decent job of reviewing it, and it wasn't the sort of book I felt like re-reading (Not when I have sooo many other books, comic and otherwise, to read at the moment).

It collected the first story arc or so from the re-relaunched New Avengers book by Jonathan Hickman, Steve Epting and company, part of Marvel's "Marvel NOW!" initiative. It's not really an Avengers book, and it doesn't support its title very well (The more recent Mighty Avengers seems better-suited to the New Avengers title, given that for the bulk of Brian Michael Bendis' eight-years or so on the previous two volumes of New Avengers, they were meant to be the "street-level" super-team...and to have Luke Cage in it).

It's really an Illuminati title, the unofficial name given to the cadre of Marvel smart-guys who Bendis retconned into having been secretly running the Marvel Universe (Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic, Namor, Dr. Strange, Professor X). But I guess The Illuminati or The New Illuminati or Marvel's Illuminati just don't sound like proper titles for Marvel comic book (I like the sound of the word Superlluminati, though)

Hickman introduces some interesting changes to the line-up, with The Black Panther joining (after flirting with previous incarnations), Captain America joining for a little while until the others realized Cap just isn't an amoral enough asshole to hang with them and, finally,  X-Man/Avenger Hank "Beast" McCoy replacing the temporarily dead Charles Xavier.

The storyline of Bendis' involving these guys that I remember most clearly was an instance that lead into Secret Invasion, which I remember pretty clearly only because it made The Skrulls look like the good guys: The Illuminati detonate one of the Skrull's giant Star Wars ships and kill, like, thousands of Skrulls.

And that's sort of the quite dark gray area Hickman positions the team in. He's come up with a terrible moral dillema for them to face. In order to save the Earth, they must continuously destroy other Earths (wiping out the population of each), given some kind of cosmic thing where parallel Earths keep being drawn toward collision with the Marvel Earth. If they do nothing, both their Earth and the other Earth will be destoryed; if they destroy the other Earth, at least their Earth will survive, but at the cost of another whole planet.

Throughout this volume, they have to wrestle with that decision over and over, but circumstances tend to keep sparing them from having to actually make it. It's an interesting, unique conflict, and one well-suited to these particular super-heroes, some of whom aren't the sort who always find a third way when faced with two bad options (Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic in particular, given their roles as the villains of Civil War).

Infinity Gems, Thanos and, I'm sure, the already in-progress Infinity crossover/event figure heavily in the title's future, but I liked that first volume just fine, and was sorta surprised that I did, having no real strong feelings about the creators involved or the characters as a group (They've generally only appeared in the most talky, least exciting issues of Bendis' books).

I was sorta surprised by Mr. Fantastic's presence though, as he and the rest of the FF are lost in time and space in Fantastic Four and FF, two books being published concurrently with New Avengers, although perhaps they're actually set before or after the events of this title. 

Young Avengers Catch-Up: Siege: Young Avengers #1 (2010)

This one-shot by writer Sean McKeever, pencil artist Mahmud A. Asrar and inkers Scott Hanna and Victor Olazaba was a brief check-in type story tied to Marvel's completely nonsensical event series Siege, a bizarrely written story by chief Marvel Universe architect Brian Michael Bendis that, as I've previously noted, doesn't make a lick of sense on its own.

The event was climax of the "Dark Reign" period of the Marvel Universe, in which former Green Goblin Norman Osborn has donned a red, white and blue Iron Man suit to become Iron Patriot and lead his own team of Avengers made up of villains-posing-as heroes and his own SHIELD-like government agency HAMMER. For reasons never explained, Osborn decides he needs to conquer Asgard, which he attacks in defiance of the his boss President Barack Obama, and ends up in an all-the-heroes vs. all-the-villains fight on the floating city of Norse-derived Kirby space-gods.

The Young Avengers special was apparently intended as a part of a suite of one-shots, as its cover is part of a single, multi-part image by Marko Djurdjevic, and it gets collected along with four more one-shots in Siege: Battlefield, which is where I found and read it. (We'll look at those other comics in a bit).

One rather admirable aspect of writer Allen Heinberg and artist Jim Cheung's creation of the Young Avengers characters is how many aspects of the wider Marvel Universe he was able to tie into the various characters, as it makes them incredibly easy to plug into just about every Marvel event series imaginable. This event, for example, revolves around Asgard, and one of the Young Avengers characters was inspired by Thor to kinda sorta pose as a Thor-like sidekick at the outset, even going so far as to go by the name Asgardian (Changed later, of course, to "Wiccan," which can't so easily be corrupted into "ass-guardian").

The plot consists entirely of what the various team members are doing during the Everyone Vs. Everyone fight on Asgard, specifically after the part of the battle (which was not a siege) where The Sentry knocked the floating city down.

Wiccan and Hulkling, whose magic and gross green veiny pterodactyl wings spared them from the crash, find The Wrecking Crew trying to super-loot the ruins for Asgardian treasure, and fight them. Patriot and Hawkeye, meanwhile, are trapped in the rubble and fighting for survival, ala Red Arrow and Vixen in that one Meltzer issue of Justice League of America, ala Nicolas Cage and The Guy Who Wasn't Nicolas Cage in World Trade Center. And Speed runs around looking for survivors in the rubble. No sign of Stature and Vision.

It's a fairly well constructed fight comic, with each of the three character or character groups going through a distinct arc in which they reach a point of hopelessness and than rally, the issue ending with a splash page of Speed leading the charge to have them rejoin the fight.

It's completely inessential of course, but then, that's what it was supposed to be all along, the answer to a question a certain sub-set of Marvel readers might have wanted to know the answer to (Hey, what were the Young Avengers doing during the Battle of Asgard?), and a bone thrown to the would-be Young Avengers audience awaiting the return of the characters creators/re-creators to finish up their story.

The artwork is quite impressive and, in certain panels, looks like the work of Cheung (particularly on a re-flip-through. If Marvel had decided to go forward with a Young Avengers monthly sans Heinberg and Cheung in 2010, this would have been a fine creative team to do so with.

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As I said, this issue was collected in Siege: Battlefield, which contained a handful of Siege one-shots, connected only by their interlocking cover images and the fact that they had something or other to do with Siege. These are they...

Siege: Loki #1 by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie

This particular creative team is of particular note for this particular series of reviews, as these are the guys who will go on to create the next volume of a Young Avengers ongoing series, the one that sparked this endeavor on my part.

The star is Loki, part of Osborn's cabal of villains secretly running the "Dark Reign", who is here restored to his original, male form, after having spent much of the previous "Dark Reign" cycle in the form of a buxom woman, for reasons I never understood (It happened in an issue of a Thor comic I didn't read, I imagine).

In the Gillen/McKelvie Young Avengers, he appears in the form of a little kid. I think they should probably keep him male and grown-up, personally because a) McKelvie draws him so well and b) all the ladies I know who dug the Avengers movie  really seemed to like sexy Tom Hiddleston's sexy Loki.

Their story is set before and behind the scenes of the battle that occurs in Siege,basically showing Loki as a wicked and clever manipulator moving in a world of Marvel's evil power players—we see him taking a call from Doctor Doom and meeting with Mephisto and Hel, for example—to get what he wants, which here seems to be the destruction of Asgard and release from his destined place in Hel's hell (which may be spelled "Hel").

It's pretty great stuff, light on the superhero business (Osborn appears on one page) and heavy on the mythological and, tonally, it felt like an early issue of a pre-Vertigo Vertigo series: Mature storytelling devoted to mythology and fantasy extrapolated from old-school trashy super-comics which were themselves inspired by classical mythology. While reading, I kept thinking this creative team would probably do a knock-out Doctor Strange series.

I can't say enough good things about McKelvie's clean, smooth, pristine, perfectly-acted artwork: That guy's the best. This is by far the best-looking chapter of the book.

Props go to the pair also for their five-panel sequence involving Loki and Osborn. That's the first time that it was made clear to me that it was Loki speaking to Osborn through his Green Goblin mask, as his Green Goblin persona, in an effort to convince Osborn to attack Asgard because that's what Loki wants him to do. In a lot of the other "Dark Reign" and Siege related comics I've read, this isn't at all clear, and Osborn is usually presented as either a complete lunatic attacking Asgard just-because, or being talked into it by Loki, who doesn't really offer any compelling reason to convince him to do so. Here, it seems the compelling reason is that Osborn thinks his dominant if buried persona is telling him to do so.

Siege: Spider-Man #1 by Brian Reed and Marco Santucci

Spider-Man and Ms. Marvel fight Venom, who, at the time, was former Scorpion Mac Gargan in the alien symbiote suit, who spent the majority of "Dark Reign" (and the Bendis-written series Dark Avengers) disguised as Spider-Man.

That, obviously, annoyed Spider-Man.

This issue, then, is devoted to the climax of their fight over that particular conflict, with the pair tumbling out of the still airborne Asgard to the city below (Broxton), where Ms. Marvel swoops in to give Spidey an assist and fly him back up to Asgard so he can participate in the events of Siege.

It's a decent enough story and the art is similarly decent. It is about as pure a fight comic as you can get without excising the dialogue, which hear consists mainly of Spider-Man quips and Venom's chatter about eating people.

The most striking and memorable image is a panel in which Ms. Marvel separates Venom from Gargan by sticking her hand down the former's throat and yanking the naked latter out its mouth.

Siege: Captain America #1 by Christos N. Gage and Federico Dallocchio

The artwork on this one made it very hard for me to read. It was clear enough that it was easily legible, I just didn't like looking at it. Very photo-reference-y, with poses and renderings that look, if not traced from photos, then at least rigorously imitating images of real people, with costumes and fantastic action set atop of them.

It's all very awkward looking, as in a terribly uninspired two-page splash page of a bunch of heroes fighting a bunch of villains. One of the Captains America, in this image, appears to be both simultaneously kicking Taskmaster's shield and firing his gun at the shield, and seems badly in danger of literally shooting himself. Also, Dr. Fate seems to be there, for some reason.

Gage deviates from the all-fighting, all-the-time mandate that dominates most of these stories by introducing a family of civilians on the outskirts of the conflict, who provide an element of extra danger for the Captains, as well as some folks to be inspired by them.

Then current Captain America James "Bucky" Barnes and returned-to-life former Captain America Steve Rogers are participating in the big fight on Asgard and, after Sentry knocks it down, they find themselves fighting Razorfist, perhaps the least believable of all of Marvel's many fantastical villains (He's the guy who has had both of his hands replaced with huge, razor-sharp blades, and his costume consists of a sort of skin-tight ski mask with ear holes that I can't imagine how he puts on—dude must have an intern to dress him. (Also, Razorfist...? Dude can't make a fist, as he doesn't have hands).

The Captains beat the shit out of him, and then run back to the crossover story. See a pattern forming? These are kind of fun in how straightforward they are, as the majority of them are little narrative cul de sacs, where the characters leave the events of Siege, run through the conflict of a single issue tie-in, and then return to the events of Siege, usually declaring, "Well, that's the end of our one-shot tie-in; back to the main series!" (I'm paraphrasing; here it's actually "Let's go... ...We're needed."

This one's followed by Siege: Young Avengers.

Siege: Secret Warriors #1 by Jonathan Hickman and Alessandro Vitti

This series, Secret Warriors, is a kinda sorta years-later spin-off of that weird Bendis-written Secret War miniseries that truly kicked off his Avengers and Marvel Universe writing, and ended with one of the worst and laziest issues of a comic book I've ever read.

The premise of Secret Warriors was that an off-the-grid Nick Fury was leading his own team of secret superheroes, all of whom eschewed costumes in favor of classic SHIELD uniforms, for maximum boring-looking character design. I never read any of it, but Marvel might have tempted me to read the first issue had they instead titled it Nick Fury and his Howling Secret Warriors (I'm a big fan of howling).

So did you read Siege...? If not, there's this one gross-looking panel where Sentry grabs Ares the god of war and rips him vertically in half, just like She-Hulk did to Vision in "Avengers Disassembled," except Ares isn't a robot, so there's a bunch of gore and viscera in the panel (Bendis wrote both scenes, so he's not stealing from another writer, just repeating himself).

Well, on of the Secret Warriors is Phobos, the son of Ares (who is also a little kid). The issue opens with him watching a bank of monitors in which panels from Siege appear, including the gross one of his dad getting torn in half.

While Nick Fury joins Captain America for the assault on Asgard, Phobos flashes back to hanging out with his dad, then picks up a couple of swords, enters the White House through a secret passage, and silently slaughters Secret Service agents throughout the issue in order to, as he finally explains once President Barack Obama is safely aboard Marine One and flying towards safety, "to deliver a message."

The message isn't metaphorical, but literal though, as the last panel of the issue sees him sitting down at Obama's desk, the Oval Office littered with dead agents, to write a letter:

It's not every day that a human finds himself responsible for the death of a god and then on that very same day escapes facing another...

But before you wash your hands of my father's blood, I would encourage you to reflect on what brought us to this point: You sacrificed honor for expediency. You traded intent for quick action. You were wrong...and we all suffered for it.

It's a pretty weird comic. At least when Garth Ennis had The Punisher threaten to kill President George W. Bush, he did so without killing a bunch of innocent guys, and the president was a little more directly tied to the crime.

Obama's guilt for the death of Ares is fairly indirect, in that he put Osborn in charge of the superheroes, Osborn hired Sentry and Ares and Osborn ordered them both to attack Asgard, where Ares rebelled against Osborn and got torn in half. I realize the buck stops with the president and all, but Siege made it pretty clear that Osborn had "gone rogue" and was acting against the will of the president and, um, the entire United States government when he attacked Asgard, acting on the advice of his Green Goblin mask/other personality/Loki.I'm not a fan of the art in this one, although there's nothing really wrong with it. The style just didn't do much for me. There is a pretty neat panel of Obama sitting behind a desk, his face in shadow, his hands calmly folded in front of him, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff lined up behind him and a small army of gun-toting Secret Service agents between them and the reader. It's maybe the clearest image of Obama-as-supervillain I've seen in a comic book.

You know, between Bush's handling of the events of Civil War, "The Initiative" and Secret Invasion and Obama's handling of "Dark Reign" and Siege, as horrible as the choices these guys make in our universe might so often seem, they're both a hell of a lot better than their 616 counterparts...