New Beginnings - New Avengers #1

Continuing the theme of books without a clear reason to exist: New New Avengers! Because the Heroic Age marking the return to a traditional Avengers title doesn’t make New Avengers redundant. Apparently.

New Avengers was an experimental period that sought to update and redefine the Avengers concept, with mixed results. I didn’t like it much, but many did and it sold well. Trouble is, last month’s Avengers #1, also by Bendis, blended the lessons from New Avengers with more traditional Avengers sensibilities, with mixed results.

New² Avengers is just a trimmings and left-overs from the other title.

If you’re going to have more than one Avengers team, they should have different purposes. Secret Avengers distinguishes itself by being a pro-active black-ops team. New² Avengers distinguishes itself from Avengers by… being based in Avengers Mansion? Ok, if you’re not going to give them a different remit, at least a different cast will help to give a reason for existence. Oh hang on…

The New² Avengers is essentially “Luke Cage and Friends”, featuring Luke, Iron Fist, Jessica Jones, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Thing, Hawkeye, Mockingbird and Ms Marvel. Three of whom are on the other Avengers team. Wolverine’s in half a dozen other books already and Luke is working with the Thunderbolts. Given the similarities of the two teams’ purposes, sharing characters makes them seem even more repetitive.

Bendis feels the need to legitimise most of these characters as Avengers, which is fair enough, but having them set up a separate team isn’t the way to do it. Actually having them work with the Big Three traditional Avengers on the other team would. This just makes Luke Cage seem like an arbitrarily anti-authoritarian angry black man stereotype, refusing the offer to be a proper Avenger for no good reason. Having Wolverine, Hawkeye and Spider-Man on both teams just highlights the redundancy of the split.

The ultimate ‘what the hell’ factor is that this New² Avengers team (and Luke actually calls them the “New Avengers” for no discernable diegetic reason) is based in Avengers Mansion. If we’re really going to go back to the Mansion after all these years, surely it makes sense for the main Avengers team to go back there? You know, the one with actual history and connections to the building. Shoving Luke’s team in there isn’t going to further legitimise them. It just makes them seem like wannabes not allowed in the Tower.

The book just feels utterly pointless. “Luke Cage & Friends” works as a premise, but faced with logic and an actual Avengers book, it doesn’t qualify as Avengers.

This is to say nothing of the plot of this issue, which goes back to the upheaval of magic storyline Bendis was exploring before Siege. Which is relevant to none of the characters.

New² Avengers is a messy goulash of left-overs from Avengers, a Luke Cage book that never-was and an entirely unrelated magic story. And while it looks nice (thanks to Immonen), it’s certainly not tasty.

Martin S Smith is an author and blogger. He’s just released his first book, The Redundancy of Flightless Birds, and reviews stuff every week over at The Taste of Rising Bile.

New Beginnings - Avengers Academy #1

Avengers Academy is the fourth Avengers launch in as many weeks and the second new teen team book out this week, so it’s not got an easy task in making itself seem distinctive. Its premise as the training ground for the next generation of Avengers doesn’t help much either, being rather old. While that’s certainly not something to hold against Avengers Academy, it presents potential downfall in the shape of “New Mutants Syndrome”.

New Mutants was a similarly pitched book in the 80s, training the next generation of X-Men. While the characters were rather cool, they failed to live up to their potential. Of them, only Cannonball has been a proper member of an X-Men team. The rest were gradually written out of New Mutants, never troubling the main X-Men titles, who were happily brining in other new characters like Gambit and Jubilee over them. Instead, they just seem to get trotted out for nostalgia driven New Mutants revival books. It’s not an encouraging precedent.

So when the instructors of the eponymous Avengers Academy tell their batch of students that they’re the next generation, with the potential to be the Captains America of the future, I responded with a little scepticism. Thankfully, so do the kids and there is indeed more to their recruitment and tutelage that is immediately apparent.

The characters themselves are a mixed bunch. Our narrator Veil is a bit of a cliché, the lonely, nerdy girl who just wants to disappear at school and then does, but she’s a relatively neutral ground from which to see the other recruits.

Striker, Hazmat and Reptil do little for me at the moment. In fact Reptil and Striker seem to acting interchangeably, comparing their actions and their descriptions from the back matter. Mettle is interesting not only because he’s visually a cross between Colossus and the Red Skull, but he’s aware of the potential of they all have for failure. Finesse walks the fine-line between interesting and walking plot device, but is fine at the moment.

The team are trained by a host of old-school Avengers (Henry Pym, Quicksilver, Tigra, Justice) but most interestingly by Speedball, who’s given up being Penance in identity if not yet in personality.

Pencils are provided by Mike McKone, who’s a fairly competent artist, but doesn’t always manage to mask his limitations. The number of faces he can draw is quite limited and at times Reptil and Striker look very similar, as do Speedball and Pym, if you ignore costumes. The colours feel slightly over-saturated in places as well, very heavy on oranges and blues, though neither are massive problems.

Avengers Academy does have the question hanging over it of whether anything it does will matter in the long term, whether its recruits will ever live up to the potential we’re supposed to believe they have. Thankfully, writer Christos Gage is aware of this and is asking the same questions of his characters, which makes this first issue a promising start for the book.

Martin S Smith is an author and blogger. He’s just released his first book, The Redundancy of Flightless Birds, and reviews stuff every week over at The Taste of Rising Bile.

New Beginnings - Avengers Prime #1

Lurking amongst the other four big Avengers titles launching the Heroic Age is Avengers Prime, a series focusing on the ‘Big Three’ Avengers; Thor, Captain America and Iron Man. Taking place between scenes at the end of Siege, though there are internal inconsistencies on this, the three are assessing the ruins of Asgard and also bickering quite a bit.

Considering the Heroic Age is meant to be about heroes being heroes again and not fighting amongst themselves, it seems a bit odd that writer Brian Bendis would play so heavily on the in-fighting between the three (well, between Stark and Rogers, with Thor stuck in the middle), especially when he has to drive Rogers out of character so much to make it work. Steve here completely contradicts everything he stood and died for in Civil War, making him look like a hypocrite for no particularly good reason or effect.

Before long, the three are sucked through a damaged Asgardian portal and dumped across the nine realms of Norse mythology, lost and alone. Well, Thor’s not lost, obviously. Which only really serves to further make him seem like a third wheel.

Splitting up the characters is a mistake. All these three characters have solo books. Therefore, they don’t really need a joint title doing character pieces on them, unless it’s going to focus on them as a group and as friends. Splitting them up robs the book of its reason for existing, especially as you don’t gain any sort of extra insight to the three when they’re alone. Steve manages to get into a fight with some goblins, which is fun, but all it serves to do is put him in a rough approximation of his Captain America costume – which tells us what exactly? That he’s Captain America? Well, a) we know that and b) he isn’t any more, which is what these new Avengers titles are all trying to establish.

The biggest problem is though that we already know what happens next. This issue takes place before Avengers #1, which still has Tony and Steve hostile to each other and Thor stuck in the middle. If the rest of this series does go on to have some manner of reconciliation between the three, it’s immediately irrelevant, because the reader already knows it doesn’t stick.

The only real saving grace for the issue is the art by Alan Davis, quite possibly one of the best artists currently working in the medium. That’s a bit of a shame really though. I’d like to think there’s more interesting titles he could be putting his talents towards. He seems wasted on this title, even if he does draw the nine realms very nicely.

Avengers Prime really does feel like a waste of time. It’s so busy retreading old ground that we should all be moving away from, with little in the way of return or reward, that it forgets to do anything worthwhile with itself. It’s a character study that doesn’t study its characters.

Martin S Smith is an author and blogger. He’s just released his first book, The Redundancy of Flightless Birds, and reviews stuff every week over at The Taste of Rising Bile.

New Beginnings - Secret Avengers #1

After the rather underwhelming Avengers #1 last week (short summary: not only is it a Bendis team book, and thus everything you’d expect of a Bendis team book, it’s practically the same team book he’s been recycling for the past five years, just with lacklustre John Romita Jr art and added Thor), I was placing a lot of hope and expectation on Secret Avengers. Ed Brubaker has been consistently scoring sixes with his run on Captain America for years now, so the prospects were good. This is the man that brought Bucky back from the dead and made it work. Hell, this is the man that made Steve Rogers an interesting character in his own book. As far as I’m concerned, he gets a free pass for years on that count alone.

Thankfully for my reviewer’s integrity, a free pass isn’t required.

The concept is that, Rogers has set–up a team of covert ops Avengers to complement Bendis’ media-friendly public team. Although not quite in the realm of a being a wetworks team like Osborn-era Thunderbolts, the Secret Avengers have been set up as a shadow-ops team to pro-actively prevent super-human problems. Brubaker quickly brings up the now-defunct Project PEGASUS (an experimental think-tank group that deals with super-science artefacts) as an example of items on the team’s agenda, which suggests we’re going to be seeing a lot more than simply knock-down drag out fights. Indeed this issue starts with the team looking for the Serpent Crown, before taking them off a tangent that would seem ludicrous if I spoilt it here, but manages to work perfectly in the context of the issue.

Being an off-the-books operation, the team’s line-up is devoid of real A-List characters other than Rogers, which means that we get an eclectic mix of B and C-list characters instead. As someone whose favourite super-hero is Stingray, this is an absolute treat. Black Widow and Sharon Carter are obvious transfers from the cast of Captain America, what with being spies and all, but we also get a varied mix of super-heroes in here – from techies like Beast and War Machine to morally questionable vigilantes Ant-Man and Moon Knight, from mythological Valkyrie to cosmic hero Nova, practically all bases of the Marvel U are covered here, which is promising for the future of the title.

Art is provided by Mike Deodato Jr, who has a penchant for very shadowy murk that gels nicely with the exclusively nocturnal tone of the story. He manages to get a good handle on all of the characters immediately, especially Moon Knight. He even manages to make Steve Rogers’ new costume look cool somehow, a task which scientists were so close to proving was actually against all known natural laws.

Secret Avengers may not quite feel like a return to the traditional Avengers style of team book that the Heroic Age promised, but when it feels this effortlessly well constructed and solid, that doesn’t seem like much of a problem.

Very highly recommended.

Martin S Smith is an author and blogger. He’s just released his first book, The Redundancy of Flightless Birds, and reviews stuff every week over at The Taste of Rising Bile.

New Beginnings - The Amory Wars – In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3 #1

I’ve long since given up on getting other people to appreciate my taste in music (either I’m a philistine or everybody else is and I’d rather it wasn’t me), but if you like heavy metal you should definitely give Coheed & Cambria a listen.

Heavy, rhythmic and melodic, the band not only does concept albums, but is in fact a concept band, with all their songs telling the story of two married space adventurers Coheed and Cambria. But, while the music’s good, I’m terrible at discerning the story from the lyrics. Which was why I was keen to try out Amory Wars #1, which takes the tale of the pair and puts it in a convenient comic book format. Genius.

Unfortunately, the end result is a bit of a mess. And by ‘bit of a’ I mean ‘complete and utter’. Although it’s not made especially clear anywhere but in the back matter, this title is following on from a previous maxi-series, The Second Stage Turbine. But rather than summarise that story on a text recap page, writers Claudio Sanchez (lead singer of the band and driving creative force of the whole she-bang) and Peter David try to put it all across in exposition. Terrible, ham-fisted exposition that jumps around between locations and characters without even bothering to introduce half of them properly.

The one character you do get to know fairly well is the son of the aforementioned Coheed and Cambria; Claudio. Hang on, what was the writer’s name again…?

Yes, not only is this something of an impenetrable sci-fi mess, its lead character is also a massive power fantasy for the writer. Claudio is deep, because he’s plagued by (ill-explained) hallucinations of his father! Claudio is endearing, because he’s explaining everything to a hundred year old dog he’s stopped from attacking him! Claudio is relatable, because he admits that he’s not explaining things well (and really, when you’ve built your issue around a character poorly explaining the back story and nothing else, you need to rethink your approach to the story)! But most of all Claudio is cool because he has every super power under the sun, but doesn’t use them! Grief. He’s sort of a straight edge super-hero in a way. It just happens to not be any way that is at all interesting or worth reading about.

Art is provided by Chris Burnham, whose work is just the right side of Scott Kolins – that is that his work rarely has much line depth and is desperately crying out for a distinctive inker. There’s an occasional flourish of personality in some panels, but nothing that makes you think he’s being wasted on the book.

Amory Wars is good in only one respect – it absolves me of any guilt I may have felt for not having followed the story in all those C&C albums. Otherwise, it’s one to avoid completely and quietly forget about.

Martin S Smith is an author and blogger. He’s just released his first book, The Redundancy of Flightless Birds, and reviews stuff every week over at The Taste of Rising Bile.

New Beginnings - Zatanna #1

Zatanna’s a character that’s always walked a fine line between out and out super-hero and a slightly more down to Earth, if not realistic, magical fantasy character. She doesn’t operate like a traditional super-hero, even if she is a member of the Justice League of America, she doesn’t have a secret identity (her real name is just Zatanna Zatara) and she doesn’t wear a super-hero costume – just a stage outfit.

As such, it’s always kind of hard to pitch the tone of stories for her: having her do traditional, big super-hero stuff seems rather inappropriate and yet the direct opposite, gritty, grounded fantasy like you’d find in Hellblazer, is too dark for her.

Enter Paul Dini, who takes a middle-ground approach for this latest Zatanna solo series, taking her appearances in his run on Detective Comics as a starting point. Zatanna is off earning her living with her stage show, a blend of traditional stage illusions and her own real magical abilities, when she’s asked to consult on a magical crime scene by a San Francisco police detective, complete with horrifically murdered and magically altered corpses. Dini’s placing Zatanna on the fringes between those two worlds of super-heroes and fantasy, a buffer between the real world and the realms of magic waiting to sweep in.

The other notable aspect of Zatanna’s character is the iconic, fetishistic costume – top hat, fishnet stocking, boots and showgirl suit. It’s not exactly subtle day-wear and it’s hard to use it without falling into the murky realms of cheesecake art. Artist Stephane Roux does well to stay away from that pitfall. Although Zatanna is drawn to be attractive, there are only a few panels where the cheesecake gets too obvious and in your face, notably towards the end. Largely Zatanna’s drawn like a real human being rather than a purvy fashion model and even gets to wear normal clothes for a while.

This issue seems to be setting up the San Francisco location as a steady base of operations for Zatanna, which is a fair choice, it’s a very attractive city, but not quite enough is made of it in the art – there’s nothing that really makes you stand up and say ’that’s San Francisco’. In fact the location isn’t entirely clear until it’s off-handedly mentioned half way in.

I get the feeling that we’re going to be seeing more of Detective Dale Colton as Zatanna’s main supporting cast member, which is fine. He’ll make a good everyman foil to Zatanna’s magical knowledge as long as Dini resists the temptation to oversell his “down to earth, ordinary cop” nature.

Zatanna’s a pretty encouraging #1 – new readers can jump in without fear of being lost – though the final page reveal will probably mean nothing to those that aren’t hardcore DC readers, it’s functional regardless – and existing Zatanna fans… well, they’re probably just going to be happy that she’s got a new series; that’s it’s good is just a fringe benefit.

Martin S Smith is an author and blogger. He’s just released his first book, The Redundancy of Flightless Birds, and reviews stuff every week over at The Taste of Rising Bile.