By: Fred Van Lente (writer), Tom Grummett (pencils), Cory Hamscher (inks), Andy Troy (colors), Ed Dukeshire (letters) & Mark Paniccia (editor)
The Story: The Chaos King has struck all living mortal heroes dead/comatose, so it falls upon a group of dead Avengers to save innocent civilians and the helpless Avengers.
What’s Good: How many truly interesting superhero characters actually stay dead for very long? The answer is “not many”, so if you want to do a “dead heroes” issue like this one, you have a challenge as a writer because the only dead heroes are so boring that no one has tried to bring them back. This was a problem that killed the X-Necrosha event last year: Who cared about these dead mutants? We were glad they were dead and didn’t like being reminded of them!
So Van Lente faced a big obstacle to making this an interesting book. But the cool thing is that I would totally read an ongoing series written by Van Lente featuring these characters: Vision, Yellowjacket, Swordsman, Dr. Druid, Mar-Vell & Deathcry. That in itself should make you appreciate what a nice job of writing this is! Van Lente does a solid job of laying out the scenario that these “dead Avengers” face, who they are and what they can do (coupled with a few origin style flashbacks). The storytelling is nice and tight and leaves us with a satisfying cliffhanger that makes one anticipate next month’s issue.
The art by Tom Grummett is very throwbacky. If you miss the line work of ’80s comics, you will love this art. I don’t know about you, but sometimes it is nice to have a break from this quasi-realistic art with the colorist adding all the contours via shading. This is just a nice combination of pencil and ink line work.
What’s Not So Good: Even though this is a pretty good event tie-in, it is still an event tie-in and that (generally) puts a limit on just how good it can be simply because you kinda know that it is going to wrap its business up in a tidy fashion at the end of the story. So, it is isn’t epic. But, in its defense…it really isn’t trying to be.
There is also a possibility that someone is going to read this and say, “Hey! We should totally bring the Swordsman back!” and then give that project to a writer less skillful than Van Lente. That wouldn’t be good at all.
Conclusion: A nice event tie-in that doesn’t try to be more than it is with really neat old-styled art.
Grade: B-
– Dean Stell
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Conclusion