By: Brian Michael Bendis (writer), Daniel Acuna (art/colors), Cory Petit (letters), Lauren Sankovitch (associate editor) & Tom Brevoort (editor)
The Story: In the wake of Fear Itself, a new/old threat emerges.
Five things:
1. Love, love, LOVE Acuna’s art! Acuna is another of those guys who is coloring his own work and it gives it such a unique look because it ceases to be pencils + inks + colors and just becomes “art”. Reminding me of the saying that “there’s many a slip between the cup and the lip”, there’s a LOT that can go awry when there are multiple handoffs on the way to finished art and even then it doesn’t look like what Acuna does where isn’t much inking in the traditional sense. On top of that, he has a great handle on how to frame these scenes. He gets a few characters who start to look like bobble heads in a couple of places, but other than that, no art complaints at all. Lovely work and he’s an artist who has really grown a LOT over the last couple of years to the point where he’s a name that makes me want to buy the comic book.
2. Also love the clever lab tech. We’re so used to seeing the only threats to our heroes coming from super-villains that it’s refreshing to have a new threat: A lab tech who has gathered a lot of genetic information on the heroes. When you think about this, it totally makes sense. How many janitors and maids just invisibly pass through a hero’s life? And they all have access to things like genetic information or other stuff. For example, who brings in the Avengers snail mail and why don’t they steal some of that information for identity theft purposes? Anyway, watching this meek lab tech just going around at key events in the Avengers recent past and palming samples was pretty cool.
3. Not much happens in this issue. I’m getting really sick of this kind of story pacing. As much as I enjoyed the issue, we don’t get much new stuff. Literally the first third of the issue shows the tech stealing specimens from various moments in the past. And the issue only really shows who she intends to give those samples to. For $3.99, a comic needs to do more and this comic is paced about half as fast as it should be.
4. That is one crowded mansion. With the Tower destroyed, everyone is bunking in the Avengers’ Mansion. You have to wonder, how many bathrooms do they have? You can just imagine a Red Hulk who’s “gotta go” banging on the door as Mockingbird is blow drying her hair… And who would use the bathroom after Red Hulk or Thing has done their business? Ugh…. Surely Bendis is going to delight us with lots of weird events springing from the crowded circumstances. Related to this is the talk that the Avengers are going to have their teams redone. That was tossed out like it was a big deal, but the way these teams are constantly shifting these days, it’s hard to get too excited about the changes.
5. Stop with the Spider-Woman/Hawkeye romance. It’s boring now. Surely Bendis has a plan for the romance, but he needs to get to it, because having the two of them make googley eyes at each other from across the room (while Spider-Woman and Ms. Marvel have girl-talk about it) is getting old. Not to mention, that isn’t what people having a kinda secret romance do. It would be more like the other Avengers would keep noticing that Spider-Woman and Hawkeye weren’t around and always coming into the team meetings with their hair ruffled and uniforms on inside out.
Conclusion: A pretty good issue. The art’s better than the story, mostly because the story is moving too slowly. But, this is still a fairly high quality title month after month. Put some worse art on this and the story flaws would really start to show up.
Grade: B-
-Dean Stell
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Conclusion