By: Brian Michael Bendis (story), Brandon Peterson, Mike Mayhew, Jim Cheung, Leinil Yu, Mark Morales, Mike Deodato, Olivier Coipel, Terry Dodson & Walter Simonson (art), Scott Hanna & Rachel Dodson (inks), Jason Keith, Laura Martin & Paul Mounts (colors), and Cory Petit (letters)
The Story: The Avengers work to escape the microverse after one more big fight with centaur kingpin Lord Gouzar.
The Review: I’m a big fan of Bendis and, as such, I’ve stuck with his Avengers books for a long, long time now. Suffice it to say, it’s been a rocky road with highs and lows. With that said, he’s done a lot for the franchise and so I really do wish I could give a glowing review for this giant-sized farewell issue. I mean, the sheer amount of heart he puts into his lengthy farewell letter at the end of the issue makes me really want this issue to be a great one. But it isn’t.
Quite honestly, it’s been pretty clear for a while now that Bendis perhaps overstayed his welcome on Avengers; ideas were being recycled, certain issues felt phoned in, and this issue really only evidences that fact. Everything just feels so derivative and phoned in that it’s hard to believe much passion and effort went into its creation from Bendis. Given how sincere his farewell letter was, you’d figure that he’d really try to blow us away with this issue, but perhaps he just doesn’t have it in him anymore.
To put it simply, this issue is extremely shallow. It’s page after page of punching. None of it carries any real weight or significance. It’s just mindless action against faceless goons and an almost unbelievably two-dimensional villain. All this punching might have worked if Lord Gouzar was an effective villain, but Bendis clearly didn’t care enough to bother developing Gouzar. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a more uninspired and unimaginative villain: he’s a crimelord centaur, whose motivation is simply “power.” That’s it. That’s the whole character concept. So why exactly should I care about the conflict our heroes have against him? With such a poor villain, all the climactic action feels effectively pointless.
For all that being said, things do start to come together a little bit towards the end of all the action. When the Avengers rally one more time to finish off Gouzar, there is a kind of old school nostalgia that does feel like a kind of “goodbye” from Bendis. It’s a nostalgic, meta moment that does sort of work.
Once the Lord Gouzar stuff is done with, the issue is admittedly more effective as well. We get a “quieter moment” in the form of a party at Avengers Tower welcoming back Janet. This feels more like a farewell on Bendis’ part and there is certainly a sincerity to this scene that the rest of the issue lacked. It’s unfortunate, then, that the punch-line to this sequence is a shill for Jonathan Hickman’s upcoming run, which undercuts a lot of the heart that Bendis had put into the scene just pages prior.
Of course, mindless action might actually be passable if the artwork was good but it’s really not. The whole idea of having a “jam session” with five million artists on the book is nothing short of a disaster. It ends up an inconsistent mess that makes for an irritating and disjointed reading experience. It doesn’t help either that none of the artists involved do their best work here – the Dodson’s have some nice pages but other than that, it ranges from rushed to unremarkable. Also, I’m not sure which artist did all the scenes with Maria Hill and Daisy Johnson in Central Park, but those pages were downright awful – just sloppy, unappealing, and at times amateurish artwork.
Conclusion: I really wish this was better than it was, but as it stands, paying $4.99 for this made feel as though Marvel had straight up robbed me.
Grade: D+
– Alex Evans
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