snap judgments

Alright Christmas shoppers, stay at home.  You’ve done your bit for king and country and if you show up at the store now, I won’t be deterred from making sure you leave with the Frank Miller Library’s Sin City Set Two.

Right.  So I was planning on going back and finding all the previous 5 issues of Mighty Avengers so I can actually see what the story looked like as God and scheduling intended but it’s just been so LONG.  That’s a lot of long box diving and I’m thankfully a site of Snap Judgments.  This issue #6 gives us the finale to Why Is Ultron a Girl Again Anyways? or as Bendis calls it… uhm, there doesn’t seem to be a title page outside of the recap page and that doesn’t call the story anything but the Mighty Avengers.  Wow.

Looking through it a second time, the story is easy to recap: Ultron has apparently merged with Iron Man’s Extremis virus and rewritten his DNA.  Ares gets small, puts a virus in Ultron that should shut her down, dislodge her from and save Tony. hopefully both, everything explodes and everything’s bak to normal.  Hey, I said it was easy, not that it made any sense.  Along the way we have an enraged Sentry finally taking it to Ultron with the power of a thousand exploding sun that can rip a techno-organic robot’s head off, which sounds really cool until you realize that Ares is in that techo-organic robot and Sentry’s not listening to the fact that this could really harsh the Save the Day plan, already in progress.  Thank God Ms. Marvel is there to punch the Sentry off of Ultron, making me wonder why she’s been off nibbling her nails about what to do and absorbing a nuclear blast instead of delegating and taking it to Ultron herself.  After all, she supposed to be the Best of the Best(tm) and we all know Sentry shouldn’t be your Go-To Guy thanks to being poorly written as a part of his character profile.

Hank Pym’s here, in his old school Ant Man outfit which brings a smile to my face,  and is the one that came up with the plan in the first place (a plan that involved shrinking!).  Black Widow coordinates the attack, directs the hellicarrier the Mighty Avengers took over, and even the Wasp manages to save Ares from the villain’s inevitable ka-BOOM, but in the end, it’s Ms. Marvel who gets told she’s a great leader and that just because she’s swapping spit with Wonder Man doesn’t mean you can’t give the movie star some screen time.  Me, I’m gla they reminded me Wonder Man was in the book.

There’s an odd moment with Hank and Jan as they have to have a little talk at the end of the book because these characters are back to square one again.  It’s hard for me to remember, but I’m pretty darn sure that at the end of Avengers: Disassembled, Hank and Jan were together again at least as friends, waiting to see what would happen between them with a change of scenery.  At least, that’s what the Avengers: Disassembled Finale said.  Then House of M went down and they seemed to lead separate lives (Hank Pym was nuts in the HoM: Iron Man mini, Janet was a quick panel or a footnote in the newspaper if I recall correctly).  Then it’s Civil War, they’re on the same side, Janet even concerned for Hank and saying that making Clor put him undera  lot of guilt and stress.  This sounds like someone who’s still invested in their previous spouse; maybe not as in love as when she was young and stupid, but at least one of the few who understands a complicated man.

Okay, there was Beyond!, but I didn’t understand how that fit into continuity and why Janet was a rather spiteful woman and Hank Pym was allowed his rebound crush #2 of Firebird.

Mighty Avengers makes the Beyond! characterizations looks lovey-dovey.  Cold, bitch, spiteful, Jan calls either Tigra or her ex-husband a tramp, it’s hard to tell with Bendis’s thought bubbles.  Hank can’t defend his new fling with Tigra (rebound crush #1!) and instead demands that either Jan love him or not, they walk away and we get a flash of an Ultron head on a nearby computer screen.  Something tells me this scene is important, but it just seems like a lot of bitching.

The Sentry’s wife is back from the dead, by the way.  I know you were heartbroken, but it turns out Sentry might be able to bring people back from death by touching them.  Just in case you didn’t hate him enough.

Tony’s fine, no real damage done from the invasion of his naughty bits and the systematic rewrite of his genetic code, so maybe some chicken soup, 7-Up and bed rest should get him back on his feet, but first he has to deal with Spider-Woman breaking into his hospital room with a dead Skrullectra.

So there you have it, folks: the Mighty Avengers in a tale so deadly, so dire, so disasterous they could only call it ”   “.

Was it a good story?  I think I might have liked it more if it came out as scheduled; Frank Cho’s artwork is disgustingly good despite the ass shot on nearly every page and there are some truly beautiful comic gags and character expressions that makes me think that it all should have turned out better.  The story is simple enough (Ultron shows up, wants to take over the world, gets stopped, we all have pie) and was probably rushed somewhat in its telling to get the reader used to the characters enough so Bendis could move along with Secret Invasion.  Were this a monthly book that came out monthly, we would have rolled our eyes but gotten on with things in a timely fashion.

Thanks to too much time to think, too much time between issues, too much booty, and too little explanation for the very very obvious (WHY WAS ULTRON A GIRL!?!), people might pick up the trade but this first tale of four-color action-adventure Avengers is going to be forgotten outside of the absurd (no, really, why was she a girl?  Why did that make sense?).