snap judgments

I didn’t always, but I really like the Authority.

I’m sure somewhere Warren Ellis has said it smarter or better or not even this at all (seriously, YOU try and predict that man!) but it’s kind of the logical extension of the Justice League.  If people as powerful as Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman just hung around and waited for the Justice Phone to ring or worried about when Lex Luthor ot that Star Alien Doodad were going to rear their ugly head, it seems sort of a waste doesn’t it?  We get a lot of superheroes leading ‘normal lives’ or ponying up to charity work between punching evil in the face, but what would happen if they just stopped and devoted themselves to 24-hour, 365 day-a-year ass whuppin’?  If they became THE AUTHORITY (just like the name of this cartoon!) of the planet?  Are these people up for it?  What kind of world would they make?  How on Earth would you oppose people in a hgh-tech flying fortress just waiting for your ass to step out of line?

It’s brilliant and from this idea have come some very awesome stories (and some stinkers, but hey, such is comics).  The heart of the matter is there and I’ll always sneak a look at what’s got their name on it this week to see if they’re talking about the theme I really like.  Sometimes the Authority will show up in a crossover and just stand around long enough to have a little yellow box with their name hover next to them and sometimes their latest volume is dropped like it’s hot from two people you think would do really well with the theme (everyone thank Grant Morrison and Gene Ha, kids.), but on the whole, I’m waiting for them to get back to their overseeing roots.  To see what happens when the world’s most powerful people regulate.

Authority: World’s End #1 caught my eye as Number of the Beast and DreamWar and whatever else Wildstorm is doing did not:  it had their name on the book and the characters on the cover.  Woo!  Imagine my surprise to find out that the Carrier had crashed and the world was under a general apocalypse!  Man, where had I been? Now, over on Funnybook Babylon, the crew there had seemed to take some issue with the rather cliched idea of surviving the world when it done gone bad and how boring the idea of post-apocalytic worlds are these days and how much they really didn’t like the characters so it really did nothing for them.

I think this is freakin’ BRILLIANT.

Remember that thematic element I like so much?  The idea of Earth’s Mightiest being exactly what it says on the cover of the book and really being the 400 lb gorilla of evil foiling?  The way the Authority was set up, it seemed impossible for these guys to lose.  They were there to keep the peace and they had just the orbital canons to do it and now…

They failed.  Not only did they fail, but they are mere shadows of who they used to be.  The team is personally broken down in a far more elegant way than they had been before.  This is not humiliation, this is a job undone.  This is not the finer world they wanted and now they have to live with this defeat.  Already, I’m interested in not only the larger post-apocalyptic theme at work, but how the characters are personally surviving it.   Sure, the setting is cliched and we really have seen it done a tousand times before but not with these guys and each member of the Authority is going to handle it in a different way.

Take Midnighter (because he kicks ass):  in #3 he sets out to go stop the big bad and his cronies from ruining their rescue efforts and he does it the only way he knows how: violence!   A beatdown commences that can never be finished as apparently, our Bad Guy this evening can’t be killed.  Or at least, can’t be killed in a way that the Midnighter can compute.  All the times evil’s reared its ugly head, the Midnighter has been able to ball up his fist and strike it in the face time and time again for the fastest results and now?  Violence is not the answer.  The Bad Guy tells him that if he’d just asked, he would have left their rescue efforts alone anyways which, while maybe not the whole truth, presents an interesting look at how this new world works.  it works in a way that the Authority aren’t really known for.  The idea that they could have used diplomacy in order to get their way isn’t a factor for the world’s most powerful people and let’s face it: the Authority isn’t really known for it’s pulse-pounding talking action.

I got a good feeling about this new start, so let’s hope they keep on making it.

Hey, did you read House of M?

It was an 8 issue comic series back in 2005 that led to the Decimation of the oodles of random mutants that had cropped up over the years in the Marvel Universe.  A population control problem, it cut down all the X-Men to all the ones everyone liked (which… yeah, that’s not true because as long as they appeared in a comic, all mutants are someone’s favorite) and … pretty much took care of the X-Universe exclusively.  The more important thing was that it was Bendis’s first shot at the Big Event Book and, almost as an anniversary gift, Bendis gives us it AGAIN after three years.

HOORAH!

This is, of course, a retelling of that fateful mini through the eyes of Spider-Woman Skrull and Hank Pym Skrull (making me really want to go back and read the HoM: Iron Man mini to see if this all really does fit in or Bendis is just name-checking his own books).  These two were totally going to go kill the Scarlet Witch, but they didn’t.

And that’s $2.99 and 28 pages, folks!  G’NIGHT!

A customer came in with a handy little heft of Marvel books and he wasn’t sure on New Avengers.  Issues had been hit and miss with him and I properly bit my tongue and tried to sell the book as the Secret History of the Secret Invasion.  The customer perked up as Secret Invasion was awesome in his eyes especially the part where they “shot the hell out of Reed Richards”.

I proudly sold him a copy of New Avengers #44, knowing he would be satisfied.

In this issue, the Skrulls are working on a project in which (and I’m nto joking) they are CLONING various Marvel heroes in order to learn their secrets.  That’s right: clones.  The first part is a big long talk with the Illuminati as they catch on ahead of time about the ways the Skrulls would backlash against them.  In fact they catch on so quick that Black Bolt makes a run for the door only to get shot up by the Skrulls who’d been watching their puppets dance for the intel.  This intel being that one final clue that will help the Skrulls go undetected amongst… well, who are we kidding?  Amongst the Fantastic Four and the incredible genius of Reed Richards.

So, their plan is to CLONE REED RICHARDS and keep putting the clone in situations where he’d willingly give up that information.  They put him in league with his Illuminati buddies, they torture him and his wife and kid, it’s… it’s actually kind of gruesome.  Personally, I find it just as distateful as the whole Tigra getting the crap kicked out of her in her underwear thing because, storywise, it isn’t necessary and is brutality for brutality’s sake and shock value.

Out of all the ways that the Skrulls could have learned how to hide themselves from the genius of Reed Richards, this is the way they go about it?  Repeatedly cloning a copy until it did naturally what they wanted it to?  Doesn’t that seem a little wasteful?  Couldn’t they have figured it out on their own, out of sheer desperation?  Why not have religious aspect factor in, something about believe in His Love or an ancient writ come to the fore with secret knowledge?  Hell, they just got through an Annihilation wave, who’s to say they couldn’t have scavenged the tech out of some other destroyed culture.  In fact, that’d have been kind of cool:  bit space battle showing the Skrulls triumphant and raiding weaker races for their information and technology, absorbing it into their own.  They could have even shown a successful ‘mini Invasion’ of some other schmoe race to give us even the barest hint of a chance that this Secret Invasion could have been a success.

So they torture and they test a variety of Clone Reeds until they finally get the math problem that will allow them the key to Invading.  They get it by having his son ask precocious little questions in bed with the wife on some lazy morning until the idea strikes him.  Then they shoot him in the head and declare war.

All you really need to know out of this issue is that the key to the Invasion and being undetected was discovered through Reed’s brain and so the Real Reed could probably reverse-engineer it.

Oh, and Skrulls got clones.

The new issue of Wizard that comes out today promises on the cover to have Bendis reveal all about the Avengers, or at least what sounds like yet another iteration of the team that seems to have at least Cap, Iron Man and Thor in it that’s going to come out of Secret Invasion.  Dear Readers, I may just pick that up, but only in the name of investigation.

Really, he can only go up from here; both Mighty and New Avengers teams haven’t exactly inspired any confidence in me.  it took them just three issues to Disassemble and here we are in issue #5 of Secret Invasion and with all these heroes around only now are we swearing REVENGE and Earth’s Mightiest Heroes are gearing up to jump into the same fight in New York City we;ve seen from several different angles by now.

Annnnyhoo….  Mighty Avengers.  Remember Hank Pym’s a Skrull, right?  Here, we get to see a little bit of his more ‘human’ side to speak as he’s getting cold feet on this whole Invasion business.  Dum Dum Dugan (also a Skrull) sits down with him in a diner in apparently the Middle of Nowhere Forest and tries to talk sense into him.  Pym thinks it’s too dangerous and the variables too big to really launch the Invasion right without some serious resistance, Dugan reminds him who he’s supposed to be playing here, a wife-slapping loser.  Stop breaking character to be smart.

Oh Bendis.  Why won’t you let the slapping thing go?  Why can’t you find another part of Pym’s personality to poke at, perhaps one of the other terrible things you’ve had him do since taking up the character?

Anyhow, Pym ain’t buying it, there’s a really odd sort of face off between he and Dugan and then they decide to take out the defective Pym.  A big fight ensues, starting in the diner and ending in the trees, Pym nearly begging for them to just listen when they shoot him in his big giant head.  He then reverts back to Skrull form and then normal sized, making me unfortunately remember Black Goliath’s funeral.  Thanks, guys.

Dugan orders SHIELD (or at least his trusted men amongst them) to lay down a good cover up, people in the area being upset that the diner’s gone and the nice guy who ran it crushed in the ensuing battle.  Dugan calls up the mothership and orders up another Skrull Pym.  I’m going to say that this Skrull Pym is the one we have currently running around in Avengers: the Initiative.

All you need to know?  Pym can’t even get being an insurgent right.  They can replace people at will.

AND THEY HAVE A PLAN.

Sorry, All You Need to Know: Battlestar Galactica is another post.

You might have noticed that there was no recap for this issue.  Despite returning to ‘present’ time, despite the good push this particular story had when we first saw Ka-Zar and Spidey hash things out in the Savage Land right around the first issue of Secret Invasion when all the Marvel heroes that arrived on the ship and they started fighting against the New and Mighty teams.

Well, when this went down, Ka-Zar and his band of Savage Landites happened upon the whole thing and wound up trying to get a handle on what’s going on by talking with Spider-Man as seen in New Avengers #41, only to have Captain America happen upon them and the threat of a fight start.  Well, a couple issues later, Spidey and his Savage Friends try talking this Cap down by explaining he can’t be Cap since Cap is dead, but this just leads to, you guessed it, fighting.  No one thinks to ask “Hey, Cap!  Great to see you back!  What the hell are you doing on a spaceship?”  Sure, we know it’s not really Steve Rogers (for heaven’s sake, Fallen Son was just one ‘No really, Steve Rogers is really dead we mean it it’s serious, he’s dead, the end!’ after the other), but humor the bastard!  Try to get some info out of him!

Well, not-Cap gets blowdarted to bits and falls only to reveal himself as a foamy mouthed Skrull.  Cut to a flashback where they talk about how this Skrull got the blood blanket treatment, how it doesn’t always go according to plan, how the Skrull Mind Priestess had to do a little fussing with the memories of this warrior so that he would remember an alternate timeline that would make him believe he’s Steve Rogers with greater clarity but this doesn’t matter at all BECAUSE HE’S DEAD AND THE HEROES CAN’T LEARN THIS INFO.

So the reader is now told that the spaceship that crashed in the Savage Land didn’t have the real Captain America in it.  Thanks to Secret Invasion #5, we know that the spaceship didn’t have the real ANYONE inside, but if you read this issue before that, you would have figured out the same thing.

And that’s all you need to know.

It’s sad how much I keep coming back to this.  I keep thinking no one’ll care or it’s been too long or it doesn’t even matter but then I go to work and see that cover with Thor and Hulk pummeling away and think, “What on Earth happened?”

How did Loeb do it?  What is GOING ON with his Hulk book?  Every issue has been page after page of punches with little to no payoff or forward momentum.  It’s Marvel’s version of Particle Man with huge McGuiness muscles.

I’ve tried, don’t get me wrong.  There is simply NO OTHER Hulk book out there and Marvel seems pretty proud of this so what other choice do I have?  Ed McGuiness draws a pretty big Hulk and that’s cool.  The idea of massive battles that bring out the inner 15-year-old boy in all of us is something to behold.  There are good points here, there have to be, it just It took until Comic Con to realize that I’m not the only one as befuddled by the execution of it all.  Here I was, sitting on this side of computer screen thinking i just was having this bad bout of fandignance; it’s not the Hulk I want to read but maybe there’s some crazy person out there totally going nuts every time an issue comes out. Well, people are going crazy, just not for the right reasons.

Hulk #5 encapsulates a lot of things both wrong and right about the series, so let’s take a look at it for a moment and prove a few things right off the bat.

First off, let’s look at what we got here:  Thor vs. the Hulk.  Think on that.  Just let it sink in, on all the massive damage that’s going to go down.  This is should be epic battle in the mighty Marvel manner here, folks.  Before World War Hulk, I would have totally given this fight to Thor but seeing the green goliath at his meanest- wait.  This isn’t the ‘Hulk’ Hulk, this is that red Hulk, the one that punched the Watcher out of nowhere and who we still don’t know the identity of.  He’s just some big red dude who’s pummeled everyone we know and love into paste and seems to be here to.. kill the Hulk.  Or something.  Who knows his motives, his identity, why he’s red or why he just keeps winning, but this is the guy who’s going to fight Thor this issue.

And there’s just something about creating an unstoppable engine of destruction that doesn’t suggest temperance.

Little preamble, the first blow is swung by Thor and we’re given a sort of quick and cocky recap, as if the book really needed it by this point.  If you’re going to be an all out action book, don’t bother selling me on your story, just let me get into who’s gonna kick who’s butt.  Like I said, Thor vs. Hulk sells itself so don’t remind me that ‘Rulky’  (Rooby rooby roo!) is this great mysterious ubermench who we should all be really excited about.

So, BOOM!  Thor punches the red Hulk and unsurprisingly, the red Hulk is relatively unscathed.  He’s gotten a little deeper shading, some atmospheric smoke going on, one panel even shows that his face did cave in like it should have but seems to be healing up in a jiff.  All in all, the result of Mjolnir are nil since the red Hulk proceeds to punch Thor into next week (or at least a nearby observatory), all the while mockingly disdainful of this fight.  Thor pulls himself out of the rubble and has another go at it, not budging the red Hulk an inch.

Okay, now to borrow something from wrestling- I mean, ‘sports entertainment’, there’s an element of ‘no-sell’ going on here that’s honestly making something that should be a fantastic battle fall short.  One needs to be sold on a move or a hit (especially when they’re fake!) in order to be engaged in the story that the fighters are telling, just like one needs to be sold on the premise of a movie before you commit to a ticket price.  Here, the red Hulk hits Thor and the move is sold to us by watching Thor fly off into a building and crawl out of rubble.  ‘The red Hulk hits pretty freakin’ hard!’ says our brain and we believe in the strength of a character that can so easily toss a Thunder God.  Mind you, McGuinness draws Thor just wailing on the red Hulk, dynamic shots full of great crackling energy, but the red Hulk doesn’t budge an inch.  The first short is aimed right at his face and his posture doesn’t bend from the impact or brace itself.  He just takes the shot and is seen arms akimbo next panel.  The red Hulk is just not selling Thor’s blows and that makes me wonder if Thor’s a lot weaker than he should be or if the red Hulk is a douche who’s going to be taking a beating in the locker room for making his opponent look bad.

But the red Hulk’s been no-selling for the past five issues, maybe it’s his gimmick?  Maybe the character is really that strong and boy howdy should we think he’s the coolest thing ever?  How cool, you ask?  Well, the book proceeds to alienate a good portion of Marvel die-hards by having the red Hulk ‘jump’ super high above the atmosphere of the planet, taking Thor along by holding on to his hammer.  So, he’s not ‘wielding’ mighty Mjolnir, just pushing it through space I guess as the red Hulk TKOs Thor with his own weapon of destruction.

:Let’s just say that again:  the red Hulk defeats Thor with Mjolnir through his tactical genius and the weightlessness of space.

Pretty epic, huh?  Or… does that kind of stick in your craw?  Are you secretly a little itchingly mad at such a bad portrayal of Thor?  At the poor use of physics?  At the gall of Loeb to sort of cheapen a fight that should have rightfully been of such scale and scope that bards should have spontaneously erupted into song, the IRIS would have had to add a new category of seismic activity to register the blows and mountain ranges changed their altitude in order to cower in the shadows of such a battle.

It’s a terribly nerdy thing to say, but if you’re going to use gravity to get around a magical ward on a weapon, you really have to go all thw way.  If the Hulk hit Thor in space, both of them would go flying back from each other.  Inertia, ladies and gentlemen, and as incredibly nerdtastic it is to bring it up in relation to comics, I have to keep going and point at Loeb as he started it.

So, the red Hulk beats up Thor and leaves him on the surface of the moon.  We then cut to …. aw geeze, A-Bomb dredging up the Hulk (real live Hulk, accept no substitutions) from the bottom of the ocean where I guess he was left last issue and bringing him back to team up with a variety of heavy hitters from the Marvel Universe: She-Hulk, Iron Man, Namor, Ares, the Thing and the Human Torch and oh, what the Hell?  Galactus and Superman.   Why not? I’m sure all these people are going to fight the red Hulk, who may or may not be wielding Mjolnir and a Kryptonite Ring next issue.

Yes, the issue is bad.  Yes, the entire run thus far as been boggling.  But that’s when I realized I had read this all before.  That’s right, back in 2001 Gail Simone paid future tribute to an issue thought at the time far too stupid to be actually written in a form that wasn’t parody.

Last note:  Jeph Loeb himself proudly told panel-goers at Comic Con last month, this storyline is coming to an INCREDIBLE ENDING, one you’ll never suspect!  THEN, the format is going to change on the Hulk so that it’ll have two stories in it each issues, just like Tales to Astonish used to, that will have a RED HULK story and a GREEN HULK story!  That’s right!  Because splitting a superhero into two and labeling them by color worked so well for the Distinguished Competition.

Let’s just hope the three remaining panels will be used for character development.

I think I understand.

So, Bendis needs to write this big Secret Invasion plot and work out a complex timeline for events to occur and hand them down the lines of editorial and otherwise, create this massive summer event.  He seems like a hands-on kind of guy, not one to sit on the sidelines and work with what he’s given, he would prefer to call the shots.  Right?  Right.  So, with all of this work he’s got to do, he’s already incorporated his Avengers teams into this main plot, leaving the two books they’re supposed to be in rather empty.  Well, they’re monthlies too and Secret Invasion has to work at a slower pace than that.  The Avengers can’t go off and have adventures like Millar’s Fantastic Four can.  So what do you do with the books?

Well, you coast.

You have filler.  You pad them out until you’re ready to fold them back into the main story that they’ve been telling since you started.  If you’ve been reading Secret Invasion so far, you know that we’re taking the slow approach and letting the sinister gravity of the book sink in before you start running around too much.  The Avengers just have to wait.

Which is why this book doesn’t have an Avenger in it.  It’s the story of how the Skrulls got Elektra, which to be perfectly honest, doesn’t matter in the slightest.  She did her plot purpose and there are more interesting things going on that I’d like to hear about.  Anything, at this point.  Can we get a D-Man back up?  A Squirrel Girl four-parter?

So, we start out by finding out that Skrullektra paid Electro to stage the big breakout that kicked off the New Avengers series and ordered a hit on ‘some Savage Land guy’.  If you’ve been reading the book, you know that.  If you check on things via the internet, you know that.  If you can think back to when you read the issues back in 2004, you probably figured out that the criminal breakout was probably a ruse or something unimportant since they never really came back to it, only to hint in shadowy ways that there must be something more.  2004, people!  Four years ago and he’s telling us now!

Right.  But before this transaction went down, Elektra was chillin’ when a black suited version of herself tried to kick her ass.  They fight.  Elektra wins.  Elektra fights Skrull-Daredevil and Skrull-Wolverine.  Elektra wins.  Elektra gets blindsided by a different Skrull.  Elektra loses.  This different Skrull just so happens to be the Empress’s main squeeze, so we get a Skrull-as-a-woman/Skrull-as-a-woman kiss.  The Empress laments having to send her dear warrior to die (meaning they set up the reveal?  Really?) in accordance witht the Prophecy.  Skrullektra then goes and un-unites the Hand and Hydra, takes over leadership and talks about honor and death and stuff.

So what do you need to know?  How much of this was told in interviews or articles in the PAST FOUR YEARS?  How much of this relates to the story as its being told now?  And why is next issue going back to Hank Pym again?  Didn’t he get his issue already?

We are getting filler.  I honestly can’t think of anything that should be noted out of this issue that we haven’t already heard or assumed.  I can see why his attention is elsewhere, but I’m really hoping the next issue of Secret Invasion turns it up a notch.  Or at least gets the characters in that book some breathing room so they can return to their titles and show us how the heroes are fighting the Invasion first hand.

This is going to be one WEIRD trade paperback collection.

Okay, so I was minding my own business on the week of June 25th, seeing as it was my birthday and whatnot when I was DELUGED by Avengers titles.  Everyone Marvel could think of came out that week, leaving me no choice but to read all of them.

Let’s start at the beginning, the two major Avengers titles of Mighty and New.  Mighty is about how the Skrulls got Hank Pym and turned him into the Time magazine cover and Initiative director guy we know today and New is about how the Skrulls got Spider-Woman and the Skull Empress got into her position of power and directed her little infiltration group.  Apparently, the Skrulls have a ceremony where placing a towel of blood over their body gives them a quick recap of issues to date and gives them a dual identity.  They seem to be taking in the new persona so to speak while keeping their own personality; thus Hank Pym can act in the best interests of both the Skrull empire by forming the Fifty States Initiative (which I’ll get to later) and fit in amongst his peers.  SHIELD/HYDRA/Skrull Empress Jessica Drew takes us on a recap of how the Skrulls have been manipulating things since I’m going to assume right before Avengers: Disassembled.  Talk of the VIBRANIUM mines comes up as THE ONLY THING THE SKRULLS CAN’T FIGHT BACK AGAINST so the Savage Land group comes in as trying to destroy the Vibranium stores there. Talk about all the mutants comes up as they try and turn a race war to their favor, pitting humans against mutants, something they want to do to the super-human community at large, thus Civil War.  This… is a lot of things for the Skrulls to be responsible for.

Anyhoo, more recap goes down as Jessica Drew joins the Avengers, asks Madame Hydra for money for continuing her double agent clause (money? really?), yadda yadda.  In the end, Pym calls to tell her that they’re going to Genosha to go put the Scarlet Witch down.  The Skrull empress gives the kill order and OH BOY THINGS FADE TO A WHITE PAGE.

So, For New Avengers #42, all you need to know is that the Skrulls have been pulling the strings on nearly everything and have a HUGE WEAKNESS TO VIBRANIUM, making the Black Panther tie-in possibly essential at this point.

Okay, Mighty Avengers #15 continues in recap fashion to show Hank Pym at his new teaching job which is where Bendis put them after Disassembled, which makes my early thoughts of New Avengers stuff wrong, so now I’m confused.  Well, I’m sure when Secret Invasion Chronicles comes out, things will be a lot smoother and no one will have to make a flow chart.  Man, I hate it when comics make me feel like an idiot for not learning their timeline…

ANYHOW, Pym is doing a lectures at Cambridge as I think that’s where they put them.  Jan’s apparently getting drunk at parties.  Hank’s either resentful of this or just as mad as me that a former Avengers chairwoman has really let herself go in the name of her ‘fashion design business’.  The arguement is weak as it seems to paint Jan as a drunk harpy and Pym as a disapproving shut-in, showing us that years of comics and storylines keep them coming back to an age old arguement.  Waking up in his office chair to find Jan moved out, he grumbles about this ‘classy’ move while the next page shows him sleeping with one of the students from his lectures.

Someday, we’ll get a new angle on these two, I swear.

So the young blonde student is completely facinated by Pym’s Avengers days, personal life and powers and pumps him for information he gives gladly.  When he brags about how he and the boys could totally detect a Skrull at 30 paces, the girl’s had enough and frankly so have I.  Telegraphed a mile away, the girl shapeshifts into an awesome Skrull and beats the crap out of him.  Jan drops by at the right time to see this young semi-nude blonde chick at Hank’s place and just tells the chick she could do better.  OH JAN.

For the record?  The ‘very ex-husband’ comment Janet makes is a little awkward since those two have been divorced for quite some time; Johns or Austen I think tried to get them remarried tried to get them remarried but it didn’t work out.

The Skrulls create a new Pym who does all the stuff we’ve seen until now, putting him back on top by giving him ambition that, let’s face it, our old Hank Pym didn’t have.  He goes back to his buddies after the Ultron storyline in Mighty Avengers and tells them how to defeat Stark’s armor.  Since the Skrulls are all set to go, Pym gives Janet a ‘new growth formula’ that’s probably something horrible.

All you really need to know for Mighty Avengers #15 is that last bit, that Janet Van Dyne now has some sort of evil formula in her hands that she might think is some new way for her to become Giant Woman (which she already did during the ‘Venom Bomb’ storyline).  So maybe you don’t need to know that.

Right!  So those are the big two, reminding me a lot of those episodes mid-season that get a lower budget so they resort to a ‘remember when?’ recap show.  Mind you, that Vibranium thing is big, but… that’s a lot of ‘previously in the Avengers’.

Ares is on the Mighty Avengers, right? So we get one Avenger for a few panels! YAY.

I’ll just come out and say it: this should have been a mini called ‘Nick Fury: Secret Files’ or something. I think it does a disservice to the Avengers to have him take over BOTH titles with brand-new characters, not to mention Nick Fury should have a little bit of fanfare in his recent return. He doesn’ have to hide from the reader, so why is he sneaking around the Avengers books?

Long story short, this issue is a gathering of ne’er-do-wells and nobodys no one’s heard of who all have some sort of ‘power’ because their mysterious parents are super-heroes. They stress that they aren’t mutants for the most part, but they all seem to have some pretty similar origins. We got six of them and a few named parents and this is Nick Fury’s all new, all secreter Avengers team.

So, who are they?  Well, apparently Ares is TOTALLY COOL with someone taking his son while he’s away (because that didn’t happen before and you think he’d have learned from the first time) since his son is one of our new heroes. Stated at 10 years of age, he’s Phobos the God of Fear now and no one (not even the GODS!) knew except for Nick Fury (who might I add appears in this issue in ‘disguise’ as a black man). The rest of them are a grab bag of ‘lost son of the Phantom Rider’, ‘lost son of Doctor Druid’, ‘not-so lost daughter of the Griffin’ and a really big guy bailed out of jail. These, plus Phobos plus the chick who can make earthquakes from that one issue of New Avengers I hated (oh, apparently she was in Secret War too, making it a very important prelude to this whole thing) are Nick Fury’s secret team to go ferret out some Skrulls.
I’d be a lot easier on this book if it wasn’t the Avengers. I think that title deserves some distinction and some Avengers from time to time. It makes sense wher Bendis is going with this since this looks like a fourth ‘Avengers’ team (counting Mighty, New and the Initiative guys) and they might actually be doing some Avenging, which is cool. Alex Maleev could draw paint dry and I’d still buy it (though Daisy Johnson looks a heck of a lot like Mila from Daredevil), so I can’t say it’s all that a waste. It’s just not doing it for me. It’s just not advertised well. And, in a bout of nitpicky-ness, it feels like we’re playing catch up again as the Avengers book are way behind the current overarching plotline.

But all you need to know is that Nick Fury has a secret team of young rookies to stop the Skrull invasion and it’s all part of his master plan.