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By Jason Bourgeois
Happy August, everyone! I am just returning from San Diego Comic Con, and my brain is still half-melted, so this is going to be short. Which probably means I intend it to be short, and will fail miserably. As if that wasn't enough, at the end of the month, I'm climbing back onto the airplanes and heading down south this time, for my third year at Dragon*Con. Keep an eye out for the guy with a camera and Cthulhu.
So, what's up this month? More of a rant than a review, and that rant would be about how Brian Bendis doesn't seem to actually want to write the Avengers.
I've made no secret here that I am no Bendis fan. I hear his Powers book is good, but I don't really care about crime dramas, so I've never read it, and don't have any plans to do so any time soon. That being said, I have read the odd good issue by him, and didn't mind his opening arc or two on Mighty Avengers, but his New Avengers never really grabbed me, and I finally dropped it around issue 25, although I have jumped back in since that book is filling in the behind the scenes information of what lead up to Secret Invasion.
Right there, that's the problem.
Let me start from the beginning, right with Avengers Disassembled. Just as the title suggests, Bendis came on, and tore apart the Avengers. Fair enough, I guess, but the start of a trend I'm just beginning to see the pattern of.
After that, the Avengers naturally didn't stay apart long, and a new team came together, appropiately called the New Avengers. This team was almost entirely made up of characters not really known for being Avengers, and a few that many fans felt never should have been there, such as Spider-Man and Wolverine. There's nothing wrong about having a team that's made up of characters that are all new to that team. The Justice League does it all the time, and so have the Avengers, but as I believe I covered back in the day, the team just felt wrong. Luke Cage, Spider-Woman, Wolverine, Spider-Man...this team does not the Earth's Mightiest Heroes make.
Still, not so bad. It's fun to mix things up after awhile, and do something wholly different. It wasn't my thing, and in and of itself, it wasn't a big warning sign, but these things add up, trust me.
In the teens, Bendis did a story with all the mutant energy released by the Scarlet Witch depowering 90% plus of the Earth's mutants crashing down and possessing a hapless mailman in Alaska, and making his way across Canada, wreaking havoc wherever it went. Along the way, it encountered Alpha Flight and stomped their collective heads in, pretty thoroughly. So badly, that they got killed, off panel. That's a rant for another day, however. The big problem here is, one of the issues of this storyline, featured zero Avengers. I think Iron Man showed up, and that was it. This was the first time a friend of mine referred to the book as No Avengers, since that's exactly what the content was.
Shortly after that, Civil War hit. The team was divided between Captain America's side, and Iron Man's side. So, the team broke up, and each issue was a focus on how each individual member dealt with the crisis. At least it dealt with the team members, but still, there were no real Avengers team action in the book during this period. After Civil War, the team reformed, with the pro registration group forming the Mighty Avengers, and those who had been with Cap sticking together as the New Avengers, and the team seemed even lamer than before, adding Dr. Strange for some needed firepower, although now they felt more like the Secret Defenders than the Avengers.
And then, the Secret Invasion hit. Skrulls everywhere! Who do you trust? Sure, I'm loving the story, but now New and Mighty Avengers are suffering from No Avengers syndrome, on an almost monthly basis, as the actual team members romp around in the Secret Invasion miniseries.
In one book, we've had stories about the Skrull Queen's rise to power, creating some clones for interogation, and deciding to go amongst the humans and invade personally. Not many Avengers here, although at least we see that the Queen intends to replace Spider-Woman, a current Avenger. And replace her she did, and has been the Spider-Woman we've been reading since the book began. On a side note, I wonder if that very strange Spider-Woman: Origin miniseries that made zero sense in ANY continuity is explained by Jessica Drew being a Skrull? The other issue with the Skrull queen explained how and when she replaced Jessica, and at least there were some Avengers here, but it was really a Skrull-centric story.
In other issues, we got Nick Fury hiding out from the Skrull invasion, which he figured out was coming pretty quick. It would've been nice if he had warned a few people, but I guess it comes down to the trust issues. We get an entire issue devoted to Nick Fury's retirement adventures, until the Skrulls find him, and he jumps back into the thick of things. We get another issue after that with Nick running around and gathering up characters whom have never been seen before, aside from two. None of which are Avengers, and only one or two with any connection to the Avengers. Finally, there's an issue with Yellowjacket and how he was replaced. He's at least was an Avenger for a time, although he wasn't one at the time, but still, pretty light.
I'm not saying much on the quality of these stories, some have been good, or ok, or outright bland, to me. I'd even argue some of these stories might have been absolutely necessary to be told. However, maybe they could have been told in the mini itself, if it's important background, or a mini, but to take over the Avengers books with unrelated, or barely related characters, is not what I read the Avengers for. With the past three years plus of stories, it just started to occur to me that there's been a surprising amount of Avengers comics with no Avengers in them.
I just think that if Bendis doesn't want to write the Avengers so badly, how about we put him on a book that's not the Avengers, and let someone who's a better writer handle the team properly, for awhile?
Jason M. Bourgeois
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