AVX Review: Avengers Vs. X-Men #4 By Jonathan Hickman And John Romita Jr.

Reviews, Top Story

Avengers vs. X-Men #4

Story by Jason Aaron, Brian Michael Bendis, Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, and Jonathan Hickman

Script by Jonathan Hickman

Art by John Romita Jr., Scott Hanna, and Laura Martin

 

 

The short of it:

 

Wolverine falls into a beer trap in Antartica, and winds up joining forces with Hope, while meanwhile, in space, the Avengets get run down by the Phoenix and Thor watches planet eating. Scott and Emma find themselves a safehouse, and Emma proceeds to abuse the weakest mind at Logan’s school to get her Cerebra. Avengers and X-Men are fighting across the globe, and Logan’s people are turning to Scott’s side like rats off a sinking ship. We see clips of fights covered in various other titles on sale this week as the search for Hope continues…with both sides finding out at just about the same time. Everyone winds up going to space to fight on the moon, as in evidence that people read the Phoenix Saga, they go to the Blue Area of the Moon for what would be the last fight if this book didn’t have another eight issues.

 

What I liked:

 

  • Beer trap.
  • Spidey and Daredevil vs Colossus
  • Romita’s art is stil a thousand times better than it was on the core Avengers title just a few months ago.
  • Despite the teaser nature of the book, Romita does a great job selling it. I keep finding myself being like ‘I want to see that’, which I guess is a success. It has me wondering which tie in to check out for it.
  • I guess the Avengers being run like a military outfit is a positive, if Cap is in charge there’s really no excuse to not go that direction.

 

What I didn’t like:

 

  • This book is arguably everything I hate about decompressed story writing. For as much goes on, nothing happens but a to be continued and a lot of ‘go find this story elsehwere’.
  • Seriously, that’s a problem. This book read more like a teaser for Uncanny, AVX Vs., and Avengers this week. Then you chase in Secret Avengers for the space stuff, and a bunch of events that I can’t even find evidence of having happened, and you call it an event.
  • Wolverine’s decision making.
  • Phoenix the planet eater. Something it did once ever is apparently all it’s capable of, and it really just gets stupider with every additional world.
  • Wolverine is mad enough to kill every AIM scientist he sees, but not to show that he has the balls to stand uo for himself.

 

Final Thoughts:

 

How many issues long is this book going to be? Because the pacing set by the first few completley falls apart here.

 

I think there are all of two pages where I really got that “Jonathan Hickman wrote this” feeling that I generally go looking for in books he writes.

 

Did any of our writing room brain trustees ever actually read the Phoenix Saga? Or did they just read Dark Phoenix? Did any of them read anything featuring Phoenix to come since then? Rachel’s tenture, or when Jean started getting her powers back, or Morrison’s run, really, anything. Planet eating Phoenix was the result of Sebastian Shaw and Mastermind and the rest of the Hellfire Club taking the avatar of phenomenal cosmic power and trying to rape her mind for their benefit. Not her natural method of operations…otherwise we would have seen it happen again at some point.

 

This book is turning more and more into Civil War with each issue, spready out story points so that teasers for tie in issues can be used in wide spread amounts. Well over half this book feels like it’s being used to push other titles, and the rest is just glossed over to literally shove the story forward. It’s sloppy.

 

Where’s Cable?

 

Overall: 6/10

A lifelong reader and self proclaimed continuity guru, Grey is the Editor in Chief of Comics Nexus. Known for his love of Booster Gold, Spider-Girl (the real one), Stephanie Brown, and The Boys. Don't miss The Gold Standard.