REVIEW: NEW AVENGERS #7
WRITER: BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS
PENCILS: MARK BAGLEY
INKS: DANY MIKI & CRIME LAB STUDIOS
PUBLISHED BY: MARVEL COMICS
Delays. In most parts of my life, I am an extremely impatient person – I hate waiting, I despise queues, and people who walk slowly drive me crazy. Delays have, however, become an established feature of the comic book industry in recent years, and it almost seems to infuriate almost every comic book fan – except me. When it comes to comics, I am actually perfectly comfortable waiting a few extra weeks for the next instalment to hit the shelves, providing this means that I still get the same high-quality work that I was expecting to see from the entire creative team. Comic books are expensive, and there are plenty of them – I would much rather wait to read a top quality book than a below-par rushed one, purely because of the demands of a schedule.
However, Mighty Avengers was conceived as a book that would run closely parallel to its older brother, New Avengers, with Bendis writing both. While I have been immensely enjoying his run on New Avengers – in fact, it’s one of my favourite books of the month – this is the first issue of Mighty I have read in quite a while (and, I might add, not just because of these delays).
The nature of the Avengers titles, with Bendis determined to interlink Mighty and New as much as possible (a move which has some great pay-offs), not withstanding the part these teams will play in the upcoming Secret Invasion storyline, has meant that scheduling of these titles is paramount. Delays have therefore had an extended impact this particular issue – for those like me who have been regularly reading New Avengers, scheduling delays on Mighty have meant that a large proportion of this particular story has already been summarised very nicely in a few short pages over in New, a couple of months ago. While I am in no doubt that Bendis will have some tricks up his sleeve to ensure that those reading both will get a unique reading experience, it does kill much of the immediate tension in the story.
Another by-product of the Mighty delays (ok, bad turn of phrase, they weren’t that bad!) is a change of artist – essentially, Frank Cho found the demands of drawing a superhero team book a little too much, and he openly admits that the delays were mostly due to this. Unfortunately, the title has now been delayed to such an extent that there was an urgent need to get the schedule back on track, and Cho has left the book. I know everyone focuses on Cho’s particular talents when it comes to portraying attractive women, but I think he deserves more credit than that; his work carried a real elegance and grandeur which was a perfect fit for the Marvel Universe’s premier (legal) super team.
I don’t mean to do the talents of Mark Bagley an injustice by saying that one of his appeals as the new artist for this arc is his speed and un-erring ability to make a deadline; Given Bagley’s availability following his decision to seek a fresh challenge following his mammoth stint (also with Bendis) on Ultimate Spiderman, and his rising stock as a result of his achievements on that title, it is no surprise that he has been asked to handle the pencils for this particular Avengers arc.
Bagley’s visuals are not as immediately striking as Cho’s, but there is much to admire in what he brings to the page – clear, expressive and technically strong storytelling. He can even pull off the grandiose when required – check out the double-page splash of yet another attack on New York City. But he is at his best when illustrating the finer points of a script, which also nicely matches Bendis’ penchant for lengthy, though rarely excessive, dialogue. He impressively manages to shift gear between the rather dank and gloomy scenes with Spider-Woman braking into the SHIELD helicarrier to reveal the Skrull plot to Tony Stark, to the humourous interplay (thought bubbles and all), between the whole team in Avengers Tower. He is not as flashy as some of the artists out there, and we will have to wait to see how he handles some of the bigger action sequences; as such, he is perhaps not the most obvious choice for this book; but his quality is clear, and I’m looking forward to seeing what he can do as he grows into these characters during the rest of his run.
So, that’s the art. You can’t assess any comic book without acknowledging the role of plot, structure and dialogue, but especially not a Bendis book; while his style and stories may be divisive, I will almost always enjoy his work for its innovative approach to sequential storytelling, in addition to his Claremont-esque ability to seed plot points years in advance. Personally, I would much rather read a book in which the creative team try to do something new, even if it does not always come off, than watch them re-hash the same old stories over and over again. Bendis, most of all the writers at Marvel, seems to have benefitted from the shake-up of the status-quo of the Marvel Universe following the Civil War, almost single-handedly championing the character of Iron Man, successfully turning him from potential villain for his role in the Superhuman Registration Act, into a sympathetic, albeit deeply flawed hero (a character trait that has, many seem to forget, been central to the whole Iron Man mythos). Stark looks more haggard here than I have ever seen him – I’m not entirely sure whether this is indicative of the stress that he finds himself under given the growing strain on his new world order, or whether this is an over-exaggeration in the script, but it is certainly indicative of the weight of guilt and expectation he is now operating under. Tony’s almost utter lack of confidence when he demands to know the whereabouts of Nick Fury, claiming that only he would know how to react to the Skrull invasion, jarred a little and is almost going too far, but then I wouldn’t be surprised if this was just another tactical Stark ploy rather than a sign of weakness.
Plot-wise, this is fairly standard start-of-a-new-story-arc stuff, with all sorts of shenanigans as the team relax in Avengers Tower, before Stark wheels Spider-Woman in as his latest recruit. Bendis is a master at depicting the interplay between characters on a particular team, and one of the strengths of the dual Avengers book set-up is that he can utilise different techniques to show how team dynamics (read: tensions) play their part in all team situations, irrespective of their status and standing. It also keeps the books centred firmly on the exposition and development of the central characters, which to my mind at least is always the key ingredient in the creation of successful and enjoyable comic books.
Wow, I’m impressed – I’ve got this far, and I haven’t even mentioned the Symbiote invasion! While the Avengers are busy fretting over Spider-Woman’s allegiance and debtating the merits of Wonder-Man’s costume… well, if life is that slow, mayhem must be somewhere round the corner, right?
Right. I wasn’t too convinced by the space scene that set up this event (though that may be explored later); however, there are some great scenes that follow, as a mysterious ball falls from the sky, landing and shattering near a New York pavement… having a new baby myself, on retrospect, I was slightly disturbed by how much I enjoyed the action involving the baby in the pram…(you’ll have to see this for yourself). Suffice to say, the pedestrians are all turned into some form of Venom / Carnage cross-breed, and the Avengers assemble… what on earth could happen next??
Overall, this has some great elements in what appears otherwise to be a fairly standard (though by no means bad) start to an Avengers story. The scheduling conflicts have taken a little of the gloss off, but that should not detract form what is a thoroughly enjoyable comic book, setting up a new story, moving the characters forward, while providing another building block in the lead-in to Secret Invasion.
