// May 25th, 2010 // No Comments » // Comics, Humor, Review, commentary
courtesy of Monty of Welcome to Border City
I’m neither a Bendis hater nor apologist. I think BMB does some fantastic work (Ultimate Spider-man) and some shitty work (Ult. Comics Spider-man). His stylized pause- and- comma- after- every- other- word dialogue doesn’t bother me. (Well, sometimes it bothers me.) In fact he has done more than a few books that I loved, including the recent miniseries Siege.
But after 7 years of running the Avengers (and somewhat by extension, the entire Marvel Universe), I think maybe he needs to take a break.
Avengers #1 reboots the franchise for something like the fourth time since Avengers Disassembled, this time under the new Heroic Age. That’s a lot damn reboots. In fact, if you look at Bendis’ acclaimed New Avengers, its hard to see the book as an actual series rather an intermediary between event books. Now New Avengers itself will be rebooting and continuing on in June — curiously with the exact same creative team it had before.
The main series, The (adjective-less) Avengers seems to replace Mighty Avengers as the one true Avengers under the helm of Bendis and Marvel legend John Romita jr.
JRjr is one of my favorite pencilers. Honestly, I just think he’s brilliant. And as one of Marvel’s best, it makes sense to relaunch their premier super-team with him on art.
So if I like Bendis and I like Romita, what’s the problem?
Avengers #1 bores the shit out of me.
Sorry, but there it is.
Despite the talents of these creators, neither brings their A-game and they never manage to bring it together in an interesting way. For all intents and purposes this is just your average “getting the band together” issue, filled with quasi-philosphical speeches by Steve Rogers. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it hardly merits the pomp an circumstance that Marvel is putting into it.
When Bendis wrote Avengers Re-Assembled nearly a decade ago, he actually came up with a story to justify putting together a new team. Did Captain America’s reasoning on this make any sense or manage to explain why they needed New Avengers instead of the old ones? No. Not even slightly. It still doesn’t make sense. But at least he tried. This time it feels more like someone bowled a strike and the machine is simply re-stacking the pins. It’s so routine, why bother?
Also, the new team itself doesn’t feel new at all. Instead it feels like Bendis is trying to convince you that you’re seeing something new. It’s as if he’s a shitty hypnotist waving his hands eerily at you and repeating “you’re feeling sleepy” in melodic tones. This Avengers team is almost exactly like the New Avengers teams, plus Thor and Hawkeye from the old Avengers teams. Oh and Cap and Steve are having the exact same conversation they’ve been having since the 60′s. And no one wants to read about that. Everyone knows a pair of friends that argues all the time about stupid shit just because that’s what they do. But most of the time you aren’t forced to listen to it. In fact you’d probably tell them to shut the hell up after a while.
Another cast member with obvious problems is Spider-man. I’ve always contended that it makes sense for Peter to be on the team, since he’s had more experience than any hero save Cap and Wolverine. The problem is Bendis doesn’t seem to know how to separate Ultimate Spider-man from the 616 version. In Ult. Spider-man, a title Bendis has written for a decade now, Peter is still a teenage boy and relatively new to being a hero. In the regular Marvel Universe, Peter is a grown man. He’s unlikely to be easily shocked when Thor blows a villain through a window, because frankly he’s fought alongside Thor for years. And yet when that happens, he acts like I would if I were 12 and just met Bruce Willis (which is to say, I might pee my pants… hypothetically). It’s kind of an issue for a main character.
Spider-man, Spider-man... sandwiched between Thor and Iron Man... is he strong, listen bud...
There is one major change to the cast, and that is the leadership of Maria Hill. Steve Rogers chose her because IT’S SHOCKING she was the best “man” for the job. Now, I might point out that Steve Rogers has no way of knowing this since he died right after she became the temporary head of SHIELD, a job which she admitted to being completely wrong for in a scene Bendis himself wrote. I might also point out that Maria Hill has constantly proven herself inept in superhuman situations and isn’t all that good at leading people. I might point that out, but really- why bother?
Now as to the art… remember what I said about loving John Romita? That’s only about half true. I love about half of his work. I was absolutely floored by books like his Amazing Spider-man run with J. Michael Straczynski, his X-Men work with Chris Claremont and even World War Hulk. Hell, one of my very first comics was the last chapter of Armor Wars 2 in Invincible Iron Man. But then he goes and does something like The Sentry miniseries. A lot of JRjr’s worst work is easily (though not totally) attributable to the inker. Romita is someone who absolutely requires an inker with a lighter style. When paired with an inker with a heavy hand, like oh, say… Klaus Janson, his panels come out dark, splotchy and really, really ugly.
So three guesses who they paired him with?
Now I’m not insulting Janson. The man is a legendary inker (in as much as inkers are legends), having worked on a litany of high profile projects, including Frank Miller’s Dardevil run and The Dark Knight Returns. This man can ink the hell out of a comic. But he’s just a bad choice to pair with Romita. I know that’s ironic since Romita is the main person he is paired with besides Miller, but it’s true.
Why so serious?
And again, it’s not totally Janson’s fault either. Iron Man looks fucking terrible. IRON MAN. A character Romita has drawn for years. The new armor was designed to look more organic. Unfortunately Romita can’t seem to wrap his head around that, and each panel he appears in makes I.M. look like a bulky monstrosity. Plus, the mouth piece always seems to look like Heath Ledger’s face in The Dark Knight. I don’t know why.
And then there are more than a few panels that look incredibly rushed. The panel that introduces Maria Hill, for example. Between the artist, the inker and the colorist, Maria Hill has never looked worse. In fact I think they drew her as a black woman. Hill has always been designed as a fair-skinned hispanic woman with graceful features. Ethnicity aside, in her short appearance in Avengers, she looks like she should be working in an oil refinery.
Which actually brings up a good question. Where the hell did she go in this book? As soon as the villain shows up, the entire cast faces him and makes a decision about what they’re going to do next. Steve and Iron Man are throwing commands left and right. So what happened to the woman Steve selected to lead them? Shouldn’t she be involved?
The book isn’t a total waste. The premise of the story, a time- travel adventure is suitably wacky and a very old school Avengers thing to do. It’s kind of bizarre that Bendis chose to base his initial arc on a poorly-sold direct-to-DVD animated children’s film. Maybe it’s a marketing ploy to get me to rent the movie. (It’s working.) Still, I’m a sucker for future apocalypse stories, so I’m in long enough to see how that plays out.
The villains intrigue me, even if they couldn’t resist putting Ultron (an overused villain of late) in it somewhat. And I like the idea of Wonder Man just being randomly crazy.
If this was just a random issue in a story, it would probably get decent marks. But these days the big two comic companies will use any excuse to print a new #1 issue (Wolverine’s title along has seen 3 in the last decade), and as a fan I say enough is enough. If you’re going to reboot a book, there better be a damned good reason or an absolutely stunning story. Otherwise you’re just exacerbating the exhaustion fans have been feeling for the last 5 years or so. Are we really that far away from the decadence that blew the market in the 90s?
Get with it, Marvel. And maybe after this story is over… maybe it’s time to actually try something different and give a new writer a shot at the Avengers. Bendis can focus on the other 18 titles he writes.
If there was a competition between Avengers and New Avengers, NA would be the hands down winner. There is no question that New Avengers is a better book.
There are days when it just doesn’t pay to be a comic fan anymore. That’s the only response I could muster when I read the title of Marc Bernardin’s incredibly insipid and insulting 
There’s nothing quite like making a sequel to a popular and successful film. The goal of the sequel is to re-create the same feelings in the audience that the first film made, but at the same time create something entirely new and not just a re-tread. Audiences can be brutal when it comes to sequels and beloved franchises. To coin a phrase, they actually do expect you to re-invent the wheel.
