Avengers Academy #13
Written by Christos Gage
Penciled by Sean Chen
It’s Super Hero Promand the Sinister Sixin two big issues of the comic iFanboy named the “Best New Book of 2010”! First the Academy hosts a dance like none you’ve ever seen, guest starring the Young Allies, former members of the Initiative…and featuring smack downs and smooch downs!Then the trainees get a crash course in big-time villainy as they take on Spider-Man’s greatest foes, the Sinister Six, in a story that will have major ramifications when FEAR ITSELF hits next month!Avengers Academy Giant-Size #1
Written by Paul Tobin (no relation)
Penciled by David Baldeon
HUMONGOUS-Sized Issue… Guest-starring The Young Allies! The traps are set and the dice are rolled as the vibrantly villainous Arcade decides to rebuild his tarnished reputation…by setting his sights on the “easy pickin’s” of the Avengers Academy and the Young Allies! But when one of his teenage victims escapes, is it a setback for Arcade, or all part of a master plan to turn the entirety of New York into… Murderworld?
It’s not enough that Avengers Academy will be shipping twice a month soon — now it needs to exert itself upon the fanbase by shipping twice in one week! This week, we get a team-up adventure featuring Marvel’s current generation of young heroes, and the most dangerous prospect faced by any of them yet: prom. So which was more satisfying? Let’s talk more after the jump. Plus: a bonus exclusive piece of art!
Last time, in Avengers Academy #12 — which I reviewed right on this very site — the kids had to tackle their first cosmic threat, the mad god Korvac. The idea of Avengers Academy itself is that it’s a place to help psychologically troubled super-teens overcome the difficulties and traumas their powers and experiences have caused them. The idea of #12 was that, in briefly getting in touch with their adult selves, most of them saw that nothing was going to change, ever. Heavy stuff — now prom. Does it ever end?
Between those two harbingers of the teenpocalypse comes Avengers Academy Giant-Size #1. As far as I’m aware, this was originally supposed to be a group of crossover annuals, but with the cancellation of two of the three participants (goodbye, Spider-Girl and Young Allies), that leaves Avengers Academy to carry the banner solo. Sharing the spotlight doesn’t exactly harm anything, but it does provide a marked tonal shift. Usually, Avengers Academy is a book just as concerned with why its characters do what they do as it is with what they’re doing; here, Paul Tobin writes an action story where characterization — though not at all invisible — plays second banana to action and clever traps.
Avengers Academy Giant-Size lives up to the latter half of its title, for sure. It’s a good, what, sixty pages or so of story, so you’re not exactly hurting for content. The problem is that the content is, for the most part, reheated. The villain of the piece is erstwhile X-Fiend Arcade, who imprisons heroes in his Murderworld theme park so that he can kill them in elaborate deathtraps, like an infantilized Jigsaw Killer. That’s all well and good until one realizes that there is, at most, one and a half Arcade stories from the three-plus decades of the character’s existence. I don’t think it’s an egregious spoiler to note that despite being locked into zany deathtraps, the heroes do not die forever. The jokey wink at Arcade never being successful in these endeavors only underlines the story’s key flaw: if Arcade is hoping to succeed through the innovative method of “trying what’s failed a hundred times for the hundred-and-first,” why should we invest ourselves?
In contrast, Christos Gage’s story in Avengers Academy proper is pay-off for those who are already invested. Most of what happens in this comic book is stuff that plays off of things which have already happened: the relationships between Firestar and Justice, and Hank Pym and Tigra; the interactions between Mettle and Hazmat; follow-up on Veil’s life-saving actions last issue; and a furthering of the thing going on between Spider-Girl and Reptil, something that arose in the pages of… Avengers Academy Giant-Size #1. As far as sucking in new readers, Academy #13 is a mixed bag. It might be good for pulling in longtime Pym, Justice, et al. fans, because of the renewed (if brief) focus upon the instructors over the students. It also demands a lot of the reader, though, expecting that they’ve kept up on the first year of stories enough to make sense of the pay-offs and actually be able to identify them as such. If #12 wrapped up the freshman year, #13 is an epilogue, another push toward the future. Its real flaw, though, is this eagerness to roll on year two: Reptil’s plotline is rushed to a conclusion so quickly that it almost makes me ask “then why bother?” and Hazmat/Mettle could have been teased longer, really. Book-breaking stuff? Nah. A little off-putting in their haste? Yeah, that’s more like it.
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One thing that Avengers Academy Giant-Size gets very right is its choice of artist. David Baldeon is still finding his feet — it’ll be a few years before we see what he’s really capable of, I think — but for an exuberant, energetic trifle, his art is a perfect fit right now. He clearly relishes the action poses and creative opportunities provided by a story set in a theme park designed to kill people, and the animated quality to his work keeps things moving briskly in a tale so thin that any lull in momentum would risk murdering it outright.
Sean Chen takes a different approach on Avengers Academy. Increasingly over the years I’ve noticed a tendency of his to skew toward the Steve Dillon end of the spectrum: uncluttered compositions with a minimal use of shadows to draw attention to body language and facial expressions. While this is a noble pursuit, it’s not executed perfectly. Scott Hanna is a great inker who seems to do too little with the pencils, for whatever reason; I almost wish he’d take a few more liberties to give the bodies more solidity. Chen’s figures can come off as stiff sometimes (look at the big “welcome to crazy prom” splash page), and bolder inks would give those characters weight that might sell the posture better. (As an aside, Chen does sell the difference between “adult” and “teen” Reptil, something I moaned about last issue.) He’s not a bad artist by any means, but his virtues can’t help but bring his flaws to light along with them.
Between the two helpings of Avengers Academy this week, we get a full enough view of the spectrum: zany teen action hijinx, and Morrissey-playlist high school drama. The problem is that each issue released encompasses one end of the spectrum, and the two barely make any effort to meet. Sure, this is a case of the best-laid plans having to be rejiggered in the event of “maybe four people on the planet buying Young Allies” or whatever. But read in one sitting, it still feels unbalanced, like a road trip that suddenly makes a wild detour and then struggles to find its way back onto its original route. (And to continue the road analogy, everyone knows that trying to make Justice a captivating character in his own right, using the current set of tools, is a dead end. Not even sex could spice him up.) After last issue’s supremely strong mixture of action and characterization, this one can’t help but come off as a bit of a letdown, a markdown from “excellent” to a crushingly puny “very good.”
All in all, though, in a market where new characters disappear just as quickly as they arrive, getting 80 new pages of content starring Marvel’s newest band of heroes is pretty remarkable in and of itself. Enjoy it. If I’ve come across like a whiner this entire review — it’s because I’ve been spoiled rotten.
Final Verdict: 7.5 (Avengers Academy) / 7 (Avengers Academy Giant-Size)
AMAZING BONUS: I met Christos Gage at Boston Comic Book Con this past weekend and asked him to take a crack at my sketchbook. A preview of things to come? A terrifying look into the face of raw power incarnate? A new career path taking bloom? U-DECIDE, etc.
