Written by Christos Gage
Illustrated by Sean ChenNew students! New staff! New West Coast Academy! A Classic Avenger is murdered…and everyone’s suspect! Captain America, Luke Cage, and Hawkeye guest-star to fight the Avengers Academy?
Note: this is the same solicit as issue #21, because Marvel did not originally release any information on this issue.
In the latest issue of Avengers Academy, Mettle pays Reptil to date Finesse so he can go out with Hazmat, but little does he know that Striker is just using this as an opprtounity to da-
Wait. No. None of that sounds right. Sounds like a riff on a Shakespeare play, if anything.
Let’s figure out what the issue is actually about, after the cut.
This week’s Avengers Academy flies two Marvel line banners, one for Shattered Heroes and one for Regenesis. The general implication, as such, would be that the book would tie into both the Marvel universe spanning epic and the line-wide relaunch of the X-Men, essentially making this book an easy read for people interested in both. It’s a bold statement to make, given that the book has had basically nothing to do with the X-Men since it’s launch, but the reverberations of Fear Itself are certainly felt (although generally in an optimistic fashion, what with the book’s current “Hey, let’s make things better!” story). However, despite two bold brandings on the front cover, Avengers Academy simply succeeds on one level: it is perhaps the single most accessible at any point ongoing Marvel currently publishes, and that is just absolutely astounding.
The general summation of Avengers Academy is this: after training a group of kids who were previously toyed around with by Norman Osborn (which we were told, as we had never met the kids before issue 1), these kids were sent off to war during Fear Itself. Afraid of the implications, Hank Pym (a subtle masquerade for Christos Gage, clearly) relaunched the Academy as a school open to all young superheroes wanting to train to be Avengers. After the “death” of Jocasta in the previous issue, however, this has led Hank to call on his friends in the X-Men, who have recently undergone both Fear Itself and Schism (presumably in the span of a week or so?), to help investigate, and he is forced to deal with Cyclops (who is training children for war), Magneto and Emma Frost (former villains extraordinaire who could be both theoretically positive and negative influences), and a hot bed of personal grudges, clashing ideals and emotional/hormonally charged teenagers with things to prove. And that’s just the first few pages.
The way Gage approaches writing this book is rather interesting. At absolutely no point in reading this issue does it ever feel like Gage is here to tell a specific story. This isn’t about Jocasta being murdered, and one of the kids supposedly “becoming evil” (again). It’s really an ode to the never-ending continuity of the Marvel universe and the characters that populate it. Rather than really focus in on short bursts of stories, Gage has taken these kids, their mentors and the newly expanded cast and placed all of them amongst the timeline of the Marvel universe, allowing them to grow and mature into greater characters rather than isolate them. It allows us time to acclimate them while a story unfolds in the background; we’re learning to love the characters, and their stories and how it guides them down various emotional paths are more like road signs down the paths they walk. So no, you’re not reading about the death of Jocasta, or some sort of mystery story about who might have done it. You’re reading about the immediate reaction to her death and what that means for everyone involved, and the implications of the eventual resolution.
It is this aspect that allows these stories and characters to succeed over other more generic books. For example, the inherent difference between what Gage is doing here and what has been by various writers on a book like Runaways is that the Runaways as characters always kept to themselves and their stories. You were reading stories about what they were up to, who they were fighting and what they were hoping and dreaming for. You grew to the characters based on their hardships and flashes of personality, but there was no real time for poignant character stories as the team was too busy running from their parents, or the past, or the future, or aliens, or whatever. By openly engaging the characters of Avengers Academy with other members of the Marvel Universe immediately and not specifically stopping to deal with “issue” to “issue”, it opens it up the book up to fans of groups like the X-Men to come see what’s happening here and allows those readers to get involved. It is the perfect way to find yourself embraced by a new book when it doesn’t rely solely on what happened in the previous issue.
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That is, without a doubt, the book’s greatest strength. This issue is as much a one-shot as it is the second part of a storyline. There are connections to what came before of course, as that is the impetus that calls the X-Men to the scene of the crime, but this isn’t the “X-Men and the Avengers Academy issue.” This is an issue about Finesse dealing with her heritage and her idols, and about Reptil dealing with prejudice and honor. It’s about family, redemption and ghosts in the shadows. It’s a reflection of both the post-Fear Itself world and the post-Schism world, skewering the two timelines together for some semblance of visible continuity (Side note – Avengers: The Children’s Crusade, however, is not reflected). That’s what inevitably lets Avengers Academy soar over other books with Avengers in the title: where other Avengers titles tell story after story about characters we all know and are already attached to regardless, Academy is bringing us the world of tomorrow, and it does so by placing itself in the today.
The only thing that really seems tired about the issue is that it is yet another book that uses the character of Magneto as a scapegoat. Magneto’s “sometimes a hero/sometimes a villain” nature makes him somewhat of a go-to character when a foil is needed to display moral ambiguity or shifting and tenuous loyalties, to the point that it becomes somewhat difficult to tell stories of this nature starring him that don’t just come off fairly contrived. Its just a topic that, if you read as many comics on a regular basis as I do, becomes a far too familiar plot point. As the first arc in this brand new era kicks off and we search for a traitor amongst our students, bringing in Magneto to teach everyone a lesson about trying to be a hero as a rather non-heroic character is a bit like watching an after school special about the dangers of using your super powers for evil. The message is rather abundantly clear just from looking at the cover, especially when you remember Quicksilver being a main character.
However, one slight misstep in execution doesn’t stop the book itself from continuing it’s rather fantastic run. Gage and Chen make a fantastic duo for the book, and having Chen back on the book as regular artist is a great move. Chen matches Gage’s humor with perfect tonality, effectively strengthening scenes with visual punchlines to match the written ones. Chen’s work manages to somewhat channel a mix of McKelvie’s ability to cleverly pose figures and Dodsen’s ability to keep characters in motion for a great looking issue paired against Gage’s words.
Gage himself manages to effectively juggle an insanely large cast of characters for the book while working intimately with each individual one, and it never feels like any of the characters are given less time than any others. The outward concern when using a cast of this size is always that any one character becomes neglected, but Gage has managed to create a system in which every character appears to get a relatively equivalent amount of screen time between issues, and outside of three clearly throwaway gag appearances, the book is full of rich characterization.
With the new era of Academy upon us, it stands to reason that if you can only buy one Avengers-related title, there’s no reason not to make it this one. What it lacks in the effortless panache of other books with their fancy high profile characters and flashy big bads and “the world is ending!” scenarios, it makes up with earnest respect towards its readership. Avengers Academy’s main job is simply to create characters to one day start taking the place of the heroes we currently read about, and if it can keep churning out issues like this then you should find Striker and Hazmat to be as big a character as Iron Man or whoever in no time.
Final Verdict: 8.0 – Buy
