Written by Brian Bendis
Illustrated by Mike DeodatoNorman Osborn’s new Dark Avengers are put to the test next month in New Avengers #19, courtesy of the blockbuster creative team of Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Deodato! The new and improved H.A.M.M.E.R., led by Osborn, is out for revenge and failure is not an option for his new Dark Avengers. And when the New Avengers find out who their doppelgangers are, it will send shockwaves throughout the team. Get your front row ticket to the action in New Avengers #19!
I’m going to spend the first part of the review — that is, the first four-fifths — talking about stuff that happens to cross my mind, and then in the last fifth remember that I have to actually review the comic. For more excitement, keep reading after the jump.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been two years — well, more like a year and a half, but still — since Dark Avengers ended. I only know this because this new issue of New Avengers says it’s #19, which implies 19 months (give or take the occasional double-ship). My brain wants to disagree with math and say “Dark Avengers?! We did this last week!” That’s the main problem with New Avengers #19 — Bendis Pacing, a way of structuring long-term comics plotlines so distinct that I put it in title case, has finally begun to eat itself.
Sure, 19 issues have gone by since the Dark Avengers fell, Norman Osborn went to prison, and so on. What’s happened in New Avengers since then? Well, they had a magical mix-up about the Eye of Agamotto, they fought HAMMER goons and got Mockingbird gut-shot (and leveled-up), and they took part in Fear Itself. And that’s it. (They also sat around at a big table eating a lot, but that’s mostly concurrent with the other three things mentioned.) Even though nearly two years have gone by, only three actual, discrete story arcs have happened prior to the launch of Dark Avengers II, and thus it feels like Norman Osborn went to prison and got out a week later. Sure, it probably took him days, even weeks to put together his new team, but because time is such a devalued concept in Bendis Pacing, the chronology is mushy and nerveless. I am honestly not sure how much time is meant to have passed, but with Norman Osborn showing his face in public, well, I can only imagine it was long enough for the apparently brain-damaged general populace of the Marvel Universe to forget that he was arrested for stuff like treason and Iron Treason.
The hallmark of Bendis Pacing is showing us everything, whether we need to see it or not, and showing it to us in full. This is the opposite of, say, Stan Lee Pacing, where anything that did not keep the action speeding along was simply summarized in a hep-speaking caption. Brian Bendis writes New Avengers like The Sopranos — a show that could rightly be described, on one level, as being about a building mob war, but which never consistently focused on that. It spun off and had side discussions with itself and tried to create a deep-focus image of every level of these characters’ lives. If Bendis had 200 pages per issue, he’d use them all, and he’d go from being the Sopranos of comics to the Tristram Shandy. The problem with all of this is that there’s no clarity of vision apparent, no buildups and payoffs to make paying attention to every little character beat worth it. There’s just stuff floating around a sketchy central plot, as if a human being’s organs had all come unmoored and decided to drift around their skeleton.
For Christ’s sake, this is a comic that spends its opening three pages — fifteen percent of its space — building to the payoff of Squirrel Girl trying to flirt with Daredevil.
In this comic: the New Avengers recover from an attack and talk about it, while the New Dark Avengers (all of whom have the personality of “jerk” or “jerk”) talk about their plans and then, off-camera, foil an Atlantean attack. That’s about it. It’s not particularly captivating, and it suffers from the worst aspect of Bendis Pacing, the part that made Secret Invasion particularly aggravating — it frontloads itself with lots of comfort room for people having conversations about stuff, and then shuffles the action off-camera or to flashbacks because there’s no room for it. The lack of balance is staggering.
Mike Deodato, meanwhile, is both not an ideal artist for this book, and kind of the ideal artist anyway. He’s good at drawing big, muscular, ideally-proportioned figures blasting around, kicking and punching and looking grim and cool. The reason he doesn’t fail here is that he’s also good at crazy layouts, and so even a comic that feels like it’s nothing but people jabbering at each other has interesting visual techniques to keep the eyes engaged. It’s a bright spot in a comic that otherwise takes two pages — ten percent! — for Victoria Hand to tell the New Avengers that there’s a thing in Miami they should go fight.
Final Verdict: 3 – Just get to the fucking point
