f13.net

So every weekday Newsarama is revealing a member of the new lineup of New Avengers, and they've already revealed three:  Dr. Strange, Echo, and Ronin.  Apparently Ronin is not Echo this time, and most people are speculating that it's Daredevil, Cap, or Hawkeye in the suit.  My money is on Hawkeye since they gave the girl from Young Avengers the name Hawkeye, and since it would be harder to explain Cap or Dardevil running around in the Ronin suit in NA, and then have them in their normal costumes in their own books (not that continuity seems to be much of an interest to Marvel.)  Of course this is Bendis so it could also be pet characters like Luke Cage, Spider-woman, Jessica Jones, Maria Hill, or that woman with the earthquake powers.

Regardless of who is in the suit this seems like a pretty shit lineup so far.  Dr. Strange's powers are so ill-defined given that they're magic and thus don't really have understandable limits beyond whatever the writer feels like at the time.  In that respect, he's pretty much the Sentry of this group.  Iron Man, Sentry, and Ms. Marvel are all on the Mighty Avengers so that counts them off the team.  Unless of course Bendis wants to put Iron Man on both teams since he seems incapable of resolving any threat he throws at the "Avengers" without having Iron Man take care of it.

So who else will be on the team?  I don't know, but at this point I wouldn't be surprised if Bendis throws Brother fucking Voodoo on the roster.  I'll be anxious to see what the next roster after this one is though, 25 issues down the line before this team has even faced one threat as an actual group.

After the fallout from Civil War, Cap may feel compelled to go Ronin.  He's done it before with Nomad.  No real reason for Daredevil to do it, though.

Something tells me that wouldn't mesh well with Brubaker's Captain America book.

I... what? I mean Echo being in the Avengers anyway was fucking retarded, but at least they put her over in Japan where it might make some sort of Bendisense. But Ronin, who was nothing more than a cover for Echo in the first fucking place? WHAT THE FUCK? Does anyone even read this shit? Do the editors just start masturbating like monkeys the moment Bendis opens his mouth? And Dr. Strange? After he made such a big stink about not getting involved at all, now he's getting involved?

This is the Mighty Avengers book right, which will definitely have Wonder Man? Or is that the other one? Is this the non-Fascist Avengers? God what a shitpile has Bendis made of the Avengers.

This is the new line-up in New Avengers.  Might Avengers is Iron Man, Ms. Marvel, Ares, Black Widow, Wasp, Wonder Man, and The Sentry.  How they justify putting Ares on the team (a guy who went on a rampage shooting at cops in one issue of his mini) I have no idea.  And yes, Dr. Strange made a big stink about not getting involved apparently just so they could have him regret not getting involved and now he's trying to make up for it.

Ares? WHAT... THE... FUCK? Is Thor just totally out of the Marvel Universe now? Because you know, I'd pay to see him come back and see Thorbots running around with their brains all hanging out and shit. Talk about a goddamn rampage.

There's a Thor ongoing series coming out around Summer that's being written by JMS.  Whether or not it will be the "real" Thor, I have no idea, but I think Marvel has said that it won't be the clone.

I loved the Ares mini.  I'm pretty pissed now that Bendis will get his hands on the character after Oeming just got around to making him interesting, but since the two work on Powers together maybe Oeming can somehow keep him from fucking up the character too bad.  Although I suppose if Oeming could do that, he would have told Bendis not to put Ares on a fucking Avengers team.

I don't think anyone at Marvel or anywhere else has the power to tell Bendis not to fuck characters up.

You know, the whole "WHO IS RONIN!!!!1!!!" thing just seems like another fucking gimmick. It's like they have to put this huge mystery in a book or no one will be interested. Guess what? A mystery is only good if it's INTERESTING, and after awhile it just gets old.

You know this thread is 9111... That's 9/11 plus a 1....

Not only is it another fucking gimmick, it's the exact same fucking gimmick they used earlier, from the exact same fucking writer, in the exact same fucking book.  Not only that, but Bendis is so enamored of his character Ronin, that I see he's also in the solicits for an upcoming issue of Ultimate Spider-man.

Today's reveal is that Wolverine will be staying on the team.  Apparently Marvel is confusing the Avengers with the Secret Defenders (that Defenders team from back in the 90's where Dr. Strange picked a completely random team for each new arc based on who his Tarot cards told him to choose).

Ugh...

This sounds like the setup when I stopped reading the Avengers freshmen year.  Dr. Druid was the leader, with a bunch of guys that either didn't fit or came out of nowhere...  Gilgamesh? 

The Avengers has always worked best as the place to stick big name heros that you aren't sure what do with or have generic "do good" reputations,  padded out with some muscle, token lowbies, and some heavy hitters when the arcs get going.  Ms. Marvel works for that, as do Cap, Iron Man, Thor, Wonder Man...

I'm sure they can fit the Punisher into this new lineup.....

I still have Secret Defenders #1.  Wolverine, Darkhawk, Spider-Woman, and Nomad.  Fuck yeah.

Got another one later starring someone I don't remember, Luke Cage and Deadpool. That was weird.

Somebody please fucking kill Wolverine. This is sounded shittier and shittier.

And now Spider-woman has been confirmed as being on the team.  They also said that tomorrow another "NEW" member will be revealed, which if it means completely new to the Avengers, would be 6 characters so far on the team that didn't have any sort of involvement with the Avengers before Bendis took over.  Maybe they can throw Terror Inc., Winter Soldier, and Puck on there.

Betcha it's Black Panther and Storm.  Storm being the new one.

I wouldn't be surprised.  They were also rumored for a while to be part of the new lineup to the Fantasic Four (along with Reed and Thing I think).  The other rumored FF lineup (based on an upcoming cover) is Torch, Thing, Silver Surfer, and Galactus' herald from that Beta Ray Bill mini (I think his name is Stardust).

Maybe there'll be two fantastic fours!

Though having Storm and Black Panther, anti-reg heroes, team up with Reed seems odd.

The way Marvel seems to do everything any more, if it seems odd, stupid, completely out of character, or better yet, all three, that's what they'll actually do.  Watching this Civil War crap from the sidelines (as I'll never actually pay money for it) has been kinda depressing.  I grew up reading Marvel, and now it's just all gone to shit.  Or it always was, and I'm just now noticing it since I've taken an interest in them again.  They've managed to take my favorite character (Wolverine.  Yeah, I know.)  and ruin him for me with all the cheese. 

I've been reading TPBs of recent DC stuff, and liked it alot, so I may just read them for the next few years.  Well, that, along with Invincible. 

Today they actually revealed two characters for the new lineup.  It seems that both Iron Fist and Luke Cage will be on the team, which now has the effect of making this book feel like a cross between the Secret Defenders and Heroes for Hire.

Really enjoying that new Iron Fist book, though.  I've liked the character since the 90's but never read a story that made him interesting.

I've always loved Iron Fist, but the new book just hasn't caught my fancy yet. Danny Rand is characterized as way too spoiled and reckless for my tastes. Having both he and Luke Cage be Avengers in this lineup is just wrong. The whole lineup is just an ill fit, and much too much like the Defenders. Just fucking call them Defenders and be done with it.

But that would be so much less confusing.  Better to just have two teams named The Avengers, or else you'd lose plausible deniability whenever someone makes mention of "the Avengers" being somewhere or doing something there's no way they could've done because it conflicts with another story.

Spider-man is the final addition to the roster, which gives us at least four known anti-reg characters, two neutral, 1 character who hasn't been in the U.S. during Civil War, and one unknown.  The other team seems to be mostly pro-reg characters.

So we're likely to see a crossover issue/mini-series where they have to work together, things are tense, perhaps a small fight breaks out, but in the end, they learn to set aside their differences and save the day.  Joy. 

Yay, Spider-Man stays on the team. Or moves to this team. Or something.

Though I know it won't be him, because it's too obvious, but who wants to bet Captain America is Ronin? He's the only one who makes any real sense as Ronin, unless of course, Spider-Man becomes Ronin but he's here in the black costume. I bet it's MJ in the Ronin costume.

And joy of joys, Paul Jenkins is bringing back Captain Mar-vel in Civil War: The Return. Do any of these fuckers know how to create their own characters? I mean, characters that don't SUCK that is, like the Sentry.

I think it's pretty stupid to have just about any established character as Ronin given that I can't think of too many heroes trained in the use of nunchacku or swords.  Elektra maybe, but that's about all I can think of unless Ronin just ends up fighting hand to hand all the time.

Taskmaster!

Wolverine has experience in Japanese weaponry and has been cast in a Ronin role back when I actually read comics.

X-Men Legends 2 greatness #782: renewed interest in comics.

Imo, the Defenders was the catchall misfit group for Marvel. They had some great lineups. The Avengers was always supposed to be the A-Team (not the A-Team with BA, Murdoc, Face!), using Cap, Iron Man, Thor, etc. The badasses of Marvel, and a tendency to more mainstream characters.

I was real tired of goddamned Giant-Man/Ant-Man/Wasp/Pym. But the Vision was always one of my favorites.

The Wasp is going to be in the other book, and the Vision is in Young Avengers, after a fashion.

Deadpool?

Deadpool in the Avengers.  That I doubt.  He signed up with the pro-reg side and then managed to completely embarass himself to them in Cable & Deadpool, so he lost any friends on the anti-reg side and the pro-regs don't want to have anything to do with him.

If that's what's drawing the line between the two, he's an outsider.

Plus, it would be insanely out of character for him to join the Avengers.  It... fuck, the more I'm typing the more likely it seems.  Goddammit, they better not put Deadpool in the Avengers.

Here's the #1 reason I don't think it'll happen, though.  I doubt they'd change his name to Ronin, since Deadpool is so recognizable on his own.

Fuck, Bendis, keep away from Deadpool.  You can have Spider-Man, I don't care about him.

(http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/P/0785122990.01._SS500_SCLZZZZZZZ_V46364573_.jpg)

 :nda:

According to Bendis, Cap put this team together even though he isn't on it.  I'm not sure Cap would put someone like Deadpool on the team (of course I wouldn't have thought he'd select Wolverine or Echo for an Avengers team either).

I don't know what the fuck that's from, but I want to skullfuck the bitchass punk who dreamed it up.

Ok, so y'all saved me from a re-entry into mainstream comics (well, Marvel comics) with the civil war thread.  Tell me if I'm wrong here...but is that image supposed to be a red, white and blue Iron Man with Cap's shield?

ETA -- Please to note that I haven't read comics since the early to mid 90s when they had eleventybillion Xmen spinoffs and Jubilee and Gambit were "new" -- there was also a Generation X book (?) with young mutants being taught by Frost and some dude who was either Irish or a Scot.  Also, IIRC, we had the whole Cable is from teh future where shit is crazy and uncool storyline going...so I am admittedly out of the loop.

Banshee was Irish.

He's dead now.

(Which is good, cause if they bring him back in a big OMG REBORN storyline, they can rename him to something that doesn't mean "Fairy Woman".)

Yeah.  It was an image someone found on Amazon.com for an item listed as "Iron Man: Steve Rogers".  However, it's been noted that Cap's shield in that picture is exactly the same as it is on the cover for Civil War:  The Initiative (the holes and cracks look exactly the same and are in the exactly same place) causing people to speculate that the leaked Iron Man: Steve Rogers image was something Marvel photoshopped up to put out disinformation.

Maybe a what-if story that got canned?

Possilble.  The recent JMS mini Bullet Points (which was more or less an extended What If?) had Steve Rogers as Iron Man, but he had a suit that was like the original clunky grey Iron Man suit.  Whatever it is, the image itself is something Marvel photoshopped together from the sounds of it.

Ah, New Avengers #27... with all the pointless Civil War tie-in issues I'd almost missed the laughably bad issues that came before.  If this issue is any indication, the Somewhat Newer Avengers should be even worse than the previous team.  So what do we get with this issue?  We get the second battle the Avengers have had with the Hand since the book started, Echo getting killed by Electra and then brought back to life, and Dr. Strange casting spells (in other words standing around with his hands glowing, explaining that he's casting some sort of sleep spell on some of the ninja), while everyone else wades in and starts slugging (as the rest of the Avengers is made up of hand to hand fighters).  Also there's more of that Bendis dialogue I love so much, where the characters actually use the names of the stories in conversations, in this case when Spidey says "Ah Logan, that was before the House of M and our little Civil War".  Yes, that kind of shit really does bother me.

Also it's been made obvious that Ronin isn't Cap (and likely not Hawkeye or Daredevil either), for those interested, through one of the two lines he gets in this book: "Yo Cage, do they always talk this much during a fight?" (his other line is the response of "Not exactly" when Echo asks if he's Matt).

So it's Iron Fist?

Why?

It's not Iron Fist given that he's also on the team.  Unless someone else is pretending to be Iron Fist and Iron Fist is dressed up as Ronin.

Edit:  If I had to take a guess right now, I'd say it's Dakota North in the man-suit.  Or possibly Blade since before New Avengers ever launched Bendis talked about using Blade in the series at some point.

If I was Blade, and someone asked me if I was Daredevil, I wouldn't say "Not exactly."  I'd say "Fuck no.  Not even a little bit."

Maybe it's Daredevil's clone!

Maybe the doppelgangers are back.

God that sounds fucktastically awful.

Yeah, but I just chalk that up to a lot of Bendis dialogue being clunky.  But then I only think it could be Blade due to the fact that Ronin is only seen using a sword during this fight, and because he seems to know Cage better than he knows the others.  Dakota North is still my first guess though as she's an obscure character who has teamed up with Cage in the past and has recently been empolyed by Daredevil's law firm as a bodyguard.

She's also never worn a costume before, and wouldn't really have a need to start now, I don't think. Of course, Blade wouldn't need to wear a costume either.

Trust me, whoever it is, it will be stupid.

Oh, I'm sure it will be.  I'm just trying to figure out in advance exactly how stupid it will be.  Bendis had this to say about Ronin:


That would seem to eliminate Blade and Dakota as they aren't really known to change costumes.  It could be Baron Zemo going by that information as he has changed costumes a few times, he does know how to use a sword, and the fact that this is supposed to be the team that Cap chose and Cap and Zemo did recently bury the hatchet between them.  Personally I'd hate for Bendis to get his hands on Zemo.

Zemo? I really need to go back and read the rest of the Thunderbolts series then, because I didn't realize he'd become a non-villain. But it's been since around the 40's that I've read Thunderbolts.

It would still be a BAD choice.

Zemo more or less became good during Fabian's last arc on the original Thunderbolts series, where he was stuck on Counter-Earth with the rest of the original team (minus Songbird).  At the end of Fab's run on the current series, Zemo used the moonstones to absorb a bunch of power to keep the Grandmaster from getting it.  Songbird, not trusting Zemo to get rid of the power like he agreed to, shattered the moonstones, creating a rift and sending Zemo back in time, where Fab will be picking up the story with the Zemo:  Born Better mini.

Just finished reading Avengers #27. It was as bad as you said and more. There's no reason for this team to be together. It's even more stupid that Captain American isn't with this team, since he'd be first in line to do a rescue of Echo. After all, he put her in that mess. Either he's dead after Civil War #7 (impossible) or horribly incapcitated or something even worse. The banter on the fight scene page was fucking awful, especially the whole "I didn't know there'd be banter" thing. It's just so intentionally cute, and even Spider-Man sounded off.

Echo is so wrong for the Avengers, but then so are Wolverine and Spider-Man. Please tell me Ronin isn't someone like Misty Knight or the other chick from Heroes for Hire. Whoever it is, it'll be truly awful.

I don't know why but: New Avengers/Transformers mini (http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=102772).  If nothing else, at least Bendis doesn't seem to be involved in any way.

Having read the first issue of the Mighty Avengers now, I can at least say it's better than New Avengers.  At least Bendis manages to gather up the full team, not to mention have them all fight as a team.  Ares and Sentry are the only out of place members on the team, with everyone else being long time members.  If it wasn't for Bendis' habit of completely changing characters' personalites this would be a perfectly ok superhero book.  The most glaring example was Ms. Marvel saying in regards to the Wasp: "Are her and her loser husband together or--?".  But people will buy up this shit up anyway, because apparently they'd rather hear the writer's voice than the characters'.

The first issue of Mighty Avengers was certainly better than the New New Avengers. Loads better. It still was half-suck though, mostly the half that was trite, shitty conversations between Ms. Marvel and Tony Stark. Those were painful, especially the thought balloons. Now, I miss thought balloons in comics. But they mostly were used to actually give us thoughts. These were retarded bad and added nothing to the story. The villain reveal at the end was interesting, but really just shows why Stark being head of SHIELD is clown shoes. He's already shown his circuitry can be infiltrated by a 15-year old. WHAT GOVERNMENT WOULD TRUST THIS FUCKER?

http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=104938 (http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=104938)

Punisher America!

That is retarded on so many levels.

*snicker*

Please note that I am chiming in here having not read a new comic in over ten years, but that description above of someone who keeps wearing disguises based on what he feels like actully made me think Marc Spectre - damn, it's been so long I can't even remember exactly how he spelled his name...

Mind you, they already gave him a run in the Avengers at least once, and I have no idea what they've done with the character in the last ten years.

This thread is not exactly inspiring me to go start buying comics again, by the way.

Marc Spector (think that's how it's spelled) is back in a new Moon Knight series. The series is decent, drawn by Bryan Hitch, and hasn't really paid much attention to the Civil War stupidity.

That's why I always liked Moon Knight - they tended to ignore most of the rest of the universe. Also really loved Sienkiewicz's gritty style.

Moon Knight is a favorite of mine as well, and I've been following this new run from the start.

There was actually a brief bit in which Civil War shows up at the doorstep, with Cap appearing in Spector's home.  Bit of a twist on it, though, since Marc tells him he's not interested in being recruited, that the whole thing is stupid and he should go fuck himself, and Cap says he's not there to recruit him anyways, just dropped by to say "I don't like you, I don't like your style, you almost make me think registration is a good idea, stay out of this."

Well, New Avengers 28 shows that the whole thing about Cap being kept alive on the Raft was just a ploy by the Mighty Avengers to draw out the New Avengers.  Did we really need another way to make pro-registration heroes look like complete dicks?

Goddamnit. What a retarded fucking plot device.

I've read it, and it makes me even more stabby.

First off, Yu's art looks ok sometimes, then sometimes it goes way too wacky one way and guys have chins that they trip over. He did that with Iron Fist repeatedly. The plot device about Cap was just as retarded as I thought it would be.

But the real shitty part of this issue is how Bendis can't resist trying to tell 3 separate story lines in one story without resolving ANY of them. Like he's following the Memento backwards storytelling only he's not even going linearlly backwards, he's just jumping around. Right in the middle of springing the Cap trap, he switches back to present time and resolves neither story. And do we have to have two full splash pages of NOTHING in the book other than posing superheroes? Fuck.

This book still sucks ass.

So I picked up Avengers: The Initiative (the Avengers mini that turned into an ongoing series before the first issue hit stands, as opposed to Omega Flight, which was planned as an ongoing and then got scaled back to a mini).  On the one hand, it's a decent book.  On the other hand though, it doesn't really have any justification for being called an Avengers book, although that does seem to at least be consistent with the other books.  This book is more like a superhero boot camp, which is a decent premise in and of itself, even if it does reuse a plot device from Starship Troopers (the movie) near the end, in a scene where one of the trainees is blasted in the head during a training exercise gone wrong.

The book stars a mix of new characters, obscure characters (Thor Girl, Komodo, Gauntlet), War Machine, Justice, and Hank Pym, and cameos from characters like Triathlon, Rage, and Slapstick.  The downside is that with the book juggling so many characters, many of the new ones don't get a chance to get fleshed out in this issue, and most of the obscure ones don't really get any sort of introduction for people who aren't familiar with them.  The book is still readable without knowing who a lot of these characters are, but the first issue of a new series should find a way to get the reader somewhat invested in the characters.  Slott has a good opportunity here to finally have a good selling book, simply by it carrying the Avengers name, but this issue doesn't have much to hook the readers and keep them coming back, especially since Slott seems to understandably leave he's trademarked humor out of this book.

Stefano Caselli does a good job on the art here.  It seems to have a manga style influence at times (especially when he draws Cloud 9 and War Machine), but it's used sparingly.  The coloring is also well done for the most part, although there are some panels where either the pencils, the inks, or the colors have ended up muddying up the facial features of some of the characters.  Not a huge problem though overall.  At the very least I'll be coming back for the second issue.  Of course, as seems to be the way with this book, for every upside there is a downside.  In this case it's the fact the judging by the solicits for the next few issues, this book seems to be trodding some of the same ground as the Thunderbolts in that it has the characters hunting down non-registered heroes.  Not exactly fresh territory, and it's a plot device I expect to see reused many times in the near future.

The Avengers: Initiative was nothing special. It just highlighted what's wrong with the post-CW Marvel books, they ignore everything in the past. Gyrich being put in charge of new recruits? Are you fucking kidding me? Stark would never work with that man, especially not allowing him to have such a vital role in the process of bringing up new recruits.

And let's just whack a character right off the bat. WHY? He might actually have been interesting, but he's dead, Jim. The whole book was /meh.

Using Gyrich isn't too out of character.  Cap and the rest of the Avengers (including Iron Man) gave Gyrich a second chance during Geoff Johns' run on the book and he's was given a bit more of a sympathetic side to his character.

After reading Avengers #29, New New Avengers, that is, I can safely say I really dislike Yu's art. It's ugly. It tries some Klimt style hatching, but it doesn't work very well. It's mostly his shapes that bug the shit out of me.

And the whole scene at Doc Strange's old house is just annoying. Bendis still just refuses to tell a story in a linear fashion, so he tells 3 stories in chopped up form as if ANY of them other than the main one were important. It's frustrating as hell.

That art was pretty painful.  I like panels to actually have background every now and then.  Between that and Bendis' storytelling I can't figure out what's going on through a lot of this issue.  It's all just garbled crap.

Ronin = Hawkeye  :roll:

Yeah, I made a loud exclamation when I got to that page. Fucking save us from hack writing. The art has gotten about 300 times worse than when Yu started on the book. It's just dreadful now.

So... Elektra was a Skrull.  What was the whole point of this arc again?  We have how many issues of the New Avengers fighting ninja, and this is the payoff?  Oh, and something is up with Cage's child and presumably Jessica Jones (I can only guess that they are possibly Skrulls as well given the look of the kids eyes).


Edit:  It seems that this whole Skrull thing is the lead up to Marvel's big event next year.  interview with Bendis on Newsarama here (http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=116568).  I was going to quote some stuff from the interview here but there's just too much crap.  Basically:

a) The "who can you trust" shapeshifting/human looking alien invasion type thing has been done at this point.  Most recently in BSG (which amazingly Bendis seems to reference once in the interview without the slightest hint of realization that he's retreading one of the main plot points of one of the most popular shows on TV right now).

b)  Marvel has their typical  "we can have our cake and eat it too" attitude.  "No more Mutants" but just about all the X-men related characters still have their powers or have gotten them back.  The Superhero registration act is a perfectly reasonable piece of legislation that the pro-reg side aren't villains for pushing, or the SHRA allows for backdoor drafts and the like.  There are no good guys and bad guys in Civil War but we'll have the pro-reg side deploy untested god clones in the field and employ villains (not even petty criminals but murderers like Bullseye) as a superhero team hunting down heroes.  In this case, it's Marvel saying that even though major characters may have been skrulls during events like House of M or Civil War, and thus were acting completely out of character, it in no way invalidates those stories.

c)  There's no way that half the shit their going to try to pass off as "it was a skrull" was planned at the time whatever stories are being changed were written.  Especially with Bendis' hints that this Skrull invasion goes back as far as the Kree-Skrull War.  I realize I'm judging this before reading it, but it shows all the signs of being a bullshit license for Bendis and Marvel to retcon whatever stories they don't like in order to make the Marvel Universe further fit their vision.

OMFG, I want to brain Bendis and Quesada right now.


Yep, let's retcon the ENTIRE FUCKING UNIVERSE. The Spider-Man clone saga? They weren't clones, they were SKRULLS! Dark Phoenix? SKRULL! Onslaught? SKRULLY SKRULL SKRULL SKRULL!!!!

FOAD, you one-note hack. I don't care how far back this was planned, it's shit. It's lazy ass writing. Now you're going to tell me Reed Richards is a fucking Skrull? Obviously Tony Stark isn't because that would make the most sense.

Marvel should just change their logo to a toilet.

Hey, come on, it's aliens disguised as humans secretly infiltrating Earth.  That concept was gold the first time Marvel did it:

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/12/Rom-1.jpg/240px-Rom-1.jpg)

I loved ROM. But it wasn't THAT good.

And people thought that Warren Ellis was joking when he said that Nextwave was the only comic in the real Marvel community, and blamed Civil War on Anal Skrulls.

Speaking of big Marvel crossovers, Marvel revealed some details on their October X-men crossover "X-Men: Messiah Complex" (http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=116920) at Heroes Con a few days ago.  I have to say I'm saddened and disappointed by the fact that not only is Cyclops apparently not being killed off in Astonishing X-men (due to wrap up before the crossover starts), but he'll supposedly be playing a fairly large role in this crossover.  :roll:

Blearg another "UNIVERSE-CHANGING NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME!!!" crossover. And Mr. Sinister is on the cover. Fuck, I hate that character as much as I hate Apocalypse. As good as Brubaker and Carey's runs have been on the X-Men books, the whole team has been a confused mess since Grant Morrison left.

But hey, if they give Cyclops some fucking sack back, I'll be happy.

I think Sinister works when the bother to actually give him an agenda rather than have him doing mysterious shit for a half-revealed plot and then fade away (well before Origin, when Wolverine's popularity still had Marvel convinced that mysterious automatically = cool).  I liked Sinister in Age of Apocalypse, and Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix, when he was used as an actual 3-Dimensional character.

Yu's art still grates on me but he seems to have marginally cleaned it up a bit for New Avengers #35, a series which I haven't talked about directly in recent months because the past few issues have been lead-ins to Secret Invasion.  This issue is a little bit different though as it focuses on the Lex Luthor putting together the Secret Society.  Wait... wrong company, but this does feel a bit similar to all the DC villains banding together in the leadup to IC.  I realize that even then, the idea of a massive supervillain team-up wasn't an entirely original one, but this one doesn't work on several other levels as well.

The Hood really is the wrong character for this.  In the few appearences he's had before this, nothing about his character would have suggested he was capable of something like this.  In fact, he's had a fairly sympathetic side to him prior to this, and was never written as a truly evil character.  I'm guessing at least some of this will be explained as we get to know more about his second-in-command, whom I have the suspicion is really the brains behind the whole operation.

Second major problem is the Hood's plan to track down and kill the families of any hero who gets in the way of his crew.  I had the same question as Jigsaw when he asked the Hood how he'd do that, and I don't think a particularly satisfactory answer was given.  The truth is, the reason villains don't do that kind of thing more often, is because killing heroes' families off on a regular basis doesn't make for good reading. 

I'm really kind of sick of Marvel and Bendis in particular trying to pick at genre conventions like this, because it's jarring in the context of a comic book universe that's adheared to these conventions for the better part of six decades.  They outed Peter Parker as Spider-man, in part because Bendis thinks that secret identities are silly.  They had a New Warriors battle result in the destruction of a school, so they could put forth the arguement that untrained vigilante superheroes are a serious threat in the MU despite the several thousand prior stories that took place in the MU, where no innocents were hurt.  They decided that Hulk was a killer (and now changed their mind back), because it was implausable with all the destruction he caused that nobody was killed.  Yes, it's silly that the Hulk can rampage through a town without killing someone, that people tolerated super powered vigilanties for so long, that superheroes can maintain secret identities, and the supervillains have to be somewhat ineffective, because 99.9999% of the time, the heroes are expected to win, but those are the established rules of the MU.  I assume the next step of injecting logic into a fictional world will be to give Spider-man and the Hulk cancer due to their exposure to radiation.

Yu's art still bugs the shit out of me. The part about #35 that bugged me the most, though, was the tone. It's quite obvious that Bendis' best writing is when he does hard-boiled crime stories. Jinx, AKA: Goldfish, Torso, all hard-boiled crime stories that were absolutely top-notch. Even the Daredevil stuff fit, because the tone of the character fit that tone of story.

But the fucking Avengers? Even the scrub Avengers? They just don't fit the tone, especially when there are Skrulls abounding, and extraterrestrial conspiracies, etc. And the whole beating of Tigra while threatening her mother was just unnecessarily brutal and wholly out of place. He's turned the Avengers into Pulp Fiction and he isn't even giving us good stories in the bargain.

True enough, I'm not sure why this story needed to be told in New Avengers.  The cover art of Wolverine with a symbiote covering half his body, and the recap page which focuses more on the Skull and Symbiote plotlines would seem to signal a completely different story than the one readers end up getting.  If the symbiote plotline felt like an detour taking us away from the Skrull plotline in order to kill time until the big crossover, taking this detour away from the symbiote plotline feels like a fascinatingly pointless exercise in treading water.

I guess it shouldn't come as much of a surprise.  Bendis has jumped from storyline to storyline since launching NA, like an A.D.D. kid on a diet of pixie stix and energy drinks, seemingly unable to resolve even the smallest of plot threads before some other shiny object gets his attention.  I'm sure in his mind he's weaving multi-layered tapestries, but the reality of it is that three years later, nobody cares about the conspiricy within S.H.I.E.L.D. or who the shadowy figure is that hired Electro way back in the first issue, and it doesn't help matters when Earth's Mightiest Heroes can't even soundly defeat a group of Ninja.  Even the bungling Skrulls of stories past could give Bendis' Avengers a run for their money so I'm unsure why he felt the need to reinvent them as serious threats.  Fuck, if the Skrulls were to team up with Stiltman, the Avengers will have to call in the Sentry for backup.

That unfortunately counts for both teams of Avengers. I mean, they still haven't even figured out what happened to Iron Man in Might Avengers, and that storyline has gone NOWHERE. At least Mighty has Frank Cho doing some gorgeous artwork, but New Avengers is just shitty art work and a seriously fragmented story that has led into multiple culdesacs. Shit, the S.H.I.E.L.D. storyline from the original run was so small anyway that no one has even mentioned it in other books. It's not even in Iron Man and he's the goddamn director of the agency.

Whoa. When did Frank Cho start doing superheroes? I think I remember hearing about him on Shanna, the She-Devil, but now Avengers? Maybe I should stop reading books without pictures and get back to comics.

Cho's done all 4 issues of the Mighty Avengers series. The writing is... well, it's better than New New Avengers, but it's not that great. Too many silly thought balloons and too much dialogue that sounds like the Gilmore Girls.

By the way, Cho is off the book after issue #6.  He stepped aside after realizing that it was too difficult to keep to a monthly schedule.

That pretty much killls any reason to read the book other than to make fun of it.

Le Sigh. New Avengers Illuminati #5. I almost had a moment of "this is kind of cool" when the Skrulls start attacking the Illuminati with Super-Skrulls with both X-Men and Thor-y power sets. There was almost a moment of awesome. Then Iron Man does... WTF does he do? Does he actually NUKE a site in the US? Or does he just magically draw power from nuclear plants around the country? Not only was that not explained well, that one act should pretty much end his reign as Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. and brand him a goddamn terrorist, no matter how much registration stuff he does. That should scare the shit out of the government.

Of course, it'll just be ignored.

Oh and good job on completely spoiling the fact that we now know WW Hulk will not end with any of these characters dying. Not that anyone should have expected that, but seriously. Keep us surprised or don't bother with the fucking story.

Goddamnit. New Avengers #36 is just balls of stupid. First, the whole city turns into Venom thing gets resolved by IRON MAN off stage with more of his "I'm techno-magic bitches!" Seriously, it's like whatever cul-de-sac Bendis gets himself written into, he just turns it off by having Iron Man or Sentry or Doctor Strange fix it with a snap of their fingers. Then, he spends more time focusing on the OTHER Avengers team than he does the team that's actually the stars of the book. And the Venom thing was some chemical bomb sent by Doctor Doom? WHAT? He had mini-Venoms in a can or some shit? Then this team of Avengers goes to apprehend a group of super-powered bank robbers, who it turns out is the Wrecking Crew. And they don't feel safe taking on the Wrecking Crew because they are too strong?

THE WRECKING CREW? Wait, didn't Spider-Woman pretty much single-handedly take down the Wrecker? And doesn't this team of Avengers have the SORCERER SUPREME OF THE GODDAMN PLANET? Doctor Strange took on the WWH version of the Hulk and held his own, and can supposedly thwart Iron Man's abilities to find this Avengers team, but he can't take down the Wrecking Crew? So what do they do? According to the last panel, call in the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, THOR for fuck's sake, oh and the Mighty Avengers, who are supposed to be apprehending non-registered heroes.

I mean, why even go to the fucking trouble of setting the rules for regisration and non-registration in the Marvel Universe if your writers are just going to fucking ignore them? We aren't just in the territory of sloppy continuity so much as we have gone off the fucking map into just making shit up as we go along. Why establish a status quo if your writers contravene it at every turn? What's worse is that it's done for the most idiotic of reasons. The WRECKING CREW? Come on.

Also, Yu's artwork is just in shitsville. His stuff just gets uglier and uglier.

Marvel comics gets sadder and sadder by the day. 

Until their stock crashes again, it's going to stay that way.

They also called in the Punisher (which is odd given the events in Civil War), Howard the Duck, Silver Surfer (not sure what he's doing on Earth), and the Vision (with his old look rather than his Young Avengers look).

Also, after an entire issue (and several interviews with Bendis) trying to establish the Hood as some sort of badass, his hideout is easily tracked down by Wolverine catching a scent.  And none of the heroes showed any concern over the fact that Dethlok, a hero many of them have fought beside, has been blown in half.

Yeah, I think they made it pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that the people shown in that panel are not necessarily the people actually present.  It's a show to scare the badguys.  The next issue will cover it.

I'm really goddamn confused about the Silver Surfer right now.  They just came out with a limited series called "Requiem" which got no press and contained the death of the Silver Surfer.  His metallic shell was flawed and it deteriorated, and nobody (Reed Richards, Iron Man, Prof. X, Galactus, etc) could figure out a way to fix it.  He did a few things befitting the Silver Surfer, flew home (to his native planet, I mean), and died.  It was pretty well done (though one of the subplots was pretty hamfisted).

Now there's another Silver Surfer limited series coming out, and it's making no mention of him having died not more than a month ago.  Picked up the first issue, it really didn't seem good, won't be getting the rest.

Silver Surfer continuity is a bit of a mess right now.  In addition to the minis mentioned, he also appeared in the Annihilation crossover, or at least the first part of it (haven't read Conquest yet).  At the end, he returned to being the herald of Galactus, with a somewhat darker attitude than usual.

He hasn't shown up in Conquest as of yet.  Been enjoying that more than I thought I would.  The lead-ins were mediocre, but I just happened to be in the mood for that kind of story so kept following them.  The first issue of Conquest, though, pleasantly surprised me.

Of course, I, like most people reading comics these days (http://www.cbgxtra.com/Default.aspx?tabid=2444), don't hold the belief that Marvel has done a horrible job with everything and that DC is far superior, so mileage may vary depending on the individual.

I read the first issues of each of the minis leading up to Conquest.  At some point I'll get around to reading the rest.  After reading Annihilation though, I didn't really see the need for them to go back to the 4 miniseries lead up, and would have preferred it if Conquest was done as a one book story (even if it had to be 12 issues or so long).

In regards to the sales charts, DC has gained a lot of ground.  The fact that JSA is the number 5 best selling title is probably something that I wouldn't have believed if you told me 10 years ago it would happen.  Marvel has pushed New Avengers pretty heavily (and Avengers Disassembled before that) for quite a while now.  It figured prominently into House of M and Civil War, and for months and months in advance now has been hyped as the lead in to Secret Invasion.  Spider-man is likewise doing big numbers, since One More Day is one of Quesada's pet projects, and has mentioned it every chance he's gotten.

I love a lot of Marvel stuff, but sales charts only prove that there is still a sizable audience out there who will pick up Marvel "Event" books.

I'm not sure you even need to read the lead-ins.  Like I said, they were mediocre.  Other than the character of Wraith, everything they went over was pretty minor.  Wraith himself may or may not end up being an important character, but either way his series wasn't very good.  I'd Wikipedia it to see who he is and go from there.

Oh, and Moondragon's a dragon now.

The art was especially bad in the most recent issue, but combined with the writing. Well, look, I can read and understand and work with some of the most painfully badly written and complicated postmodern theory you might name, but the last issue of New Avengers just left me kind of baffled in parts. Or maybe I just felt unmotivated to try and figure it out. But honestly, there were whole pages where I was just thinking, "I have no fucking idea what's going on here, who is fighting whom. That guy just did something to that guy, somebody just say 'oof' and someone else said 'ergh', but...I guess since it's Bendis, somebody just got his testicles ripped off or mangled, but that's about all I'm sure of."

NECRODAMUS!

So I read the New Avengers Annual #2, with the Hood attacking the New New Avengers in Dr. Strange's mansion.





SPOILER ALERT:

Avengers win, Dr. Strange leaves the dimension or some shit and Ms. Marvel AGAIN lets the rogue Avengers go free. Once again, why the fuck even have a Civil War and registration shit that "CHANGES EVERYTHING!!@!1!!" and then not have it change really a goddamn thing? Why is Ms. Marvel even on the registration side if she's just going to ignore it everytime her friends get caught? And who gets to be Sorcerer Supreme now that Strange is gone? Tigra gets used again as a plot device.

On Annihilation: Conquest, I thought the Star-Lord lead-in mini was actually fucking great. Plus I'm loving Nova in general, because for whatever fetishistic reason, Nova has always been a favorite character. I think it was that I bought issue #1 of his original title when I was a kid and didn't know that it was an unholy plagiaristic retread of Spider-Man + Green Lantern. But the current Nova book is actually *good*, which you really can't say about most of his various titles over the years. The Wraith mini was totally bleh, the character leaves me cold. Lesbian space dragons in the Quasar one, mildly interesting, but not much of a story. The main Conquest series has been really quite nice, though not quite so interesting as the first Annihilation mini.

New Avengers Annual? Waste of space. At best, just further evidence that Strange is a Skrull now. Which cancels out the likeable humanity and complexity of the Dr. Strange who appeared in World War Hulk, stupidly. These guys cannot figure out where they're going.

I actually wasn't reading Star Lord.

Nova has been good, with the exception of the talking dog with the accent.

Not related to the topic in any way, shape, or form, but I figured Haemish would appreciate these (http://www.slgcomic.com/product-exec/product_id/613/nm/Milk_Cheese_Beer_Mug_Set) (he needs to go back to his old Milk & Cheese avatar), and I have no problem briefly interrupting our New Avengers hate.

(http://www.slgcomic.com/images/shopimages/large/mcmugs_500.gif)

I would so buy those if I wasn't broke.

I really do miss that avatar, I think, or was it one with Tiki masks of some sort?  Either way there was an avatar that I loved but it has ceased to be.   :heartbreak:

I still have it somewhere. I might resurrect it some day.

Well, with the latest issue picking up right after the annual, not much really happens other than Luke Cage and Jessica Jones having a lover's spat on the steps of (Mighty) Avenger's Tower.  Leads to a nice little cliffhanger, though.

This issue leads me to believe that Luke Cage is a skrull.  I think a lot of people are expecting Jessica Jones (and baby) are Skrulls, but I think that Luke Cage has been a Skrull all along, and he wants to avoid the Might Avengers to avoid detection.  And the baby is a half-skrull.

I think we aught to start a "Secret Invasion" thread.

If I thought there was any reasonable way to differentiate between hints that Bendis puts into the books and his overall poor understanding of many of the characters he's written since his Avengers run started, then I'd have loved to do a Secret Invasion thread.  If I really thought he'd been laying the groundwork for this since New Avengers #1 instead of meandering around never really able to see any of his story arcs through to an actual conclusion, I'd be willing to discuss Secret Invasion.  I don't really have any desire to follow a story that with each reveal of a character being a Skrull potentially invalidates months or possibly years of character development, unless the Skrulls all end up replacing complete fucking z-listers nobody cares about anyway.

For him to be a Skull, they'd have to completely negate the issue with everyone soul-searching about their feelings on the whole Secret Invasion and then Doc Strange doing a spell to prove that none of them are Skrulls- at least, none of them think they are.  Though hypnosis isn't exactly rare in comics.

Maybe there are separate factions of Skrulls.  Each is busy replacing their own set of heroes and some accidental overlaps occur.  By the time this is all revealed, only a few people will be the original.  The stories from then on can deal with being a human in a world full of Skrulls.

Of course the first person each faction duplicates is Logan, which is why he manages to be in so many books.  It's perfect!

I'm thinking that the one character Bendis may actually have done poorly "on purpose" is Strange himself, which makes the truth spell irrelevant. Though on the other hand, it invalidates the very human, appealing, and consistently-portrayed Strange of World War Hulk. (And of course, it also doesn't make any damn sense: why would a Skrull Dr. Strange bust his ass and take enormous risks to defeat the Hulk?)

That's the basic problem with the whole Secret Invasion conceit: it's so obviously not tightly plotted, not tightly planned, and a simple way to get out of the various problems that the bad character work of Civil War created, that it almost can't possibly work well as a series. If you want to see how good writing can trump bad writing, look at McDuffie's Fantastic Four run, which took some of the atrocious stuff done to Reed Richards as a character and actually found a way to make it work out coherently and catalyze some good stories. Secret Invasion is bad writing chasing bad writing. Bad writing times two doesn't equal good writing.

Unless they come up with a plot device that makes it so it does!