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THE MIGHTY AVENGERS VOL. 1 HARDCOVER: THE ULTRON IMPERATIVE REVIEW!

Publisher: Marvel Comics
Writer: Brian Michael Bendis
Artist: Frank Cho
Content: Mighty Avengers issue #1-6

Review by Neil Kapit

In which a new team forms yet again, an old foe returns in a post-op body, and everybody secretly hates everybody

In the past few years, the Avengers has gone from a book where too little of consequence happened to a book where too much of consequence happens. The destruction of the pre-Disassembled team was immediately chased with the formation of a new cast, and the subsequent plot threads spun the book even further out of control. Stories like Sentry, Ronin, House of M, and Civil War all brought the Avengers to the forefront of the comics industry, but they also created an environment where character development and emotional relevance were suffocated.

The height of this absurdity was the creation of the Mighty Avengers; not only would there be two groups of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, but they would exist in oppositon of each other. And since the previously existing New Avengers were the anti-establishment resistance, the cast of the new book would literally be the establishment. Selling a series where the Evil Empire are the heroes is hard enough, and the convoluted conditions that created Mighty Avengers didn’t make it any more appealing.

However, upon reading the first six issues of the title in completion, I have to admit that I’ve misjudged this book. Though the concept of a pro-Registration Act book is inherently unsettling, Brian Michael Bendis seems to have come into the series with full awareness of that. The result is a book with a refreshing self-awareness, which does not celebrate its heroes so much as explore between the cracks in the foundation of their team.

The antagonist of the story, as the title implies, is the classic Avengers villain; however, she ( yes, you heard that right....you really do have to see for yourself ) is merely a catalyst for the larger struggles amidst the cast. Amidst the early battle scenes, flashbacks of the team’s formation are cleverly spliced in between. Iron Man, having set himself up as the Marvel Earth’s effective dictator, is nearly responsible for armageddon due to his own paranoid contingencies. With the help of Ms. Marvel ( who is visibly insecure about her new role as Avengers leader, but far more sympathetic than Tony Stark ), he assembles a team drawing upon a wide range of personalities, few of which are remotely compatible. Even in the middle of the crisis, everyone distrusts everyone, as evidenced by the use of thought balloons that capture the characters’ true feelings about their teammates.

The control freak Iron Man is the worst examples of the instability of the new Avengers squad, but it’s clear that everyone else here is also hanging on by their fingernails. It’s no surprise that Bendis has picked a cast of characters who have all had some sort of emotional distress, be it co-dependence ( Wasp ), Black Ops duplicity ( Black Widow ), paranoid schizophrenia ( Sentry ), or deep-seated feelings of inadequacy ( Wonder Man ). It’s also not shocking that the team member who ends up saving the day is Ares, the brutally honest-- if not just brutal period-- Greek God of War. Unlike his teammates, he wears his heart on his sleeve and doesn’t have a hidden agenda, and it’s his blunt, forthright action that manages to keep the Mighty Avengers’ first mission from failure.

This is a very solid script, and it’s a shame that this series was derailed for so long by art delays. However, Frank Cho did a very good job with the visuals for this story arc. His art is very clean, coherent, and well-suited to the story. The big action scenes he does well with, but his background as a humor cartoonist also comes into play; he nails the emotional states of the various personalities well, and lays out their interactions beautifully. Cho has a bad reputation for being a cheesecake artist, and I’m not going to pretend that the women of this comic are drawn realistically. But the other strengths of his storytelling make up for his apparent fixation on chests.

After some rough years of random upheavals in place of plot or purpose, the Bendis Avengers has finally hit its stride. By scaling back on the soap-operatic shocks in favor of in-depth characterization and interpersonal conflict, and by giving the cast a clear tone and purpose as the ambivalent members of an authoritarian strike force, he has given the start of Mighty Avengers a lot of promise. While it’s a shame that Cho can’t continue drawing this series on a regular basis, he has left an artistic stamp on the series, and this collaborative effort has mapped it out as one of the best superhero team books the company is producing.

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