Teenage Wasteland: Avengers Academy #37 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: I can give you all spoilers by changing the chemistry in your brains.

Avengers Academy is a book that landed on my pull list because the owner of my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me not to tell the paying customers that I intend to tell law enforcement that they favor books with pictures of children in spandex ass pants, decided to take a liberal interpretation when I told him I wanted to add “Avengers” to my subscriptions. It was a book that I didn’t particularly want when it launched, considering that the book’s predecessor, Avengers: The Initiative really did nothing for me. But over the years, the character-driven stories by writer Christos Gage have grown on me, taking the book from its initial charity buy I was too lazy to tell my local comic store owner to drop from my pulls to one of my must-reads when it drops… just in time for it to be cancelled as part of the Marvel Now relaunch (Because Marvel doesn’t reboot! Because DC reboots! And if someone tells Marvel Editorial that DC’s front office personnel regularly use the bathroom, Marvel’s brass will learn to love walking around with a load in their pants!).

And that cancellation is a Goddamned shame, because Avengers Academy #37 is a really good comic book. It wraps up a storyline that was an exceptional part of the Avengers Vs. X-Men event by consciously not being a part of that event, places a solid focus on the characters and their motivations while not skimping in any way on the action, and delivers one hell of a satisfying conclusion to the event that reminds us just how young and conflicted some of these characters are. And it shows us a character dying too young, in a puddle of his own blood, for no good reason at all… kinda like the book itself is gonna go in two months.

This issue concludes the Final Exam story arc, with antagonists Jeremy Briggs and The Enchantress holding most of the team at bay while missiles carrying the Clean Slate weapon, which will “cure” people of superpowers, streak to all points of the compass. The team is operating unsupervised, what with all the grownups off trying to slap the bikini underpants off of Cyclops, and laboring under what appears to be insurmountable odds. Not only that, but Hazmat and Mettle are fighting after having used Clean Slate to rid them of powers they don’t want and that isolate them from the bulk of humanity… and then having taken the “cure” to reinstate those powers in order to stop Briggs. Suffice it to say that, what with being saddled with powers that guarantee that the only way they’ll ever get fucked is if it’s by an uncaring God, they are unhappy.

From a certain viewpoint, this is a difficult book to recommend because it is, without question, a fourth part of a longer story. If you haven’t read any of the first three parts, you’re not going to have much of an idea as to what’s going on; Jeremy Briggs isn’t a name villain, and the only indication as to why Hazmat and Mettle are so angry at him comes in the last couple of pages. However, if you’re an action fan, there’s enough information here for you to enjoy the story without knowing the preliminaries: you don’t need to know where Clean Slate came from to know that Lightspeed is chasing missiles, and you don’t need to know Briggs’s life story to understand that he can manipulate matter, that he’s an irritating and smarmy son of a bitch… and that the team doesn’t just want to defeat him, they want to hurt him.

Where Avengers Academy #37 excels is in the characterizations, particularly those of Mettle, Finesse and to an extent, X-23. Mettle had his powers taken in a prior issue, and considering those powers were a metal skin that prevented him from feeling too much, breathing, or doing anything sexually beyond accepting a paycheck from a Japanese niche roboporn Web site, he is pissed that he was forced to reclaim them in order to stop Briggs. And Gage really accentuates Mettle’s impotent (ha!) teenaged rage, including some mouthy cheap shots that you just like to see a condescending douche like Briggs take. There’s a panel where Mettle suckerpunches Briggs that’s almost as satisfying as seeing Geraldo Rivera take a blast from a 50,000 volt electric stun gun.

Further, Gage’s treatment of Finesse and her final takedown of Briggs is simply stone cold and satisfying. Where Gage has always walked a fine line is in showing some members of the Academy trying mightily to become heroes, while other are simply struggling to not become villains (there is a difference), and there are killer examples of that in this issue. In some panels, we have Lightspeed selflessly trying like hell to stop the missiles despite overwhelming odds… and in others, we have Finesse making the nutcutting decision to flat-out murder Briggs in pretty much cold blood, and to further allow X-23 to believe that she was the one who did it. The dichotomy between the characters’ motivations has always been one of the most interesting parts of this book, and it is used in full force here… although I do have trouble believing that a born and bred killing machine like X-23 would lose too much sleep over the idea that she unknowingly killed a guy who was trying to dissolve her into goop by turning her sweat to acid.

Tom Grummett’s art is a good fit for a straight-ahead comics punch-em-up. His work is not overly stylized, but detailed with a reasonably fine line – detailed enough that every time he draws Lightspeed, I start thinking he should draw her a damn sandwich. His panel layout is pretty simple to follow, and his action is generally well-choreographed, although there were a few sequences, particularly in the battle between Enchantress, White Tiger and Reptil, where the camera moves were a little confusing; I couldn’t easily tell if the camera moved, or if Reptil had leapt past Enchantress, and if he had, how Enchantress turned so fast, or what. Grummett’s violence is visceral without being too gory to lose its Teen rating – let’s just say that was the cleanest death by exsanguination I’ve seen in quite a while. Overall, Grummett delivers good, straight-ahead comic art that reminded me a bit of Mark Bagley.

Avengers Academy #37 is a book that lives and dies by its characterizations, and they are characterizations that are not necessarily easy to do. These are teenagers, and teenagers are sometimes mercurial, sometimes self-absorbed, and sometimes don’t think about the consequences of their actions. And all of those traits are shown here across a wide swath of characters, all of whom are written and relatable as individuals. Further, the book is loaded with action, and features a villain’s defeat that is at once satisfying, and then handled in a way that carries far more emotional weight than the normal kill-the-bad-guy-with-a-quip ending normally does. Bottom line: this is a damn good, straight-on superhero comic book. Give it a shot while you still can.