Mistaken Identity: Uncanny Avengers #1 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: If we can’t save the Earth… you can be damn sure we’ll spoil it.

It is never a promising sign when the very first page of a new comic book is so confusing and misleading, it forces you to flip back from the middle of the book to the beginning to understand what the hell is going on.

Welcome to Uncanny Avengers #1, a decent book with some good dialogue that, unfortunately, opens with the storytelling equivalent of a dude putting down his beer, picking up an M-80, shouting “check this out!” and blowing off all his fingers.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

What’s going on on this page? We’ve got a guy, one week after the conclusion to Avengers Vs. X-Men where Cyclops went apeshit and almost destroyed the world, on a surgical table with his eyes pinned open, getting what appears to be a fairly radical lobotomy. The guy on the table, who has brown hair, has the Phoenix Force reflected in his eyes. In fact, the image of the poor sonofabitch’s eyes are the primary focus of pretty much every panel on that page.

So that’s Cyclops, right? He got captured at the end of Avengers Vs. X-Men, and now he’s being rendered powerless in some super Guantanamo or something. Because the next time we see Cyke, he’s wearing headgear that would easily hide that lobotomy scar. So yeah, Cyclops. It’s obvious. Everyone thinks it’s Cyclops.

Yeah, no. It’s Avalanche. We see him with a big ol’ Hannibal Lecter scar about halfway through the book. And maybe I’m in the minority, but in my first readthrough, I thought, “Oh God, whoever got to Cyclops got to Avalanche, too! Right? Wait a second…” And I found myself flipping back and forth, checking eye and hair color, questioning my interpretation of what I was seeing. And before, you ask, no: sobering up didn’t help. It took me several readings in varying states of chemical enhancement to assure myself that it wasn’t Cyclops on that operating table, given the reflection of Phoenix in his eyes.

Why did they do this? Writer Rick Remender and artist John Cassaday are A-List talent, for Christ’s sake. Which means to me that, while I should never discount the possibility that I am a dope with shitty reading comprehension, they must have made the conscious choice to mislead me on purpose. And I know what you’re saying: “But Rob, obviously it wasn’t Cyclops, because his eyes were open without shooting optic blasts!” Really? Okay… except I don’t have any superpowers beyond my liquor tolerance, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be at my Marion Ravenwood defeating best if my fucking brain was exposed and being chopped at.

I know I’m a few hundred words into this review and I haven’t addressed anything beyond my own personal confusion over the first page, but this shit matters. It’s one thing to cleverly add mystery to a story, but to mislead a reader to the point where he or she is muttering, “Who’s that guy? Is he the same guy as before?” like my dad at a brewpub screening of Inception just isn’t cool. And it’s a Goddamned shame, because it colored my opinion of the entire book, which otherwise was a pretty decent opening chapter for a new team comic.

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