Under New Management: New Avengers #34 Review

Editor’s Note: Those spoilers are some bad mother – shut your mouth! I’m just talking about spoilers…

Well, that’s it. With New Avengers #34, Brian Michael Bendis is (for now) finished with the Avengers books. And, as he did in the core Avengers book, he uses this issue as an opportunity to repair all the toys he played with and damaged during his time on the floor, and clears the decks for Jonathan Hickman and Steve Epting to give New Avengers its third first issue in less than ten years, making New Avengers only one comeback short of Lindsey Lohan in that same time period.

With multiple comic series, crossover events, and an Avengers movie under our belts since Bendis started on Avengers, it’s easy to forget that this all really started about a decade ago, when I walked into my local comic store where they know me by name and ask me to stop yanking at my belt and screeching, “Avengers Disassemble!”, and saw a book named Alias that I bought for Amanda, thinking it was a comic adaptation of the new Jennifer Garner ABC TV series. It most certainly was not. It was a crime story taking places on the dirty fringes of the Marvel Universe, involving B-Lister Scott Lang and the first real rehabilitation of Luke Cage since his introduction (we’re gonna claim convenient amnesia about Brian Azzarello’s attempt to turn Cage into a mix of 50 Cent and Leone’s Man With No Name).

Bendis brought Jessica Jones and Luke Cage with him into The New Avengers, and it is somewhat fitting that he closes out his run with them here… with a pretty exciting and well-drawn mystical battle thrown in to boot.

The issue opens with the battle between fallen Sorcerer Supreme Doctor Strange and spirit of Daniel Drumm, the brother of Strange’s Sorcerer Supreme successor (look, Ma! I write like Stan Lee!) Doctor Voodoo. Drumm has the ability to possess any of The Avengers to attack Strange (why he can’t just possess Strange and make him drink Sterno drippings and Dran-O – mmmm, a Hobo Cosmo – isn’t really explained), and is taking full advantage to make them attack not only Strange, but each other. Strange needs to find a way to stop Drumm without injuring any of his friends, and without spoiling anything, well, let me just say that one fucks with Doctor Strange at his own peril.

So for the first part of the issue, what we have is an old-fashioned superhero-against-superhero battle, which is a refreshing change of pace after six months of Avengers Vs. X-Men where superheroes hardly ever fought. Actually, that’s an unnecessarily snide remark on my part, because Bendis uses the opportunity that having a villain in control of individual heroes provides to make the match-ups more unfair than any editor would allow in a real cape-vs.-cape fight. Let’s just say that almost none of the battles in Avengers Vs. X-Men carry quite the weight of seeing Thing attack Daredevil. So Bendis uses the scenario to really show the stakes of letting Drumm win, which keeps the excitement level up where it needs to be when you’re talking about a non-corporeal villain you almost never even see.

Bendis uses the battle to resolve the long-running plot point of Strange giving up the mantle of Sorcerer Supreme (I call it a plot point rather than a storyline, since the event occurred quite a while ago, and we haven’t exactly spent a lot of time seeing Strange moping about it or trying to get the title back or anything), and he does it in a damn exciting manner – again, I would recommend against the fucking around vis-a-vis Doctor Strange – and yet I found the reclaiming of the title strangely (ha!) empty. Again – the loss of rank hasn’t exactly been a simmering storyline here, and it’s not like Strange had to leave The New Avengers or anything when it happened, so the whole thing came kind of out of left field for me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to see the Doc back in Steve Ditko’s old cape, but it felt more like Bendis felt obligated to return everyone to their pre-New Avengers status quo than it felt like an organic story point that just had to happen. This, however, is a nitpick; if a sense of obligation is what it took for Bendis to show Strange calmly kicking someone’s ass, I am okay with that.

And finally, we close with Jessica Jones and Luke Cage – again, Bendis’s first doorway into the Marvel Universe and, by extension, the Avengers books, leaving the team to raise their child (who has been a baby since at least 2006, long enough to make Bonnie from Family Guy look like she gave dangerous and horrific premature birth). There is something damn fitting about Bendis closing his Avengers run with these two character, that feels like he’s tying up about a decade worth of stories by going full circle. Fading to black on Jones and Cage felt right… and if you don’t think that last page doesn’t tease a Bendis-written Heroes For Hire book with Cage and Jones, you’re more cynical than I am.

One of my favorite elements in New Avengers has always been Mike Deodato’s art, and he goes out with a bang here. His work feels weighty; everything looks almost three-dimensional, with idealized, yet realistic figures and highly expressive faces. Deodato gets some good action splashes here (despite the book, again, being a mostly mystical battle), although much of the physical combat is drawn by a gaggle of one-page guest artists, each with their own highly-individual looks. I personally dug the pages by Becky Cloonan (Thor vs. Strange, which is right in her wheelhouse) and Yves Bigerel (Captain Marvel against Strange – cartoony, but dynamic and using all parts of the page, including the bleed, to fit action in) best, but your mileage may vary. But the meat and potatoes falls, rightly, to Deodato, who makes these fantastic characters real, exciting, and human. I don’t know off the top of my head where Deodato’s landing after this – I don’t recall having seen his name on any of the Marvel Now one-word teasers – but I’ll follow him wherever he winds up landing. It’s that good.

As I look again at the final panel of New Avengers #34, with Jessica Jones and Luke Cage walking off almost literally into the sunset, it’s really occurring to me that this issue truly signifies the end of an era. And what a fucking era it has been: starting with an indie comic writer getting a foothold into a comic publisher struggling its way out of bankruptcy with an intimate little crime comic, and ending with The Avengers being one of the most well-known superhero teams on the planet. And while all of that doesn’t fall squarely on Bendis, there’s no denying that the dude had his hands on the wheel of some of the key comics of this era. Make no mistake: if there had been a crossover between The Avengers and The X-Men before Bendis, it would have been called X-Men Vs. Avengers. And Luke Cage would have watched the entire thing from the quarter bin.

For the first time, Marvel Now feels like a bookend for what has been one of the most exciting decades of comics in my lifetime. Here’s hoping that it’s the beginning of another one… instead of being that other thing.