Earth’s Mightiest Heroes: Mighty Avengers #1 Review

I’m having a hard time deciding if I like the first issue Marvel’s new Avengers title Mighty Avengers – and I do like it – purely on its own merits, or because of Jonathan Hickman’s work on the main Avengers titles.

It’s been about nine months since Hickman took those books over from Brian Michael Bendis, and in that time those books have been notable for their huge plots and cosmic scope, often, in my opinion, at the detriment to the characters. There have been issues of Avengers where the members of the team have acted like the worst kind of taser-happy, steroid-ridden, ex-high-school bully suburban cops, just because they needed to in order to advance Hickman’s master plot plans. We’ve spent months where we normally only see The Avengers competently analyzing a threat or competently meeting a threat, with their most human moments being only when they fuck up egregiously, causing them to return to the competent analysis phase of the story (see, for example, most of the Infinity event, on sale now!

So the first issue of Mighty Avengers, written by Al Ewing with art by Greg Land, is a comparative breath of fresh air. Sure, it is debuting smack in the middle of Infinity, but this is a book about, you know, The Mighty Avengers. Despite the cosmic nature of the threat to New York, we spend most of our time with the actual characters, watching them interact and bicker and try to get along. And we get a sense of many of their motivations for grouping together and acting as Avengers, beyond the simple expediency of “if they don’t, I can’t show off my nifty extinction-level plot I’ve designed” we’ve been getting much of the time in the core titles.

In short, Mighty Avengers #1 is about people, not spectacle. Which makes it a damn good read compared to a lot of the other Avengers books out there.