When The Legend Becomes Fact: Avengers #1 Review

Editor’s Note: It was the spark that started the fire — a legend that grew in the telling. Some believe it began the moment Spoilers were rescued from a dying universe…

Before you ask, no, I don’t know who all those people are. The floating chick on the left is an incarnation of Captain Universe (who I remember from Micronauts comics when I was a kid), and if I had to hazard a guess based on the nuclear symbol on the team diagram, the dude on the right apparently flying in an effort to escape the fire pouring out of his ass is Nuke from Squadron Supreme. But there are at least four people on that last page I couldn’t pull out of a lineup if my life depended on it.

So now that we have the fanboy gymnastics out of the way, we can actually talk about Avengers #1.

First of all, there is no doubt that this is no longer Brian Michael Bendis’s Avengers. From the opening pages implying that “Previously in Avengers” was a cataclysm of cosmic creation, followed immediately by the representation of the Avengers lineup by an abstract diagram, this issue is a shot across the bow that this is indeed Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers. And that means that, after years of stories that seemingly always hinged around a bunch of guys shooting the shit around the kitchen table, we are in for something very different.

And that is not a bad thing. At least not yet. But we might get there.

New Avengers! Well, Not “New Avengers”, But New Avengers! New Old Avengers! Third Base! Screw It, Here’s A Trailer

Marvel’s first post-Bendis issue of Avengers, written by Jonathan Hickman and drawn by Jerome Opena, will be in comic stores tomorrow. But is Marvel taking it easy and banking on the fact that the pre-Marvel Now version of the book was one of their bigger sellers, or that its being written by one of their A-List creators, or that it shares the name with a near-billion dollar movie that just came out just six months ago to sell the thing? Fuck no; that would be lazy. Besides, why rest on your laurels and prior achievements when you’ve got motion comics algorithms, a microphone with a dude with a semi-deep voice, and possibly and purely by speculation a pile of pure flake cocaine burning holes in your pocket and / or nose (if you believe the rumor that I made up just now)?

Stack on top of those assets about 15,000 comic Web sites looking for something cool to talk about on a lazy night before New Comics Day, and it means that Marvel’s created a trailer for Avengers #1, which you can check out after the jump.

Who Wants To Be An Avenger? Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers Lineup Revealed

We’ve known for quite some time that Brian Michael Bendis’s run on the various Avengers titles was coming to an end, and it was recently announced that current Fantastic Four writer Jonathan Hickman was going to be taking over the two main titles, Avengers and The New Avengers. But one of the burning questions leading into the transfer of power has been: after the Avengers Vs. X-Men event shakes out and Hickman takes over, who’s gonna be on which team?

Well, some of those questions have been answered, as Marvel has released the first three covers to Avengers, written by Hickman with art by Jerome Opena, picturing a pretty big gathering of superheroes (and, as did Pinocchio, I question the correct term for a gathering of multiple superheroes. For today, I will eschew “gaggle” and “pride,” and will go with “wad.”):

Miracle, Man: Avengers Vs. X-Men #6 Review

Editor’s Note: Behold, I teach you the Spoiler! He is this lightning, he is this madness. 

Okay, so Avengers Vs. X-Men #6. Yeah.

Somebody’s read Miracleman.

This book is the spitting image of the end of Alan Moore’s Miracleman run; we’ve got superheroes with the power of Gods, who create a floating fortress above the cities of humanity. They use their powers to end hunger and drought, and make a dramatic statement to the United Nations flatly stating that all human conflict will end by their hand. This is a dead-on reproduction of the events of Miracleman #16, except instead of Warpsmiths we’ve got Phoenixes (Phoeni? Phoenixexces? Whatever.), and since we have Cyclops instead of Miraclemen, we have less detached alienation and 90 percent more colossal douchitude.

Fantastic Voyage: Fantastic Four #606 Review

Editor’s Note: Come along and ride on a Fantastic Spoilage! 

First off, let’s stipulate that Fantastic Four editor Tom Brevoort was having a bad day when he recommended that an issue about alternate Nazi versions of the Fantastic Four be labeled as a Point One entry issue, rather than this simple, classic-feeling one-and-done about the core team performing the type of weird, over the top science adventure that is the team’s stock in trade. Yes, a bad day, and not simply colossally poor judgment, or perhaps rampant alcohol abuse. But more likely an off day. Sure.

Let us also stipulate that, while this is an entertaining and charming issue that services all four core characters extremely well and captures the feeling of a classic FF adventure, part of the reason it feels classic is because the plot has been done before. And done, and done, and done, both in movies and in other comics. The thing works, but it works because it’s hung on a proven framework… the same way The Magnificent Seven is cool, but mostly because it’s taken straight across from The Seven Samurai.

Ich Bin Ein Douchebags: Fantastic Four #605.1 Review

Editor’s Note: It was the world’s strangest accident. While testing a new Web site, our heroes were bombarded by mysterious spoilers from outer space!

In a complete and total vacuum, Fantastic Four #605.1 is an interesting little one-and-done Elseworlds-style alternate history of the Fantastic Four, hypothesizing what the team would be like if they’ve been born and raised in Nazi Germany. Which, again, taken on its own is a kind of cool concept (although “Nazi Thing” sounds suspiciously like a fetish German Scheisse porno), but in the real world, it only shows that writer Jonathan Hickman has read Mark Millar’s Red Son and Warren Ellis’s Planetary, and that he also thinks that the character of Reed Richards is a real, real douchebag.

Tip Of The Mushroom: The Manhattan Projects #3 Review

When I was 16 years old and a Junior in high school, I designed an atomic bomb. Y’know, for fun.

This was back in the mid-80s, so this was a big thing to try to do; these days, I’m pretty sure you can Google “How to build an atomic bomb” and get three different working designs, provided you don’t mind getting a particular red mark on a file with your name on it, and having to get your prostate tickled every time you go within 500 yards of an airport.

No, back then you needed to hit libraries and read every book you could get your hands on about the subject, from John McPhee’s The Curve of Binding Energy (Which I highly recommend, if only to scare the living shit out of you; the next time a politician tries to terrify you with ephemeral ideas about Soviet-bought dirty suitcase nukes, it’s easier to giggle at their ignorance when you know that you can make a dirty bomb with a pile of uranium, an ammunition press, a .44 handgun and a public toilet. I am not joking) to Richard Rhodes’s phonebook about the original Manhattan Project, The Making of The Atomic Bomb, which still sits proudly on my bookshelf.

I read everything I could get my hands on about the original Manhattan / Los Alamos project for clues on how one might build such a thing (I also asked my chemistry teacher how to synthesize hexamethelinetetramine in case I needed to make RDX high explosives, and I wasn’t referred to law enforcement, but what the hell; it was the 80s. We knew what freedom was then. Freedom and Aqua-Net). I was fascinated by these guys out in the desert, trying to build something that, for all they knew, would turn all the nitrogen in the atmosphere into plasma and make the Phoenix Force look like something that could be knocked down by Midol.

All of this is one hell of a long way to go to explain why, although I am generally not the biggest fan of Jonathan Hickman’s comics, I am totally digging his work on The Manhattan Projects.

Overstimulated, Exhausted Children: Avengers Vs. X-Men #3 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review constitutes a confirmed extinction-level spoiler.

I don’t have kids myself, but many of my former drinking buddies do, which has in turn made me decide I can never have kids. Because I just can’t talk to them. You ever try talking to a little kid, particularly after they’ve had a shitload of candy? Candy you gave them in the hopes they would take it, go away and stop trying to talk to you?

You can’t make any sense of it; they spin wildly from point to point, with no real logical gristle connecting them, with weird exaggerations that beggar belief to hear (“Wait, wait, little Billy… you’re saying Deathstroke rode his pony… sorry, his My Little Pony… to Cybertron? To fight fucking Voldemort? Who plots your shit, Billy? Rob Liefeld?”). After a while, it starts to hurt the mind to keep track of what’s happening and why, because if you stop and think about it for even a minute, it doesn’t make any sense at all.

In that same vein, if I told you that the plot of a story was, “You know what would be cool? If the Avengers battled the X-Men and Phoenix – no, not some redhead in a green body stocking, but the actual giant flaming bird, like the one from Battle of The Planets – on – get this – the fucking moon,” you would think that you were overhearing a schoolyard monologue by some kid who was on the first step of a road that’s started with Ritalin and will eventually end with methamphetamine extract.

Welcome to Avengers Vs. X-Men #4: where every plot point was written with a prefix of, “And you know what else would be cool?” regardless as to whether it makes any Goddamned sense at all.

Five Guys On One: Marvel Announces Avengers Vs. X-Men

Yesterday Marvel announced that their big crossover event for 2012 will be: Civil War! Wait – I mean: Avengers Vs. X-Men!

In a streaming press conference with Editor-In-Chief Axel Alonso, SVP of Publishing Tom Brevoort, Senior Editor Nick Lowe, and Marvel’s Architect writers Brian Michael Bendis, Matt Fraction, Jason Aaron, Ed Brubaker and Jonathan Hickman, they gave the gist of what we’re in store for: about 300 clams to read the whole story! Wait, that’s not right…

…the seeds for this story have been growing for a while. When [the 2007 X-Men event] “Messiah CompleX” introduced the so-called “Mutant Messiah,” a little girl with green eyes and red hair named Hope, it raised the obvious question, “Who is she?” and, of course, the specter of the Phoenix.

So if I had to hazard a guess, the Phoenix Force is returning to Earth, probably to infect the little girl who looks just like Jean Grey, if Jean Grey were redrawn by commission for loathsome perverts. The X-Men will want to protect their messiah, The Avengers will want to stop a potential extinction-level threat to Earth, stuff will explode, and dudes will get kicked.

A Whole New 52-Less World

It is Wednesday, and as it has since the inception of this publication almost three months ago…

…this means the end of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives broadcast day.

Which feels like business as usual, but… something is missing… Oh right! There’s not a single issue of DC Comics’s New 52 in the take this week! That explains why my local comic store owner, who knows me by name and asks me to stop asking whoever’s milling around the Archie comics rack if they “wanna see the Old 5-2″, looked at my take this week and only said, “Bomb Queen? No refunds if the pages stick together, Rob. And no, I won’t shake your hand. Or anything else.”

It’s gonna be a weird week with almost no DC books to review, but check it out: we’ve got a new Mark Waid and Marcos Martin issue of Daredevil, Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Rizzo’s Spaceman #2, Neal Adams art and script on Batman: Odyssey, Jonathan Hickman’s followup to FF #600, and a new Angel & Faith from Buffy Season 9!

This is going to be an interesting week; without the new DC books, we’ll have a chance to review some different stuff, and without that New 52 pressure (And since a series of head and chest colds here at the Home Office are starting to dissipate), we should be able to get a new episode of the Podcast in the can.

But before any of that, we need to read the new stuff. So see you tomorrow, suckers!