Uncanny Avengers 13, Young Avengers 11

Uncanny Avengers 13
Remender (w) and Acuña (a and c)

Captain America, Havok, and Wasp are fighting Banshee, which is only finished when Jan, realizing that his armor is too strong, flies into his mouth and shoots out his vocal cords. Still, it deafened Cap for the time being, leaving their group a little worse for wear. Jan flies ahead to scout out the twins' base and runs into Sentry while Cap and Havok fight off other defenses and realize that Immortus may have hinted to the twins' powers being drawn from one another. Meanwhile, Thor begins plotting his return home and Wolverine is tortured by Daken, told that Red Skull has footage of Daken's death at Wolverine's hand and that he plans to showcase that footage, giving more reasons to hate and fear mutants. After Daken leaves again with the twins, Sunfire and Rogue show up and learn from Wolverine about the twins' plan for Wanda, vowing to stop it. However, that plan might not be quite as it seems as Wanda reveals to Simon that she intends to bring forth the mutants but she'll do it as an army to help take down the twins.

Plenty going on here as all of our storylines start circling their way back to one. There's a lot of really good plot happening but Remender has taken great care to make sure that the book is still, first and foremost, driven by its characters and its ideas. Despite the inherent darkness of this story and its numerous villains, Remender throws in some nice romance bits, including Havok and Wasp's budding relationship (with some more really fun lines from a shouting Cap) and Wanda and Simon's rekindled romance hot on the heels of his immense trust in her, something Wanda could not really expect from anyone else at this point. Remender writes a solid Wolverine here too, one who is perhaps more broken than we've ever seen. He's being tortured by the son he killed, who is both breaking him physically and emotionally as he tells him that it's his fault the mutants are going to be pushed away despite all of his attempts to follow Xavier's dream. Wolverine is kind of the ultimate tough guy in the Marvel Universe so when a writer is really able to capture this kind of broken piece of him, it shines through in a rather big way. It's obviously a well you can't go to too many times for fear that it loses that meaning but it certainly pays off here. There are a lot of directions this book can go and all of them are interesting and seem like they'll improve what's already a good story. Great work out of this book.

Young Avengers 11
Gillen (w) and McKelvie, Anka, and Norton (a) and Wilson (c)

The still-assembled Young Avengers are in the course of their usual journeys when Loki gets a notification from an alarm system he has in place telling him that something is going wrong back home. In this case, he immediately realizes that it's Teddy ending up back in New York. He tries to call Teddy but reaches Leah instead, who reveals that Mother has Teddy and is planning to ruin reality by sending all of the evil-universe versions of the Young Avengers into the 616 before coming in herself. Loki informs the rest of the team of Mother's plan and comes up with a couple of solutions. The first and most possible, he thinks, is getting Billy to use his magic to transform Loki into a conduit that can physically produce more magic. Billy hesitantly agrees and the plan actually works surprisingly well, transforming Loki's body into one that is more adult (more in the ranges of 20-30, in the very least, and with what can only be described as a Tom Hiddleston kind of bent). However, it doesn't work out as planned in the sense that, though he's strengthened a bit by it, he doesn't have full magic back yet. Now, marred once again by distrust from the YA who all believe this was Loki's true plan, he has to convince them to help get Billy to the Demiurge state, the kind of ruler of all state we saw of him in one universe. With that kind of power, even if he only holds it for a moment, he can wrest back the power Mother stole from him and is currently using in her home dimension, giving them a shot at stealing back Teddy and closing her link to this universe. But can they bring Billy back from such a show of power?

Very, very complicated plot. There are elements of magic within magic here and, frankly, magic by itself is hard enough to get a grasp on. Still rather interesting and full of nice twists and turns. Like Remender's Uncanny Avengers above, the story, no matter how big and dire, gives way to character as it's needed. Young Avengers, I would say, presents it differently in that it's a story about characters with some plot getting in there occasionally where Uncanny Avengers is a story first with the characters adding a necessary element. It's hard to describe really well because there is such a strong focus on characters with both books but it seems they take a greater role here, even with the size of the story expanding. Everyone has at least one big moment here, with Loki and Billy obviously getting the lion's share. America gets her moments more sparingly, mostly in the way that she talks and the role she's established for herself in this team. David calls in (most impressively) a rather formidable battalion in the form of his X-Men connections and their own various connections to help the team with their problems. Kate has a nice moment with Noh-Varr and a kind of self-doubting but somewhat heroic moment as she reveals that she's afraid to take part in the mission in case, like Mother intimated, she's compromised in some way (it's waved away when Noh-Varr reveals he, too, is 21 and having no problems). Noh-Varr checks some old messages from ex-girlfriends and admits to himself that his beard isn't fooling anyone. Even Teddy, in a very limited role, appears as a chair at one point, which is interestingly something I didn't know he could do, even if it's very much forced on him. Interesting moments for everyone. Looking forward to where this goes, as ever I am. Amazing art, of course, is a staple here.