Avengers 24, Origin II 1

Avengers 24
Hickman (w) and Ribic, Larroca, Deodato, and Guice (a) and White, Mounts, F. Martin, and L. Martin (c)

It's a new page for the Avengers as they celebrate their victories in INFINITY (and their total lack of deaths! Props to Hickman for not capping this event with any deaths) before being reminded that they're the Avengers and that they can't take days off because a time traveler from the year 3030 might show up at any moment to warn them of their impending doom thanks to a rogue planet on a collision course with Earth. With the help of the Iron Man derived time traveler, they build a device that allows the two worlds to exist on more or less the same plane but the message is clear; someone launched this planet at them and they likely won't just stop at that. The time traveler also gives Tony a special new weapon in private and explains that she's doing it because he's going to need help soon and that everyone he knows is going to be trying to kill him. Bum bum buuuuuum.

Pretty neat little book for the holidays. People should at this point realize that I'm a fun of the occasional hang-out issue where the team gets to unwind just a little bit, even if it's only for a handful of pages before a giant new threat emerges. I like that the team realizes the enormity of their success, even if it comes with a heavy weight still for Tony, who is still hiding his Illuminati business and for people like Steve who is never done working. There's a great contrast there between the party going on up at the top of Avengers tower and the planning Steve and Tony have going on downstairs. Tony still has the Illuminati business on his mind so he's not exactly leaping to party (despite his typical mode) and Steve probably never feels quite right at a party. One of the things that's great about a well-written Steve Rogers is that he's still sometimes fun and can be funny but, when he's not leading people into battle, he's not really a hang-out kind of guy. This issue was a nice way to change pace just a bit as the seriousness of NEW AVENGERS starts to bleed into AVENGERS as we turn the corner into All-New Marvel NOW! Technically the label for this review should have been AVENGERS 24.NOW but I've made a conscious decision to not include those point-words things. Kind of weird. It's a big year coming and many of the books on sale in January will have to do with the new Marvel branding. This isn't a bad lead-in for it.

Origin II 1
Gillen (w) and Adam Kubert (a) and F. Martin (c)

After the events of the first ORIGIN, we're sent back into the woods to see a still feral Wolverine living with a family of wolves as he makes his way in the natural world. There's some amount of narration from a third person omniscient narrator, someone who's able to tell us that wolves stay together as a pack not out of fear or particular survival instinct but because they want to. It also tells us that they don't typically accept others into their pack but relate that this particular pack has accepted the wolfish man in as he has spent so much time protecting and helping them that he's essentially a part of the family. There's a polar bear lurking around that Wolverine has sort of communed with and there's a lone wolf watching with a peculiar red marking on its forehead. With Wolverine out hunting one day, the polar bear finds its way to the home of his wolf family and brutally kills them all. Wolverine returns too late to help and fights the bear in a battle that kills them both. Of course, being dead doesn't stop Wolverine from getting back up and killing the lone wolf when it comes to gnaw at his carcass. The final shot of the issue shows a wounded and mourning Wolverine behind the body of the polar bear which has a metal tag on it, asserting that the bear is property of Nathaniel Essex, Mr. Sinister.

ORIGIN was a really seminal work for Wolverine fans and one that went a long way to giving a fan favorite character a true backstory. It's not often that a retconned backstory really lands with fans and is so readily adopted but ORIGIN certainly was. Why not go back to that trough to make another hit and to put a new spin on a character who, by this point, we've seen almost entirely too much of? Wolverine is one of the characters like Spider-Man who is everywhere in the Marvel Universe (interestingly, in AVENGERS 24, Cap removed both of them from the team, citing Wolverine's recently lost healing factor and Spider-Man's erratic behavior) and given the amount of minis and on-goings he's had, it feels like we know all there is to know about the character. Kieron Gillen and Adam Kubert set out to prove that wrong as they go back to the end of ORIGIN and start from there, with Gillen revisiting his own history as he pulls out Mr. Sinister, one of his biggest villains from his run on UNCANNY X-MEN. I don't think that Marvel could have chosen a more interesting writer to take a spin on Wolverine; as I said, this is now a character who we know a TON about because he's everywhere all the time. If anyone's able to find new ground, it's going to be Kieron Gillen. Adam Kubert's art in this issue (as well as Frank Martin's colors) is amazing and particularly haunting in the full page panel of the bear with the dead wolves around him. The writing is somewhat minimal in this issue but the story is very clearly there and our character is very clearly established. The art does the rest of the work and Gillen again does a great job knowing when to tell and when to show. The book is a bit longer than a standard book (reaching about 30 pages) which may justify (kind of) the five dollar price point but, in truth, it's probably because they know it has the ability to be a real hit. Is it worth the money? Yeah, probably. Really gorgeous book with some A+ characterization to kick our story off.