Avengers Assemble 24, Mighty Avengers 7

Avengers Assemble 24
DeConnick and W. Ellis (w) and Buffagni (a) and Redmond (c)

Anya, detached from Wolverine after a rather harrowing day with him, returns to Avengers Tower to try to figure out the next step. She gets the help of Tony Stark in this next phase (and gets lectured about the studying and preparation that comes with being a superhero) and they trace Covington to a couple of different smaller AIM hideouts in her strike on AIM. In the process, they manage to recover Anya's teacher, the one whose disappearance kicked off this whole event, and bring him to the hospital. They also realize that his new Inhuman trait has to do with being invisible to machines (Iron Man can't see him through his armor) and determine that Covington has begun to simulate this trait and is using it in her attack on AIM. Now, as she moves to make a big strike, Anya meets with Cap, finally, and he calls the rest of the Avengers in to ready them to move against Covington.

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE is ending soon, cancelled likely because of sales and because its successor, AVENGERS WORLD, is already on bookshelves and in long boxes, but this arc is just one of the reasons that's a pretty sad cancellation. I've long said that AVENGERS is the "oh god, you're in pretty deep" Avengers title, with Hickman's intense, very rigidly plotted and often confusing (though good) writing and stories where AVENGERS ASSEMBLE is more the starter-Avengers book or, barring that because it sounds condescending, the more fun-Avengers book. However, this arc is playing at a bigger game. It's showing us Anya, Spider-Girl, sure, but it's going deeper and showing us the roots of these superheroes. It's showing us the way these individual heroes act and move and think and plot and avenge on their own and it's giving us their individual styles (while explicitly giving it to the young hero Anya) before rejoining them all to show the Avengers in action. In a nutshell, it is the heart and soul of an Avengers team, it is the "Earth's Mightiest Super-Heroes team up to fight the foes that no one of them could fight alone" mentality hard at work, and it is paying off. It's going to be sad to see this one go for a lot of different reasons but this arc is one of those arcs that is certainly fun to read, worth reading while it's happening, but really a deeper and more profound arc to look back on afterwards, or even during. Really good stuff and really clearly a great Avengers book.

Mighty Avengers 7
Ewing (w) and Schiti (a) and D'Armata (c)

Ava has learned, intercepting Falcon's call to Cage, that Gideon Mace is out on the streets somewhere, inexplicably freed from prison as a hero to anti-cape Americans who gained particular prominence with the movement during Civil War (though I don't believe he had a part in it, this issue retcons the idea that people, at the height of hating superheroes, took to this man). Now Ava's out to find and kill Mace while her Mighty Avengers brethren are out to stop her from becoming a murderer and inciting a war with Mace's supporters, who have formed the "American Policy Research Initiative," an organization that has set out to essentially buy politicians and form its own militias to counteract laws with which it doesn't agree. It's a delicate process for the Mighty Avengers to try to remove Mace from the situation without getting him killed or inciting some sort of war with these guys made more difficult when Ava turns her body over to the Tiger God to allow him to hunt and run free on Mace, making her loads more powerful and more ruthless, less willing to listen to reason. She makes her way to the APRI and attacks, which She-Hulk claims is grounds enough for the APRI to sue them, but they manage to subdue her with a little subterfuge and some well-placed hits. It's not over so quickly for the Avengers, though, as Mace calls the police on them and immediately makes it all look like an attack on him and his group in front of news organizations and the cops and everyone.

The power of one good issue or one good arc cannot be overstated. I was very luke(cage)warm on this book to start because it immediately got off to the sort of "silly captions and silly moments mask a serious book" stuff I tend to take umbrage with for some reason or another (I mostly just hate incongruous tones; there are ways to add humor or levity to serious matters without making it so blatantly obvious, that's one of the keys to writing). It carried on for about five issues with me not really getting anything else out of the book but last issue saw a big shift for me. Things started to actually happen and the tone really started to solidify a little bit better. This issue continues that trend (although it still does the slightly irritating caption-humor I have such a, probably irrational, distaste for) and keeps the book pretty focused, giving it an enemy and putting it into political and physical turmoil along with really helping to establish our heroes. Pretty good stuff out of this one and I can only hope that it continues this way (like the slightly slower turnaround in the DEADPOOL series after an unbelievably hated first arc).