Uncanny Avengers 17, Secret Avengers 16

Uncanny Avengers 17
Remender (w) and McNiven and Leisten (a) and L. Martin w/ Ponsor, Milla, and Molinar (c)

With Exitar ready to move, the Avengers and other heroes on Earth (and even some of the villains) work together to try to maintain a forcefield that would hopefully prevent Exitar from destroying the planet. They buy time for Thor to reason with or kill Exitar, whichever works, or for Wasp to destroy the tachyon dam preventing backup from all over time to arrive. For Thor to succeed, he has to defeat Eimin and take back Jarnbjorn. For Wasp to succeed, she needs to kill Grim Reaper, the last remaining Horseman of Apocalypse. Neither is able to do it in time and, despite a valiant fight and the unity of the world below, Exitar strikes, ending the world almost immediately. Thor escapes through a portal to Asgard-space where he grieves and talks to Odin, who believes that Earth brought this on itself with its in-fighting and inability to unify. This Ragnarok is their own.

I want to get this out of the way up front: I like this issue. I don't love it, I'm not ambivalent on it, I like it. There are a lot of good beats, the fighting is well-done, and it moves pretty well. There's a nice little parallel that I really liked too when Eimin tells Thor that the Earth will be destroyed despite the loss of her brother because, for as much as she loved Uriel, she hates Kang more, which is very similar to the time really early on in the Avengers' existence when Kang, having won a one-time prize of life or death for anyone he chose after defeating the Grandmaster with the help of the Avengers, chose to have the Avengers killed rather than saving his dying love Ravonna. Maybe Eimin was a little too similar to Kang for the Avengers' liking. I've also really liked this series as a whole. I think it's done a really great job being self-contained and still telling a gripping story that feels big enough to be an event without all the crossovers and the hype. However, the problem of being a book in a huge universe like this is that you know the Earth can't really be destroyed, you know that Captain America isn't really dead, along with almost the entirety of the superhero community minus mutants. The journey, then, is what's important. I've heard the TV show Luther referred to as a "how-dun-it" rather than your typical detective "who-dun-it" and it's similar to what's happening here. You know, likely, most of the broad strokes of what's going to happen, in the same way I think we can all pretty safely suspect that Planet X, the new home of the mutants which will finally be seen next issue, isn't actually going to end with all mutants off-planet. Earth probably won't be destroyed, all the heroes of the Earth probably aren't dead, and this probably isn't really Ragnarok (though the release of this issue comes at an appropriate time, I tell you what), but we're in this to figure out how we get to the next point. Because of that, I can only "like" this issue, not love it. We know, for all the drama and all the heartbreak this should cause, it's too big to be real because it's part of a full, huge, and very profitable universe. As such, in literary terms, this is only an inciting incident posing as a climax to get us to our actual climax. The problem, of course, is that everyone knows.

Secret Avengers 16
Spencer and Kot (w) and L. Ross (a) and M. Wilson (c)

Mockingbird is still alive and she tracks down Forson in the AIM labs. Forson, still reeling from how quickly everything has gone wrong here, loses the fight to Mockingbird and loses any control over her he may have had while he hopes that her mind will settle on the personality she truly wants it to be, the AIM personality. Meanwhile, Hill's work with MODOK has helped eradicate AIM from SHIELD and they're hammering out the details of his arrangement with SHIELD. She goes to meet with the Secret Avengers members and accepts Hawkeye and Iron Patriot backing out of the team but not before she uses the code word to erase all memory of this job. Finally, Mockingbird, back to herself again all except for a slight headache and healing stab wound, teams with loose ends unsuccessfully wrapped up Winter Soldier and Quake and the three of them decide that they're free agents.

I've had my complaints about this series and this very week in my pre-game I said that it was a book that often lacked focus and got distracted by its own meandering plot, all while choosing it to be on the list in the hopes that it would have some meaningful wrap-up or something that tied everything together neatly, if not expertly. It didn't seem to do either. It feels, like this entire last arc, very much like a book that was cancelled before the writers were ready and thus had to be rushed out without properly closing a lot of doors. Of course, it's also seeing a reboot in the coming months so it's not exactly like it was a big cancellation deal (this re-launch strikes me as weirdest of the entire Marvel relaunch bunch. DAREDEVIL and CAPTAIN MARVEL, for example, both got swept under a little as they both released before Marvel NOW! so a relaunch makes some sense and there was some major status quo change to justify the new starting-on point). So instead, it's just a book that never really found a footing and that ended in one of the weaker endings I've seen for a book, even one that's set to turnaround pretty quickly. Guys, this is a book that had a surprise appearance by Winter Soldier, a character I adore, and I found his part jarring and incomprehensible. That's what this book is like.