Mighty Avengers 8, Secret Avengers 1

Mighty Avengers 8
Ewing (w) and Schiti (a) and D'Armata (c)

The Mighty Avengers have managed to get away from Gideon Mace and his militantly conservative hate group but there is still talk of a lawsuit given White Tiger's attack on the headquarters. Now the team has brought Ava to Blue Marvel's undersea base Kadesh in the hopes that they can find some way to remove the Tiger God's influence on her. Before they're able to come up with anything or summon any magic specialists, Blue Marvel is called away by a threat from WESPE, a European sort of AIM style group with a focus on providing scientists with money and resources in exchange for deadly tech down the line. Blue Marvel, She-Hulk, and Spectrum go to find out what the alert in the Pacific is about. Blue Marvel is particularly worried as it seems to be occurring in an area that serves as a gateway to the Neutral Zone, a dimension he found long before and apparently where one of his sons, Kevin, is trapped. Dr. Max Brashear, Adam's other son, has teamed up with WESPE in the hopes that he can find a way to bring Kevin back. As you may imagine, he has some serious problems with his father. He traps Spectrum and She-Hulk in a forcefield strong enough even light can't get in or out and then he uses his volcano base to rupture the space between the world and the Neutral Zone, hoping to bring Kevin back. Meanwhile, the Tiger God has appeared to Ava and demanded answers for her interference in his hunt. She reams him out, explaining to him exactly how feared tigers aren't in this day and age and daring him to kill her, seeing where that would leave him. When he realizes he can't, she demands he give her all his power, which he seems to do. She wakes up again, apparently better than ever.

There are some interesting things going on in this book and with this team. I don't know a ton about Blue Marvel but he's got a pretty good story and an intriguing conceit. White Tiger, too, is showing a lot of promise in this book. The interactions between the team are compelling, at some points anyway, and sometimes interesting enough in and of themselves. Still there are a few too many jokey-jokes and tonal shifts in the writing that throw me off. I really cannot get past jokey introduction captions (this will come back in the next review too, guys. Look forward to it, if not to the next book). On top of that, Max, or Dr. Positron as he's calling himself, is a little more comical a villain than I think this book needs at its outset. I understand the appeal of writing him as somewhat childish; he is the child of Blue Marvel and his personality couldn't be more different than his father's. Regardless, he borders on silly and it makes him a little hard to take seriously. This book, too, is already more concerned with the rest of the Marvel Universe than almost any book in the modern era, making references to a handful in just one issue. Again, I understand the point of that and I get that Ewing found easy enough ways to reference books like Blue Marvel's initial series, YOUNG AVENGERS, and his own LOKI: AGENT OF ASGARD, just like I get that Marvel is a business and likes to get fans interested in those sorts of tie-ins, but sometimes it feels a little cynical and a little too hitting us over the head. In a way, it's either a book that's good in spite of itself or a book that's not quite good despite itself. Tricky, tricky book to get behind.

Secret Avengers 1
Kot (w) and M. Walsh (a) and M. Wilson (c)

The Secret Avengers are back up and running on Maria Hill's watch as her new and uneasy alliance with MODOK begins. For her team's first mission, she's sent Coulson and Fury Jr. (gotta start referring to him like that as Nick Fury Sr. is set to reappear in the upcoming ORIGINAL SIN) to space to investigate a SHIELD satellite having some troubles while Black Widow and Spider-Woman spend their day relaxing, something apparently important to Black Widow. They've gone to get massages and gelato and to test out some weaponry at a place Natasha knows well. Unfortunately for them, though, they're interrupted by a naked Hawkeye on the run from AIM (not a single person knows why he's naked except that Kot and the team wanted to parrot the Hawk-blocked bit from HAWKEYE which they do not once but twice in what might be the cheapest move in the entire...you know what, we'll get into it later). As they escape AIM in Natasha's car, Hawkeye naked and the two women covered with towels, they're called by Hill to assist Coulson and Fury Jr., who are dealing with the cybiote and Captain Britain foe the Fury in space.

Guys. I would have words with this book. I've been a little skeptical of this reboot of SECRET AVENGERS, coming, as we all know, very shortly after the end of the last volume. I didn't think the last volume was great and I think that the last arc of it was something of an unfulfilling mess. Ales Kot had a big hand in wrapping that volume and now kicks off this volume promising to take readers somewhere they've never gone before with something fresh and new. And yet, he also describes the book as a Michael Bay directed episode of Breaking Bad by way of Arrested Development, thereby referencing three things this book will be similar to instead of just being its own thing. This is just issue one so I'm trying not to be too judgmental about it but it's kind of hard. In most cases, I think I'd rather a first issue swing for the fences and miss because at least it tried something. The last thing you want is for your first issue to be boring. I think we've had a couple of those recently (sadly, I kind of have to point to ALL-NEW INVADERS and ALL-NEW X-FACTOR for those examples, though I have hopes for both books). However, eye-rollingly unimaginative and derivative isn't exactly a great swing either and that's rather what this was. Not only did we get a naked Hawkeye for literally no reason after he, trying to evade AIM, breaks into what happens to be the same exact Russian baths in New York that Natasha and Jessica are at. Then they do the now infamous "Hawkeye-face comic-code-style covering Hawkeye's genitals" to him and then, later on, they cover what would be a Spider-Woman exposed breast with a Spider-Woman face because apparently the joke that really only worked when it was new back in HAWKEYE was hilarious enough to work twice in this issue. It's all just ridiculous and derivative and that's not even getting INTO the fact that it often seems like there are maybe five people who I've seen write Natasha Romanoff and have managed to create a believable character for her backstory and this doesn't seem to be one of them. I'm cutting myself off here because, again, it's the first issue and I don't want to throw the series entirely away based on one issue but I will tell you that we're not far from it. OH, and Kot spent some time having Maria Hill and MODOK discuss Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias" and Shelley's contemporary Horace Smith because literature debates are the way we expect Hill and MODOK to talk and aren't condescending at all (Kot would go on to talk about Sylvia Plath in his opening letters-page column because UGH). OKAY, I'm seriously done now. Join me later for me being angry at ALL-NEW X-MEN because I don't know why I scheduled the books I'm most looking forward to for the Thursday through Saturday stretch.