Mighty Avengers 9, Secret Avengers 2

Mighty Avengers 9
Ewing (w) and Land and Leisten (a) and D'Armata w/ Delgado (c)

Blue Marvel tries to reason with his son Max while his other son Kevin, larger than life, begins to come out of the portal. Kevin is too unstable to bring back into this world and he's primed to explode if he's not sent back into the portal, taking the solar system with him. Max refuses to believe it and thinks that he can stabilize Kevin with just a little more time and so refuses to lower the forcefield. Spectrum becomes gamma radiation and enters She-Hulk to power her up more, giving her the strength to break through the forcefield and, when the two separate again, they manage to force Kevin back into the portal. Max is still furious with his father and Adam is more depressed than ever. Meanwhile, Ronin fights off one of some enemies looking to get their hands on the talisman he took and finally reveals himself to be Blade.

There's a lot of Brashear family backstory here as we see Adam's relationship with Kevin as the two fought off major threats on the down low and we see the circumstances of Kevin's disappearance right at the start of the Marvel Age. It's very clear that Adam loves his family and is full of regret for Kevin's loss, as well as his wife's death and the subsequent anger from Max that separated them. So like, it's easy to see how much he loves them but it's also not hard to extrapolate that maybe he's the problem? Anyway, it's a big moment for Blue Marvel in this issue and a tiny universe-threatening problem defeated but not a ton more to deal with on this front. Ronin is Blade, something probably pretty evident considering how often they kept saying Deathwalkers and, well, not hard to switch that on over to Daywalker. So that's that. Not an awful book and certainly it keeps with the tone of this series so far but there just kind of feels like there isn't a whole lot here this time out.

Secret Avengers 2
Kot (w) and Walsh (a) and Wilson (c)

Coulson and Fury are drifting through space as the Fury (not Fury) drifts into the sun. At the same time, Black Widow, Spider-Woman, and Hawkeye use the SHIELD car to drive to the space station to repair the console to stop more satellites from falling out of the sky and killing more people. All this while an assassin comes to kill Maria Hill for actions she's taken that led to deaths. So it's a busy day for the Secret Avengers as Black Widow, Spider-Woman, and Hawkeye make it to the space station and stop the satellites, MODOK sends a lab rat with a syringe on its back to take out the assassin from the vents, and the saved Maria Hill uses one of MODOK's designs, the nanobot blanket, to have her team rescue Fury and Coulson from impending doom.

Readers of my first review of this series will know that I was not so onboard with it. It felt like it was gratuitous and trying way too hard to be something it simply can't be. Kot himself compared the series to a Michael Bay movie, a Breaking Bad episode, and an Arrested Development episode. I said that in the first review too and I bring it up again here because it felt to me too much like it's trying to be too many things at once all the while trying to be different from other comics but trying to ape some similar styles. It's hard not to read any HAWKEYE influence into books like this one, ones that are maybe more chaotic with more personal risks than universal risks and that's probably not fair. However, it's also hard not to read those influences into THIS book particularly as the first issue took the Hawkeye-face-covers-exposed-genitals and and second issue finds Clint out of costume with bandages all over his face, a la HAWKEYE. I also talked in the first review about not writing this book off because it's so early and I'm going to continue to not write it off. I lodged some of these same complaints against SUPERIOR FOES OF SPIDER-MAN at the start of its series and I think that one has nicely carved out its own little niche. Here's hoping that Kot can do the same thing though I'm maybe secretly a little more skeptical. This one just seems so derivative to kick things off. LOOK, I'll stop talking about it now because I'M NOT WRITING ANYTHING OFF.