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.

A+X 5, All-New X-Men 8

A+X 5
Iron Fist + Doop: K. Immonen (w) and LaFuente (a) and Campbell (c)
Loki + Mr. Sinister: Gillen (w) and Bennet and Morales (a) and Charalampidis (c)

A+X stories are meant to have little substance to them, which makes them a little hard to review. Especially the Iron Fist and Doop one in this issue. There's a basic story wherein Doop and Iron Fist are trying to get back some sort of friend of Doop's, which is all kind of hard to follow because Doop speaks in an untranslated language that Iron Fist can apparently understand (or at least pretend to understand) and that the reader can't. My being unimpressed by Doop, who everyone in comics seems to love, continues unabated.

The second story is a little more meaty, with Loki teaming up with Mr. Sinister to steal back a genetic sample (hair) of Loki from Dr. Doom, who was trying to clone a Loki of his own to match Ragnarok, the Mr. Fantastic-created Thor clone from Civil War and currently appearing in Dark Avengers. Sinister doesn't trust Loki but wants the the DNA for himself; as the foremost geneticist in history, he feels he can push homo superior a little past where it is now with some Asgardian mix. As Loki allows him to take the hair, he reveals to the audience that Doom would have likely been able to make a clone, given enough time, but that Sinister will find he bit off more than he can chew because, as opposed to even Thor, there are things in Loki that go far beyond his philosophies. Interesting idea. That's it. That's all I've got.

All-New X-Men 8
Bendis (w) and Marquez (a) and Garcia (c)

I'm a little burned out on this series already. I came out of this one trying to think of what I was going to write and nothing sprung to mind. I guess the idea that Jean is willing to read and alter people's minds is a big step. Everything else was inconsequential. I don't know, I'm still skeptical of the whole concept of this book so I kind of can't get myself worked up over anything that happens in it. This whole issue, too, felt like another step sideways instead of forward. We know Warren wants to go back to his time and that he's scared by whatever has happened to him in the future that has seemingly erased his whole personality and left it as Angel. We also know that the Avengers and X-Men are tense right now. I don't know, it all just seems like we never move ahead, we move to the side at every potential step. I think that's, to an extent, something that happens in comics. You have a really long-form medium that requires you to put out a book every month or so and you're eventually going to stutter step a little bit. However, since issue two or so I feel like we've been stutter-stepping. I talked about, in my review of Venom 31, that an issue without much action to move forward is great sometimes. It's necessary. You can't just keep throwing action at us because it's going to lead us to a spot where action is all we know so you have to keep upping that action or you stagnate with the action you have. This is kind of the opposite of that. All-New X-Men has been avoiding action at seemingly every turn. Even when there is action (like in this issue, Warren and Angel fight Hydra at Avengers tower), it's action that doesn't push story along. Like I said, even before this issue, we knew Warren wanted to go home and we knew that he was afraid of how he became the Angel he sees in the present. We don't need a fight scene to prove that. Then Bendis spends a couple pages (that feels like several) with Kitty and Iceman mocking Cap and Beast with a fake conversation. Then Scott says something. Then they're all blown away when Jean alters Warren's mind to keep him in the present. And that's where we are. If they had put that in a recap for a new issue, without releasing this issue, I would have believed it had already happened. I would have believed that I simply didn't remember the specifics but, as all the foundations were definitely there, it must have happened and I forgot about it. That's not a measure of a good comic.





ALSO: Blogger is having some troubles right now, it seems, so I may put off my last review of the week until tomorrow, when it will hopefully stop giving me error messages.