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SNAP JUDGEMENTS
by Randy Lander
AVENGERS #501
"Chaos, Part Two of Four"
Not Recommended (2/10)
You know, I've got a lot of respect for [writer Brian Michael] Bendis, I've become a fan of [penciler David] Finch and honestly, I don't expect the review to change a lot of minds one way or the other. But my previous review of
Avengers #500 was sort of lukewarm, and that's just not negative enough for this storyline, which is going to do long-term "Clone Saga" style damage to one of my favorite groups of characters. Really, Bendis on Avengers never sounded like a good fit, but even in my most cynical moments, I never thought his story would make me wish that Chuck Austen had stayed on the book instead. Because at least the damage Austen was doing was contained to a few characters, while Bendis is writing a version of the Avengers that bears no resemblance to the characters I know and then using that out-of-character behavior to justify a destructive overhaul of the team.
I took issue in my review of
Avengers #500 with the very premise of this story, that Bendis's story was going to revolve around the destruction of the team. It's not the story that this book handles very well by past history, and it's not handling it well now. It is also very, very easy to destroy, to have people die and to "shake things up," while it's a lot more difficult to create something new. Bendis has created any number of new things, and in the past his destruction of characters or relationships has been balanced by a creation of something new, but so far, it looks like this is just a deck-clearing exercise for something completely different that probably could have existed without the destruction of this team. Which, combined with the "Who will die next?" scoreboard on the Marvel website and the way the book is being hyped, by both company and creator, makes this look like destruction for cheap shock value. And really, everyone involved should be better than that.
Even if you grant the premise, though, there are huge problems in the execution. First of all, Bendis is undoing very recent storylines here, which suggests a sudden jerk of the steering wheel in another direction rather than a careful integration of the characters. Tony as Secretary of Defense? Nah, ditch that. The new Captain Britain? Nah, off her. Now, I didn't like either of these things, I'm not particularly sad to see them go, but given that each one was set up in extended storylines within the past six months or so, it seems insulting to the audience that bought them so recently to basically pull a "do over" in the pages of Avengers.
Second of all, a lot of what Bendis is doing here is character based, based on how the characters interact with one another. And you know what? It's becoming quite clear that Bendis doesn't know these characters. For example, he sees Hank as a guy who hit Janet Pym while he was suffering a nervous breakdown years and years ago, and nothing more. He doesn't seem to know the suffering and regret and efforts to change that Hank Pym went through (including a very near suicide), nor does he acknowledge that in recent years, they had become a fairly happy couple again, and not the couple filled with resentment and making one another miserable that Pym describes here. That's not even mentioning that ascribing unforgivable, irredeemable behavior to a character when the blame lies more with one writer setting it into the character's history seems silly. The conversation between Hawkeye, Cap, Falcon and Iron Man is just painful, as Bendis attempts to sell us on these teammates of long standing having bitchy fights like you'd see on
Melrose Place and coming apart, rather than coming together. Not to mention saying that "they had it coming" because they weren't more proactive, while ignoring the important meta-context that the Avengers aren't proactive because that's the way it has been in the Marvel Universe, not because the characters have been doing anything wrong but because in their paradigm, that's the way things are. Basically, almost every page of this book misses the point of the Avengers by a mile, which would be fine if it weren't the foundation upon which Bendis was resting his understanding of the team and the direction of his story.
The @#$%& of it all is that the creative team is better than this. David Finch does some spectacular work here, and even the stuff I don't like, such as the monstrous She-Hulk, is dictated by the story and not by an unfortunate artistic choice. The coloring is a touch dark, but given [colorist Frank] D'Armata's previous work, I'm willing to write that off to a bad printing job rather than a deliberate choice to make the whole thing too murky and brown. Certainly Bendis's dialogue has the same distinctive ring that it always has, it just sounds wrong and often uninformed coming out of these characters' mouths. It'd be kind of like having Mamet writing
Star Trek... clearly, there's talent there, but it's just so mis-applied.
Email Randy Lander (
randy@thefourthrail.com ) comments about this review.