The Comic Book Club: Fantastic Four’s Finale and Avengers #10

  • Share
  • Read Later

EVAN: I’ve been reading this storyline for a bit now, and I keep coming back to how weird it is that the proceedings are centered on a event crossover from over a decade ago. Mind you, it’s all structurally sound: the Hood’s motivation as power-hungry has-been, the way that searching for Infinity Gems lets the big mainline Avengers team break up into smaller units, the ethical considerations and the way that those fit into Bendis’ strengths.

But so much time is spent in talking-head mode that this book doesn’t feel like the mainline Avengers book. As clever and well-executed as it is, this title is where you want the widescreen, epic-feeling storylines to go down. This still feels smaller than it should. It’s all of Bendis’ pet storylines from The Illuminati coming home to roost, but not feeling like they’ll have a larger impact on the Marvel Universe as a whole. That’s not something that you should ever be able to say about the core Avengers title.

(More on TIME.com: The Comic Book Club: Spawn and Casanova)

Bendis’ characters all tend to sound the same, but voice isn’t the problem here. It’s more a issue of scale. His storytelling habits don’t lend theselves to pulling the virtual camera way back to establish scope. He’s an on-the-ground guy at heart, and that’s why I think his writing is still (after all these years) better in Powers and New Avengers than to this kind of storyline. Yet, like Douglas, I like that he keeps pushing himself. I just want him to crack the nut already. If he’s going to continue being one of the chief architects of the Marvel Universe, then I want to see him pull out a different toolset for when it’s time for thing to get B-I-G.

I tend to be a JR, Jr. fan no matter how loose or tight his pencils are. Still, I hate how bulky everyone looks here. I remember in his X-Men days how he could draw a variety of body types. Still, he pulls off really effective acting in the faces and body language. The underwater sequence that Douglas called out, the rooftop talk with Ant-Man and Iron Fist and the scenes inside the plane all show off how Romita can still tell us how the characters feels about each other. I just wish it were all tighter.

(More on TIME.com: The Comic Book Club: Iron Man #500, Supergirl and Wolverine/Jubilee)

DOUGLAS: Evan, you told me I should really be reading the new Heroes for Hire series, so I was looking forward to seeing the entire first issue (from, what, two or three months ago?) reprinted as a backup feature here. It’s the same trick as when the first issue of Chew was reprinted in The Walking Dead: give the struggling new book a boost by including it in the top-selling title. I approve of that as a strategy in general. If Marvel’s going to keep charging $4 an issue for Avengers, it makes it a lot easier to buy if they can throw in a juicy backup like this one.

I’ve recently been catching up with some of Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning’s other Marvel titles from the past few years: for a while, they were concentrating on their own little quasi-weekly cosmic line (Nova, Guardians of the Galaxy, and various Annihilation/War of Kings/Realm of Kings-related miniseries). I think this is the first entirely Earthbound Marvel series they’ve been doing in a while. It’s a nice, solid meat-and-potatoes superhero team book: solid premise, clever end-of-first-issue twist, art (by Brad Walker and Andrew Hennessy) that’s a little cluttered but basically functional. (I’d like to declare a moratorium on figures of superheroes in action extending over panel borders, though: it’s the kind of trick that only works if you do it infrequently.) As for the surprise character who shows up on the last page: my, those Jack Kirby character designs from half a century ago sure are durable—!

From this sample, I’m not totally sold on the new Heroes for Hire as a series, but I can see picking up a few issues for cheap to read on the cross-trainer at the gym. That’s actually how I feel about the rest of the recent Abnett/Lanning Marvel stuff, too: it’s not something I seek out when it comes out, but if it falls into my hands, it’s a fun way to pass the time.

(More on TIME.com: The Comic Book Club: Love & Capes and Power Man & Iron Fist)

EVAN: I’d already gotten H4H #1 when it came out, but it was good to revisit with some distance. I’ve always been a sucker for the ad-hoc strikeforce concept in superhero comics, and this one’s off to a promising start. I love how Misty served as a kind of Greek chorus here, and how the various different missions dovetailed into one larger arc. I wasn’t expecting a done-in-one structure here, but I hope it keeps up. The great joy of these books is how they service under-utilized, cult characters, but the problem is that the characters can remain static because no real development can happen on them when they drop in and drop-out. A few style notes: as a black nerd, I always look at how artists draw black folk, and Walker does a great job here. The lips, especially, on Falcon and Misty Knight are great. An odd thing to mention, I know, but it stuck out to me.

GRAEME: As far as the Heroes for Hire extra goes… Yes, I like the idea of having an entire issue reprinted in the back, especially from a value-for-money standpoint, and this was fun enough. But I’m with Douglas; there’s something about it that I enjoyed, but not enough for me to rush out and catch up on what I’ve missed. It feels like a back-up, if that makes sense, and that’s not a good sign when it’s really a freebie asking you to spend $3.99 per month to keep going.

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. Next