I haven’t been reading Fantastic Four for the last few days because I didn’t want to bring a ton of old single issues with me on an extended business trip. Decided to use the trip to catch up on a bunch of trades that have been piling up. That includes today’s New Avengers Vol 1, the first of the Complete Bendis Avengers. (I picked up the entire run during Barnes and Noble’s massive Christmas TPB sale.)
Oh right. I was holding off on reading these because I wasn’t sure how to handle them for this project; do I need to read these twice for them to qualify for a rating? The new comics I’ve been reviewing go on the shelf, so they’ll definitely get reread. But they’re so far in the future that there will be enough time in between for me to get a new perspective on them. With these, they either go on the shelf (possible), or they go in the boxes, which means they would come up again in just a few months. No matter how good they end up being, would I want to re-read them again so soon? Eh. I’ll worry about it after I write this.
New Avengers 1-10
The trade also collects Bendis’ Avengers Disassembled story arc, but I’ve already reviewed that here.
Not his finest work, but still not bad. It doesn’t play to to his strengths, which lie in page after page of spellbinding dialog and character growth. Having done zero research on this, I have the feeling that Bendis falters when his stories are more plot-driven. Or perhaps it’s just harder to focus on talking when you’ve got a huge roster of people to juggle. No...that doesn’t scan because his X-Men work had better talking than these Avengers issues as well. Goes on the ideas list of things to actually research.
So the plots of this trade: Electro stages a prison break on The Raft. A random assortment of New York’s finest heroes show up to stem the flood of bad guys. Cap sees it as a sign and recruits them to reconstitute the Avengers. The new team chases down Sauron. The new team chases down the Sentry and deal with his mental blocks. The new team throws amusing one-liners out as all Bendis characters do.
Sauron has never interested me. The Sentry has never interested me. Bendis did nothing to change my mind.
I’m surprisingly not a fan of David Finch. I say ‘surprisingly’ because he’s got that Silvestri-esque Image style that I responded well to in the past. Probably because it’s so close to the wonder that is Jim Lee.
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| Finch |
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| Silvestri |
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| Lee. (The king.) |
Finch overdoes it with the shadows. It gives his art a dark quality that makes it look like it’s always about to rain. It works fine for Batman, not so much for the Avengers.
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| The inker earned his pay that day. |
And then there’s this…
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| What is her body doing??? |
It must have been a different time, because 6 years later, when Milo Manara did it...
...The internets went up in arms over its unrealistic hypersexualization of women. I’m not saying they’re wrong, just that it felt an awful lot like:
Then I feel like a pig because I don’t disagree with the guys here:
I’ll rank these now. If I end up re-reading it, I’ll update it.
Regret buying? No
Would buy again? Yes
Would read again? Yes
Rating: Fine
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