New Avengers #1: Review

An all-new team, featuring a few faces new to the Avengers, comes to us courtesy of Brian Michael Bendis, the brains behind ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN. As with his more famous title, the pluses are interesting stories, detailed characterization, and especially witty dialogue (Spidey is the star in this department, of course). His standard weaknesses are on display as well, stories that move at a snail’s pace (the six-issue “Breakout” would have been wrapped up by Stan Lee—or any other writer from before 1990—in a single issue), and the usual tedious plot revolving around anti-government paranoia, though at least here he doesn’t have any angsty teens to deal with. Finch’s art has the nice realistic feel of the various ULTIMATE series, and he ably meets Bendis’ requirement of big panels with little dialogue. This first story arc serves mainly to bring the team together and it’s a more heroic gathering than the disappointing one in THE ULTIMATES wherein the heroes answered a summons from Nick Fury and sat around bickering until an actual mission came up. Here the team is the result of the ad hoc gathering of heroes responding to an actual crisis, resulting in a more potent and admirable fighting force. The big concession to commercialism is the inclusion of a couple of big names: Spider-Man makes a nice balance for the stalwart Captain America, though Bendis overdoes the whining self-pity a bit. Wolverine, however, is there only due to his star power as Cap’s rationale for why he must be included makes no sense whatever. The new voice and lineup for the Avengers may have attracted some new readers to the title but we’ll have to see if it makes them stay.

Brian Bendis brings Luke Cage from the series he wrote called Alias. Over time he'll incorporate its star Jessica Jones as well. And Spider-Woman also guest-starred in the last arc of that series. Iron Man isn't actually in this issue, but he'll join in from next issue. And Peter put this in the IM Library before my time, so I'll leave it there. In #4 we'll learn that Electro was hired to break out Sauron (Karl Lykos). And in #5 we'll find out it was Savage Land Mutates that did the hiring. And later we'll see that the Skrulls were involved. Matt Murdock was outed as Daredevil in DD (1998) #32-37. During that time Luke Cage started working as his bodyguard (for Jessica Jones' Alias Investigations). Cage is seen here to have a particular beef with Raft prisoner Purple Man. This is due to what he learned Killgrave did to Jessica in Alias #25-28. I believe this is the 1st we hear of Spider-Woman working for SHIELD. (She says she joined a couple of years ago.) Early on she was duped into working for Hydra, and got entangled with SHIELD. But since then she's been seen as a free agent (e.g. a PI).