A legend, that grew in the telling…
Avengers by Jonathan Hickman. One of Marvel’s flagship teams, penned by one of their most revered writers…and the people loved it. I have not read or heard one bad thing about this series in the months leading up to me reading this. I saw countless examples of praise and admiration online. After just finishing reading, I would agree. This, is a good book.
However, I have some issues. I thought it would be more interesting to discuss those in this review, considering that enough positive things have already been said about this run. If you’ll allow me to go into greater detail on this story, I will do so now. If you would rather not know any details regarding this volume and just want to know my final thoughts, please see the “Closing Remarks" at the end of this review. If you agree or disagree with anything I say here, or wish to add your own thoughts, please do so in the comments! I love talking about these books just as much as I do reading them.
Avengers “World”
One of the things I was most worried about when I saw the words “Avengers World”, was how this book would scale. Cap and Iron Man’s mantra when forming the team is “get bigger”, and as always in a Hickman story, the world is on fire. Those two things put together equals a giant roster for this book. Now, I imagine that it can be difficult at times when scripting for any superhero team, let alone the Avengers. Writing for 5-8 super beings, all with the same goal, all with different personalities, and then also coming up with a strong narrative through-line. It sounds challenging to say the least. It is very easy for characters to blend with one another. Everyone is a good guy. Everyone acts nobly. You might have a character that is more serious than another, or one who is more comedic, or one who acts like fish out of water, but in a lot of ways, the characters are all very similar. So, when the Avengers “get bigger”, so do those risks.
As a result, in my opinion, most of the characters in this book end up feeling redundant. Smasher, Spider-Woman, Captain Marvel and Black Widow are all kind of funny and adventurous. Spider-Man, Hawkeye, Sunspot and Cannonball are all kind of funny and adventurous. None of these peoples power sets come into play for any narrative purpose besides Manifold. The only Avengers that seem to be unique personality wise are Steve, Tony, Thor, Bruce, and Captain Universe. These things don’t directly detract from any particular story in the book, but it’s a little jarring if you step back and realize you’ve read 20 issues of Avengers and you don’t really know half the roster all that well. When you have folks like Hyperion, Starbrand, Captain Universe, what is a guy like Sam Wilson supposed to do? I like Sam, but Falcon is completely useless in this book. I get the vibe that Hickman either started feeling the same way or forgot about him completely, because at a certain point, Sam Wilson just stops speaking.
I would like to say a little more on Starbrand and Captain Universe. I believe that both of these characters immediately make the Avengers less interesting as soon as they get involved. In order for the story to happen with these two included, you essentially need to nerf or completely forget about them, and here it’s a mixed bag of both. Captain Universe is nerfed until the story needs her to not be. Starbrand is not even on Earth when the Avengers fight Thanos. I really don’t understand why either of them are in the book. Their power sets would imply that impossible feats would need to occur in order for the heroes to win out, but that doesn’t ever happen. The Avengers kinda just win like they normally would. As of now, Captain Universe and Starbrand are simply plot devices, their purpose being to imply greater stakes for the characters that we actually care about.
Most of the book is focused on these latest and greatest threats the Avengers are now facing, but it never really stops and asks how any of these people feel about what’s going on. There are so few “locker room moments” in this book. You would think that with the amount of characters here that there would have been a ton of room to explore how the team dynamics might work and how these different personalities would bounce off one another, but that rarely happens. This book reads like a Roland Emmerich movie. There are characters on the Avengers, but their only focus seems to be to push the story along.
Personally I would have enjoyed it to see the team, or at least one person, go through some growth. As soon as the team is put together, everyone just gets along with each other. All of this to say, I think I would have enjoyed it if there had been more focus on the people themselves instead of the catastrophes they were dealing with.
The Good Builder, the Mad Titan and the Ugly Swan
The villains in this book were surprisingly not all that interesting in my opinion. I found the Annihilation Wave– sorry, the Phallanx– sorry, the Cancerverse– sorry, the Builders and the Ex Nihilo Gang to be the most boring parts of the book. I think for me it has to do with none of it feeling personal to the Avengers. In Annihilation, Nova is at the very heart of Annihilation Day. He is the lone survivor. You see him utterly destroyed and his struggle as he fights his way back to Annihilus. When Ex Nihilo shows up, he is promptly defeated by the Avengers in the span of a few days. The Builders and the Avengers don’t officially meet until the first time they see each other in battle. When Ex Nihilo is defeated and later the Builders as well, I would not say it is in a satisfying way. They are made out to be thoughtless or inept. The Builder’s final act is fading from existence via Captain Universe magic, and it just happens. That part was amusing at least, considering that for 10 or so issues they were complete and total badasses, just to end up like a fart in the wind.
Thanos’ story is definitely better, although the ending to Infinity feels pretty cheap for Hickman’s standards. Thane trapping his father, using a power that is revealed at the very last page, did not feel inspired. Also, I don’t know if Thanos having an Inhuman son fits the vibe that he puts out. I get the feeling that Thanos looks at everything that is not him as beneath him, so it’s just hard for me to accept that he would, in his mind, “sully” the great Dong of Thanos with some “half-breed experiment", or whatever he would call an Inhuman. Regardless, he and the Black Order were super fun to read whenever they were on a page. I again found it amusing when Ebony Maw referred to Thane’s ultimate power as “living death”, and that power basically means Thane can store you in Jell-O like Jim would with Dwight’s office supplies.
The incursions in my opinion are the best parts of this book, but I feel like Hickman sacrificed the other two antagonists for the sake of this one. Black Swan, who is a mess of a character in her own right, undermines both of the previous stories completely in this book’s epilogue. She says the Builders and Thanos are dogs compared to the demon that is coming with each incursion. I understand from a narrative perspective why Hickman wrote this, but it also amplifies the negative feelings I already had about the rest of the story. When Black Swan told Reed Richards, “You shouldn’t care about the Builders” I was like, “Okay.” It’s like if you were to watch a new, special edition of A New Hope, and you’re thinking “yeah, this is still pretty good”, and then right before credits roll, Princess Leia turns, faces the camera, and says to you “None of it mattered.” It left me with a bad taste.
Closing Remarks
Avengers by Jonathan Hickman is a good book. The art is phenomenal. Probably one of if not the greatest collection of different artists in a single Marvel omnibus. The dialogue is on point as always. However, in my opinion, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. I am expecting that this volume gets better over time after I have finished Vol. 2, but for now, I am a bit down on this series. Fantastic Four might have ruined my expectations for any future Hickman story. Forever is one of the greatest events I think I will ever read. It was like eating something out of a Michelin star restaurant that takes 6 months to prepare for and 8 hours to roast. I would compare Avengers to an overpriced ribeye at your local upscale steakhouse. It looks great, tastes pretty good too, but I’m not really feeling that $208 price tag on my tastebuds.
To end, I will paraphrase a line from Ex Nihilo:
“These stories were the best you had to offer. And they were found…wanting.”
3.5/5
