Back To Square One: Avengers #31 Review

Brian Michael Bendis is soon leaving the Avengers titles after extended runs writing them going back around eight years. That’s a lot of story, including an immeasurable amount of character development, plot twists, and universe building. Most of it good and compelling, some of it not, but no matter what you think of the years of storytelling, you have to admit that it’s had an impact.

Or at least you have to admit that it had an impact. Because regardless of tenure or reach, Bendis does not own the Avengers. And now that he is moving on to Marvel’s X-Men titles, it is now apparently time to take some of the most impactful events of his time at the wheel… and roll them back to the 2003 status quo, just in time for the next guy to take over, do some stuff, and inevitably roll that back when a new person wants to play with the old toys.

In short, welcome to Avengers #31, the first part of the End Times storyline, and what appears to be the final retcon of a couple of the remaining epic events of Bendis’s Avengers story. He appears to be taking this final opportunity to glue the heads back on the last couple of action figures he mangled while he had custody of the toy box… and while it is giving me a temporary feeling of, “Goddammit, again?”, it is probably a wise long-term choice for Marvel… and one that could wind up being satisfying if executed well, if yet another example of showing that, in the comics world, Thomas Wayne, Martha Wayne and Uncle Ben are the unluckiest sons of bitches in the world.

It is the immediate aftermath of Avengers Vs. X-Men, and the Avengers are taking some R & R. Everyone is napping, boning each other, or if you’re Captain America, enjoying a hot cup of Tony Stark’s imported monkey asshole coffee (I’m guessing, but it seems like the kind of crank Stark would buy), relaxing in front of the TV and watching desperate civilians left homeless and ruined by the massive battle with the X-Men scream impotently at cameras for answers. I, personally, prefer The Daily Show, but I’m not in a position to, you know, put down my coffee cup and assist people my actions have left destitute.

But alas, The Avengers are unable to enjoy an extended period of rest and refuge from their – shall we call them “innocent victims?” – as former Avenger Wonder Man, known in the 80s as having the most dapper leisure suit costume in comics and known more recently for attempting to destroy the Avengers for perceived crimes against humanity, comes crawling back to ask for forgiveness before subduing the Red Hulk and vowing he would earn his way back into the team’s good graces. One would think a better way to accomplish this would be to assist the desperate people left with nothing after Avengers Vs. X-Men so that Tony Stark can catch up on Angry Birds, as opposed to knocking out a Hulk, but what the hell do I know? In the meantime, the team is further roused from their torpor by an emergency Avengers signal from Inner Space – the home of the Micronauts, for those born after the 1970s…

So we have a couple of things going on, the first being the tone deafness of literally showing the Avengers fucking around doing nothing while people scream for their blood on television. On one hand, this is nothing new; Manhattan has been systematically destroyed every summer since at least the Civil War event, and the status quo is for the damage to just be carefully ignored and assumed repaired in the background while the heroes go about their business. But showing Captain America sipping a cup of crank and watching scenes of destruction on TV – scenes that include a reference to Wakanda, a city ruled by an Avenger, that was decimated during Avengers Vs. X-Men, pulls back the curtain and makes it look like The Avengers do, in fact, just break shit and go home. I found it impossible to look at that panel of Cap, sipping on a “#1 Avenger” mug, without imagining him thinking, “Boy, I wonder if Black Panther has started digging mass graves, or if he’s still systematically euthanizing the wounded… damn, this is good coffee!” The whole sequence just felt wrong, and if I don’t see Black Panther tell The Avengers to fuck off and do their own Goddamned dirty work when the next event rolls around, this will have been a big misstep on Bendis’s part.

But what we also have are what appears to be the final reintroduction of Wonder Man and Wasp back into the fold. Now, Wonder Man is only slightly problematic,  even though he, over the past few years, went apeshit nuts and straight-out attacked The Avengers, screaming that they should disband due to the bodies they’ve left in their wake, there has also been an implication that he is malfunctioning , and that his opinion might not be his fault. Which is a good enough way to reintegrate him into the team, but the problem is that part of what made Wonder Man’s attacks interesting was that he had a point. During Bendis’s run, we’ve seen Hawkeye, Vision, Wasp, Bucky-as-Cap, and Thor all killed – some more than once – along with countless hundreds of civilians caught in various crossfires (hi, Black Panther!). Having a character not only disavow that kind of track record, but publicly proclaim that the team’s concept is flawed at its center, was Goddamned interesting… particularly since no one has ever really proved him wrong. So while it remains to be seen if Bendis will actually reintegrate Wonder Man onto the team, if he does, unless we see an articulate reason why Wonder Man now thinks The Avengers is a worthy endeavor (beyond, “I had Ion Spacticity”), the move will be a letdown.

And then there’s Wasp. I know that we don’t know that the woman with a covered face in Inner Space is actually Wasp, but we’re talking about a woman in a microscopic world with an Avengers ID. Who do you think it is, Gwen Stacy? Wasp was apparently killed in Secret Invasion, and her death was a major factor in the rehabilitation of Hank Pym from long-time half-crazy wife-beater to front and center hero again. And while it is certainly not uncommon for Marvel to bring their heroes back from the dead, the return of Wasp would mean that every character death (I think) that Bendis presided over on his Avengers books will have been retconned. And part of me wants to recoil from that in horror, as it means that all the stories I’ve enjoyed (or even hated) since the early 2000s will have had their impact diminished – seeing a longtime, even minor, character sacrifice herself loses its impact when she just traipses back four years later…

…but this is comics, and the fact of the matter is that, when it comes to the Big Two’s characters,  they are corporately owned action figures in a metaphorical toy box. And if someone thinks there’s a good story that will make a buck based around a dead character? They ain’t staying dead. Which sucks on one level, because it means death has no ultimate meaning in these stories, and I almost invariably recoil when the resurrection happens… but I, and most readers, almost inevitably forget about that when the next good story with that character rolls along. And while I recognize that it only helps future writers to have these characters available, well, this story is going to live and die based on how well Bendis executes the retcon. And for me, it is damned hard to do it well. Ed Brubaker nailed it with Bucky’s resurrection in Winter Soldier… while Spider-Man’s Brand New Day will always be nothing but a rotten event horizon that the character slithered through to eventually give us good Dan Slott stories (We’ll see how The Superior Spider-Man falls on this continuum).

Art-wise, this is an interesting looking book, because it’s handled by two artists: Brandon Peterson and Mike Mayhew. Based on the visuals, it appears one of them did the pieces set in Inner Space, while the other did the Avengers Tower-based parts, and the looks are quite different (and no, I don’t know who did which). The Inner Space stuff is finely detailed and lined, with about a million fine detail lines. Which would look somewhat 90s style, except the lines are normally parallel, and they are all over the place. Which gives less detail and shadow than the feeling of watching interlaced video on a progressive screen; it’s kinda distracting. Meanwhile, the visuals set at Avengers Mansion are more interesting; a close looks shows no less detail, but the inking and the coloring give things a softer, more painted look. Further, while there are facial detail lines, they are realistic; a close-up of Wonder Man shows less a Liefeld sneer and more a guy creeping into middle age, which adds to the realism. The overall effect serves to hammer home the differences between the two settings, but I liked the New York-based stuff better.

As an individual issue planted between a major event and what is shaping up to be the return of the last of Bendis’s character dispositions, this is, if I’m honest, a dud. The Avengers look like they’re sleeping off the aftermath of their own actions, and the early goings appear to be nothing more than systematic bricklaying for a return to a status quo that, frankly, I didn’t miss all that much.

However, this is written by Bendis, who was willing to kill Wasp, Hawkeye and Vision in the first place, so I won’t discount the chance that things here aren’t quite what they seem. It’s possible that he could pull a switcheroo and have Wonder Man just acting contrite to get one more chance at whacking The Avengers, and maybe Echo wasn’t incinerated by Count Nefaria in Moon Knight, and was instead blasted into Inner Space (I doubt it, but hey, who knows? That face scarf would cover most of Echo’s white handprint). But for now, this just looks like setup to put all they toys back in the box for the next creative team, which just gives me a sinking feeling that we’re seeing yet another cynical retcon. Which could mean good things in the future, but time will tell if it makes for a decent story now.

My advice? Wait until next month for the next issue, and read Avengers #31 back-to-back with it to see how it plays out. Because on its own, this issue isn’t really hitting on all cylinders.