When The Legend Becomes Fact: Avengers #1 Review

Editor’s Note: It was the spark that started the fire — a legend that grew in the telling. Some believe it began the moment Spoilers were rescued from a dying universe…

Before you ask, no, I don’t know who all those people are. The floating chick on the left is an incarnation of Captain Universe (who I remember from Micronauts comics when I was a kid), and if I had to hazard a guess based on the nuclear symbol on the team diagram, the dude on the right apparently flying in an effort to escape the fire pouring out of his ass is Nuke from Squadron Supreme. But there are at least four people on that last page I couldn’t pull out of a lineup if my life depended on it.

So now that we have the fanboy gymnastics out of the way, we can actually talk about Avengers #1.

First of all, there is no doubt that this is no longer Brian Michael Bendis’s Avengers. From the opening pages implying that “Previously in Avengers” was a cataclysm of cosmic creation, followed immediately by the representation of the Avengers lineup by an abstract diagram, this issue is a shot across the bow that this is indeed Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers. And that means that, after years of stories that seemingly always hinged around a bunch of guys shooting the shit around the kitchen table, we are in for something very different.

And that is not a bad thing. At least not yet. But we might get there.

Avengers #1 opens with an unknown and unseen narrator waxing rhetorically from some point in the future about the epic tales that Hickman apparently has planned for us, before shifting to a short exchange between Steve Rogers and Tony Stark that extends from the end of Bendis’s final issue of the main Avengers title, talking about how the Avengers need grow. Smash cut to Mars (yes, the planet, not Spike Lee’s alter ago, That would be weird, even for Hickman), and brandy-new villains Ex Nihilo, Aleph and Abyss, who are firing some kind of DNA bombs at Earth to turn us into our own “perfected versions”… for some reason. For all we know, the Ex Nihilo’s ultimate goal to to transform “regular humans” into “perfect humans who instinctively know how Ex Nihilo likes his balls worked during sex.” Anyway, enter The Avengers (the lineup from the movie, no fewer heroes and no more), who, being Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, immediately set to mightily getting their asses handed to them. Ex Nihilo then air-drops Captain America back to Earth to break humanity’s spirit. Instead, Cap wakes up after three days (three days during which I assume Ex Nihilo and company stopped airdropping evolution bombs on Earth, because, I dunno, The Walking Dead had stacked up on their TiVo or something?) and activates Cap’s and Iron Man’s secret plan to expand, assembling all the Avengers to counterattack.

Let’s start with the obvious: I think we can all stop pretending that this new Avengers, driven by the Marvel Now initiative, is anything but a damn reboot. Last month, in Bendis’s final issue of Avengers, we saw a team with a core membership of about 20 or more members, none of them being Bruce Banner. Now, a month later, Hickman tells us that the core membership of the Avengers is the team from the movie, and what’s more, that it has always been those guys – this is flatly stated by Stark late in the issue, with expansion beyond the six “original” members being a new and spiffy idea by a genius – that genius being Tony Stark, who has apparently forgotten that there were 14 or 15 other people drinking his liquor at Thanksgiving dinner.

I realize that its a little early in the run to make the blanket statement that Hickman has retconned Avengers to that kind of extent, but there is no denying, given the information provided in this issue, that we are expected to accept that the team was, and has always been, the core six guys. And I am willing to accept, given the prologue implying that these stories are being recounted as legend by some unknown person in an unknown future, that the story is being told in a way that mimics legend in the old The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance way: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” But that take is pure speculation; given what actually appears in the issue, this is a reboot, and that kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Which isn’t to say that the overall tone of the book isn’t somewhat satisfying. Hickman has clearly decided to make the break from Bendis’s mix of superhero action and workplace dramedy in favor of the concept that, if The Avengers are Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, then they should battle extinction-level threats to the world, and that those battles should be legendary. Hickman flatly tells us, by the second page, that what we are reading is a legend, and there is little room in a legend for, say, Lancelot to bitch at Gawaine that he drank the last of the coffee without making more. Which fits Hickman’s Big Ideas style of comics, but it means that the only conversations that happen in this book are big, bombastic and concerning matters of End Of The World importance. There is one joke in this book, but otherwise the tone is deadly serious, with Cap mimicking his 40s-speak from the movie, and Hulk being shown as frightened almost immediately, in an attempt to show the relative danger level of Ex Nihilo and company in an inverse of the movies showing other characters frightened of Hulk to show his level of danger. All of which is reasonably effective in showing the depth of shit The Avengers are in, but which is a pretty jarring change from the type of Avengers story we’ve gotten used to over the past eight years.

And I suppose that’s going to be a problem that Hickman faces while writing Avengers, at least to start with: he’s not Brian Michael Bendis (which is not the same as “he’s no Brian Michael Bendis”). By focusing as much on dialogue and character interaction as action and plot, Bendis’s Avengers were people first and heroes second, which led to a comic that felt very human. Hickman is hell on wheels with big ideas, intricate plots and interesting cosmic threats, but in the past, I have found a lot of his writing to be bloodless, with characters simply doing stuff to advance the ideas and the plot. And while it is too early to be certain, I’m seeing a certain amount of that habit in Avengers #1; Thor says one word in this issue (not even a word, really) and is only there for Hulk to fight, taking them both out of action. Hawkeye spends about 15 times the words showing how competent he is as he does wisecracking (he isn’t even the one who tells the joke), and Hulk’s only words are completely out of character, to show how dangerous the villains are. And again: it’s too early to tell how Hickman will break on this story, but there are indications here that he will tell a big story populated by archetypes instead of character. And after years of following well-rounded characters who happened to be in big stories, this might not be what you’re looking for. I know there are plenty of Bendis-haters out there who will welcome the change (assuming we do, in fact, go archetype over character), but as someone who generally liked Bendis’s Avengers and New Avengers, I am concerned.

Jerome Opena’s art looks like it will be a good match with Hickman’s Big Idea stories. In this issue, he’s called upon to draw things from a dude waking up in bed to alien spaceships to a couple of brand-new villains, and all of them look like an equal amount of care and thinking went into them. His figures and facial expressions are extremely detailed, including a fuckton of facial detail lines. However, unlike a lot of artists who feel compelled to pack their faces with a million fine lines, at least Opena’s follow facial contours to add a little dimension. Granted, those dimensions also serve to make Tony Stark look like he has sharp cheekbones, a prominent brow and about 127 years under his belt, but at least the lines do something different. His panel layout is simple and unstylized, and his storytelling is pretty clear, with a couple of exceptions: thanks to a camera move, the initial attack against Hulk by Abyss was a little confusing, taking me a couple of passes and a careful reading to understand what had happened. In addition, there’s a panel where, due to Opena’s camera angle choice, it’s not clear whether Cap or Aleph caught Cap’s shield, that could have easily been clarified by picking nearly any other point of view. These are little mistakes, but they do matter… but overall, Opena looks to be up to the challenges of Hickman’s large-scale stories; I just hope he scales back a little on the detail lines, and that he pays a bit more attention to his camera placement.

In looking back over this review, I can see that it might be possible to think that I hated Avengers #1, but that really isn’t the case. Hickman has clearly made the choice to write huge Avengers stories that can rank as legends, and that might well turn out to be interesting. But as an individual first issue, it has a few problems; we have characters acting out of, well, character, changes to recent history that aren’t explained, and characters moving around to apparently serve a plot – to add additional Avengers – that was taken care of before Hickman ever wrote a word on the book. And while we might find, by the end of Hickman’s run, that his issues were a tale told about legends at some point in the far future, which would explain the suddenly broad and archetypal characterizations we see here, it’s still a little jarring coming right off of a book where the prior writer’s final scene was a huge, personalized Avengers team drinking and hanging out.

Bottom line: there’s some stuff here to like, but more than one sign that we might be in for a run on Avengers that cares more about the Big Ideas than The Avengers. We’re just gonna have to see if that’s how it goes… and if it is, if the ideas are big and interesting enough to carry bloodless characters.