A Lot Of Talk And A Badge: Avengers #8 Review

Editor’s Note: A White Event creates / alters heralds to spoil this ascension.

Since taking over Avengers back in December, writer Jonathan Hickman has clearly been pushing toward some kind of huge, extinction-level event that is meant to go down in legend – he all but comes out and says it in his movie trailer-like first issue. And since that time, Hickman has marched Avengers through ever-increasing threats, cosmic and not, moving inexorably to whatever massive event he has in mind. And all that has occurred in the series has been used in subservience of that plot, including little things like consistency of characterization or focus on anybody in particular.

Which means that, in Avengers #8, Hickman has given us an portrayal of The Avengers where Captain America is ignored by several members, three members of the team actively try to kill or demand that someone kill a teenaged boy, and all in all lead with their fists against a confused kid who doesn’t know what’s happened to him and in no way acts as an aggressor until several of The Avengers big guns take a poke at him. All to allow Hickman to put a bunch of power in front the Ex Nihilo guy he introduced back in the first issue.

In short: yeah, I’m pretty close to giving up on Avengers entirely.

The power of the Starbrand, previously seen in Marvel’s New Universe comics and seen here in the 616 for the first time, has accidentally been bestowed on Kevin Connor, a college student who isn’t anyone in particular. He has good grades, no disciplinary trouble… and now he has the power to destroy a planet. The Avengers arrive on the scene, where Connor is lying in a crater full of people killed when the Starbrand power found him. Connor is confused, terrified, and horrified about the scene around him… so of course, Hulk attacks him despite Captain America’s orders to stop him. When it turns out that Hulk isn’t necessarily the strongest one there is when there’s a plot demand, The Avengers go straight into UC-Davis Security Guard mode, throwing around bitchy cop orders while Connor protests that Hulk attacked him. The Avengers react as any empathetic protectors of the innocent would: by allowing Thor to chuck Mjolnir at Connor while making disparaging comments about his mother. The Avengers regroup, by heroically ganging up on Connor while Iron Man encourages Thor to bash Connor’s fucking head in with his hammer, when Nightmask intervenes and takes Connor to Ex Nihilo on Mars. Because… well, because Hickman said that Ex Nihilo was gonna be part of the story, that’s why.

So you’re probably detecting a theme here: in this issue, Hickman writes The Avengers as the absolute worst kind of arrogant, authoritarian douchebags. With the exception of Captain America, there isn’t a member of the team whose first instinct on how to deal with this kid – a kid who is naked, confused and fucking terrified – isn’t either to mock him or tune him up. Hell, Iron Man’s first comment is to tell Cap that there’s no one around for a mile, you know, in case they feel like killing Connor (to be fair, Iron Man’s comment is cut off, but the implication is pretty clear). When Connor asks what’s happening to him, Captain Marvel cracks, “You’re sitting in a smoking crater, kid. Naked. We’re all gathered here today to bring you pants.” Is it a good line? Sure, but it’s not the most empathetic thing you can say to a scared kid lying on a bunch of corpses, is it?

Sure, Captain America’s first instinct is to talk to the kid… but Cap is also apparently almost incapable of stopping Hulk or Thor from attacking Connor with almost no provocation. And sure, Cap sees Hulk disobey his orders and attack the kid, and then he sees the kid protest that he was just defending himself… but then Cap allows Hyperion and Thor to talk shit to Connor and attack him at full force. Hell, he even joins in the fun. So in short: Captain America witnesses a scared, skinny blonde kid being mocked and bullied by powerful people… and he lets it happen. Yeah, that sounds a lot like Captain America, doesn’t it? Perhaps next issue, we can see Cap perusing Mein Kampf, flick boogers at Spider-Man, and do other things that are ridiculously out of character.

These Avengers are dicks, man. They’re the superhero equivalent of the cop who pulls you over for a rolling stop, yells at you for your terrible driving, and tossing your trunk for something to arrest you on just because he fucking can. It was bad enough that I wanted Starbrand to tune them up and get away… and it’s possible that that was Hickman’s intention here, but if it was: why? It felt extremely out of character for almost everybody, which made suspension of disbelief damn hard for me. There was an alienating double-effect going on: The Avengers were so unlikeable that I wanted them to lose, and simultaneously so unlikeable that I didn’t believe what the protagonists were doing. It worked double against the ability to get into the story… and it all felt just cynically done to advance whatever long-term plot Hickman has in mind for his endgame on his Avengers run.

I can almost see the cynical plot arithmetic happening in Hickman’s head: “I want a Starbrand character who will be on the side of the angels when the shit with Ex Nihilo goes down, so he needs to be likeable. However, I need him to be brought to Mars to deal with Ex Nihilo, and that means that he needs to run from The Avengers. That means I need the Avengers to seem menacing to Starbrand, which means that even though I will show Starbrand as empathetic and human in his confusion over his new powers, I will have The Avengers attack him mercilessly anyway! Regardless as to whether or not any of The Avengers would, you know, actually do that! My master plot plan is intact!” Sure, eventually it will give us some giant, cosmic battle at some point in the future, but for right now it just feels like cheap compromise for the sake of compromise. And it is Goddamned infuriating.

Dustin Weaver’s art is highly detailed, using fine lines to put together generally realistic figures and expressive faces – you can see the terror on Connor’s face repeatedly, which makes The Avengers’ dickitude all the more irritating. His pacing is well-done, using small panels to speed things up in the action sequences, pulling out to larger ones to accentuate the big action setpiece moments (you want to take a moment and marvel at someone having the strength to punch The Hulk into orbit). The only problem is that some of his panels remind me of John Romita Jr. – some of his faces and figures and are somewhat blocky, with a bunch of crosshatched detail lines in some of the closeups. Which is fine if you like Romita’s stuff, but it’s not really my cup of tea. But still and all, Weaver does solid work on the action, even if that action ain’t exactly believable from a character standpoint.

Avengers #8 probably does what Hickman wants it to do in the sense of advancing toward whatever epic battle he has in store for us in the coming months. However, it does it at the expense of characterization. Bottom line: if these are our Avengers? They are bullying, undisciplined assholes. They aren’t superheroes, they’re super cops, and the worst kind of cops: the kind that’ll bust your taillight out to make quota, talk shit to you while he’s writing the ticket, and wave his taser in your face if he doesn’t like the way you call him “sir.” And the worst part is, they’re only that way so that Hickman can make them look like big heroes at some point in the future… but that doesn’t make things any different now. If these are The Avengers? You can keep them. Give this one a wide berth.