Earth’s Mightiest Heroes: Mighty Avengers #1 Review

I’m having a hard time deciding if I like the first issue Marvel’s new Avengers title Mighty Avengers – and I do like it – purely on its own merits, or because of Jonathan Hickman’s work on the main Avengers titles.

It’s been about nine months since Hickman took those books over from Brian Michael Bendis, and in that time those books have been notable for their huge plots and cosmic scope, often, in my opinion, at the detriment to the characters. There have been issues of Avengers where the members of the team have acted like the worst kind of taser-happy, steroid-ridden, ex-high-school bully suburban cops, just because they needed to in order to advance Hickman’s master plot plans. We’ve spent months where we normally only see The Avengers competently analyzing a threat or competently meeting a threat, with their most human moments being only when they fuck up egregiously, causing them to return to the competent analysis phase of the story (see, for example, most of the Infinity event, on sale now!

So the first issue of Mighty Avengers, written by Al Ewing with art by Greg Land, is a comparative breath of fresh air. Sure, it is debuting smack in the middle of Infinity, but this is a book about, you know, The Mighty Avengers. Despite the cosmic nature of the threat to New York, we spend most of our time with the actual characters, watching them interact and bicker and try to get along. And we get a sense of many of their motivations for grouping together and acting as Avengers, beyond the simple expediency of “if they don’t, I can’t show off my nifty extinction-level plot I’ve designed” we’ve been getting much of the time in the core titles.

In short, Mighty Avengers #1 is about people, not spectacle. Which makes it a damn good read compared to a lot of the other Avengers books out there.

We open with a big chunk of the Heroes For Hire team – Luke Cage, White Tiger, and Power Man (not Luke Cage. That other kid, Victor Alvarez, who also has a terrible taste in color schemes and belts), on the trail of The Plunderer, which exactly the type of C-List bad guy that Heroes For Hire generally fights. After an intervention by The Superior Spider-Man to help out in an imperious manner, White Tiger decides that being a hired mercenary isn’t the best use of her abilities, while Power Man wheedles at Cage that, if Cage misses being an Avenger so much, Cage should just quit and go grovel around Tony Stark for his old gig back. Meanwhile, Monica Rambeau, aka Captain Marvel, aka Photon, aka Pulsar, aka Spectrum, is trying out a new costume while taking down yet another low-level superjerk, when she is met by some unknown party (described leeringly by her costume tailor as “muscular” and “intense,” this proving everything about the fashion world that we have learned from Project Runway) who we don’t see but who she clearly knows. With perfect timing, Thanos minion Proxima Midnight chooses that moment to land in New York, promising mayhem, so Monica tosses the mystery man a shitty Spider-Man costume (making him “Spider-Hero”), and he, Spectrum, Spider-Man (the real one. By which I mean Otto Octavius, the fake one. Christ, I need a drink) and Luke Cage group together to meet her threat.

The actual threat of Proxima Midnight in this issue only lasts a few pages, which means that Ewing gets to spend most of his time with the characters and their interactions in lower-stakes settings. And those interactions are satisfying, and make a lot of sense. I can believe that someone like The White Tiger, who has taken on the mantle from a beloved family member who was a neighborhood hero, would chafe having to work under the auspices of no money, no hero. Ewing shows Power Man as being really devoted to Cage, and becoming angry when it seems that Cage wants more than to hang around with this clear (whether wanted or not) protege, and it just organically made sense.

This book is packed with those kind of interactions, and most importantly to me, shows these characters not really getting along. Sure, Spider-Ock doesn’t really get along with anyone – one of the hazards of being a megalomaniac – but I can get into a team where there’s a little conflict. That’s something that’s, for me, been missing at least from the main Avengers title, where it feels like the team members are sometimes no more than power sets to be deployed against whatever is the threat of the month. A little bickering makes everyone feel like more of a person, and I will take stories about people over stories about big stuff any day of the week.

When it comes to the art, well, I think we’ve established that Greg Land isn’t our favorite penciler. Land relies heavily on photo reference, if not directly on the lightbox, and ironically that leads to a level of unreality (within the scope of comic art) that tends to drag me out of the story. There were a few panels of Luke Cage, with his goatee, where I was certain that Land used the same photo reference that he did with Tony Stark in Iron Man. Same thing with Spectrum, who looked in a few panels just like Pamela Anderson with a bob haircut… and there was one sequence of two panels where it was obvious to me that Land just cropped the first panels and zoomed to make the second. And the splash panel where Spider-Man makes his entrance looks like Otto just slipped on ice, or is perhaps flailing drunkenly on a dive bar floor. Look: Land’s work is a acquired taste. I clearly haven’t acquired it, but your mileage may vary.

Which raises the question: would I like this book as much if the main Avengers books were still being written by Bendis, who was all about the characters? Maybe, maybe not… but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that right now, I am glad to have an Avengers book that cares about the people more than big ideas and intricate plots. And further, I’m glad to have an Avengers book that remembers that the tagline is “Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.” Not every threat that a superhero team faces needs to be an extinction-level cosmic threat, and I miss the more street-level stuff that Bendis’s New Avengers used to face. Mighty Avengers #1 is a strong start to what looks to be a character-driven book that doesn’t take itself completely and utterly seriously. And that’s the type of Avengers book I’ve been missing all through 2013. Give it a shot.