Weaponized Cthuhlu: Avengers: Endless Wartime Review

Avengers: Endless Wartime, the new original graphic novel written by Warren Ellis with art by Mike McKone, is, for all intents and purposes, an effective sequel or side tale about The Avengers from the Joss Whedon movie. It is a sequel to The Avengers that, unlike Marvel Studios, has no rights issues or special effects budget constraints to deal with, and therefore can include fan favorite characters, like Wolverine and Captain Marvel, that the movies can’t. And it is a sequel that is printed on really shitty paper.

Seriously: I got my copy shrinkwrapped and therefore never opened before I got it back to the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, and the pages in the front and back third of the book were wrinkled to hell and back. And on top of that, a couple of panels had printing errors that smudged the shit out of the lettering. It’s not the worst thing in the world – it doesn’t make the book unreadable or anything, and I lost all my resale value, defects or not, the minute I stripped the shrink wrap to read the thing – but when you’re dropping $25 clams on a piece of shelf porn, you expect the thing to be printed at least as well as it would have been had it been broken into a six-issue miniseries. Your mileage may vary, and God knows you won’t spend the full $25 if you buy the thing off of Amazon or something, but I bought it at my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop threatening to demand $25 if they don’t let me strip off my shrink wrap for a close inspection.

But let’s forget about the printing issues and go back to the story, which takes place pretty much outside of current Avengers continuity, includes all the players from the Avengers movie – and they are far more recognizable as the characters from the movies than they are most modern versions of the characters in the comics –  and has the global scale of a major motion picture. And while it feels like there are a couple of stories jammed together that make things a little confusing now and again, it’s packed with familiar character notes, catchphrases, and Warren Ellis dialogue. Dialogue that would jeopardize a PG-13 rating if it actually was a movie.

I’m not gonna even try to do a full plot summary the way I normally do in my reviews, because this thing goes through two or three flashbacks, four separate locations, three different sets of antagonists, and a whole bunch of different killings. What you need to know is that some weird war machine that’s half organic and half mechanical is shot down over some Third World toilet. The machine reminds Captain America of something from his past, and Thor of something completely different from his past, so they lead The Avengers around the world to hunt down the source. This hunt leads them to filthy war zones and into a confrontation with S.H.I.E.L.D. and finally to a corporate research facility in the middle of nowhere, where everyone fights like hell and learns something about what it means to be an Avenger, and what the nature of war is.

I’m gonna start with the most negative thing I can think of here, and that is that there is a lot of stuff going on here, and a lot of coincidences required for the story to come together. There needs to be an ancient evil dropped in the very place where Captain America downs an experimental plane, and then both of those guys need to be in the same place where the amalgam of those things are in order to set things off. And we further need to believe that a couple of airmen from the 1940s could somehow become mutated by these things and join them all together into some kind of weaponized Cthuhlu (note to self: make  “Weaponized Cthuhlu” the name of your next punk band) that can generate its own ordnance. As an example of past mistakes and horrors of war made tangible and concrete, it works for the story, but for the plot, it’s kinda messy. Further, to do all this plot heavy lifting, Ellis gives us a couple of long flashbacks – 11 pages and nine pages, respectively – and it’s not really clear exactly why we’re flashing back until later in the story, which makes them distracting.

But then again, if you stop and think about the plot of The Avengers movie for more than a few seconds, it really doesn’t make any more sense than this does – Loki escaped and made a deal with Thanos to rent some Chitauri to knock down New York and invite certain nuclear annihilation… why exactly? In the end, it didn’t matter in that movie, and the weaponized Cthuhlu don’t matter here, because the draw is the characters, the interplay, and the dialogue. And the characters here are largely similar to the ones in the movie. Bruce Banner calls The Hulk “the other guy.” Captain America is baffled and adrift in the 21st Century. Iron Man is cockier and more arrogant than he is even in the comics, and he actively uses his armor to involve himself in international affairs. Thor comments about the disgusting beasts of Asgard. And biggest of all, Banner gives a member of the team a shocking and unexpected revelation about his relationship with The Hulk. The characterizations and motivations of the primary characters all but scream, “We’re the same people from the movie!”, and as someone who loved the movie, that is a positive thing.

And the dialogue… all I can say is, man, I’ve missed Warren Ellis working regularly in comics. The one dude who doesn’t act like he does in the movie is Hawkeye, who instead acts like Hunter Thompson with a bow: muttering that he woke up in a dumpster, has a reputation as a drunk, and who takes an inordinate amount of glee in flying the plane. And that’s just fun, as is the interplay between all the character, who snipe at each other in ways that are just plain old entertaining. Here’s a taste:

Hawkeye: I might be lost.

Captain America: I don’t believe you.

Hawkeye:  I might also be in a dumpster.

Captain America: I believe you.

Hawkeye: There was a girl. And some people who hit me.

Captain America: Tell it to the chaplain, Hawkeye. Get here.

Hawkeye: You are old.

The book is packed with fun stuff like that… which is a good thing, because there is a lot of darkness going on here. Despite the flimsiness of the weaponized Cthuhlu conceit, it exists to provide personification to prior wartime failures of Captain America and Thor. Further, we’ve got Wolverine in the mix, who conflicts with Captain America due to Wolverine’s more… liberal… ideas of the rules of engagement, as well as Iron Man, who has involved himself in some little insurrections, including the one that started this whole mess. So the lightness of the dialogues and some of the characterizations take the edge off a story that is really very dark at the core.

Mike McKone’s art tends toward realism – the figures and faces are all real-looking, which helps ground the idea of battling against weaponized Cthuhlus (can you tell I just like typing that?). He tends to be a bit more stylized in his closeups, which have a slightly thicker line and remind me a little bit of Howard Chaykin. But as in the movie, it’s his Hulk that is truly a surprise. He’s not a giant mass of muscle like you often see in the comics, but more like a golem: big and strong, sure, but also a little misshapen, with an odd face as opposed to a font of plain rage. And it’s not by accident that I keep going with the weaponized Cthuhlu thing; McKone depicts the monsters as strangely, wrongly shaped, with what looks like a bunch of Stark Arc Reactors grafted into them. The combination of realistic people and different-looking monsters is a good mix; it’s good-looking stuff.

Avengers: Endless Wartime isn’t a perfect book. The number of events that need to come together for everything to happen is a little hard to completely swallow, and frankly, until you get a better sense of what the drone monsters are later in the book, the extended flashbacks feel more distracting than they do story-advancing. But fans of the Avengers movie are gonna have a lot of characterization red meat here, and the dialogue and more fun depiction of Hawkeye make it a fun read for a book that, ultimately, is about the failure and pointlessness of constant and endless conflict.

Is it worth 25 clams? If you’re an Ellis fan, probably… but I’d recommend getting it through Amazon or someplace else where you can get it for cheaper. Because if my experience isn’t an outlier, the fucked-up pages and smudging’ll take ten bucks off the resale value before you even crack the spine.