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The biggest problem with the first two issues of Avengers Vs. X-Men was, to me, that in order for it to make any sense, the writers needed to make Cyclops into a monomaniacal zealot, vis a vis Hope-as-mutant-savior, so focused, rigid and intractable that he made Timothy McVeigh look like Winston Churchill with a quualude habit.

It is now the third issue, and it appears that the Marvel Architects in charge of this story have found a way to temper our perceptions of Cyclops’s fanatical tendencies: by making Captain America a focused, rigid and intractable monomaniacal zealot.

In short, Avengers Vs. X-Men #3 displays the first real and disappointing cracks in what has been a tight, if sometimes logic-stretching little tale (if you can call an event comic destined to cover all Marvel titles for the next four months “little”): and that is that it attempts to mask Cyclops’s believability-stretching reactionary behavior with similar, yet opposite,  behavior by Cap. And instead of balancing the scales, it shows the Man Behind The Curtain by making two characters do stupid and unbelievable things in the interest of advancing the plot.

With that plot apparently being to make it so Wolverine can fight anybody. Because that shit sells some comics, yo. But we’ll get there in a minute,

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Editor’s Note: The Review Force is a cosmic entity capable of causing a planet-wide Spoiler event. 

Usually, when a more minor, lower circulation comic becomes part of a major summer crossover event, it is a book to avoid. Almost invariably books like that are where publishers stick filler while hoping that the crossover’s logo on the cover increases circulation enough to justify the printing costs and stave off cancellation for a couple of months. Everyone knows that an event’s important stuff occurs in the primary title and the related major titles, while the second tier books are where you get “major” revelations running the gamut from, “Some minor character is terrified of the ramifications of this major event!” to “Wow! It turns out I, the reader, don’t give a fuck about any of this shit!”

So imagine my surprise when Secret Avengers # 26, which is precisely the kind of book where you’d stick Captain Cannonfodder and his fear of Phoenix but need to (fatally) redeem some misdeed made in a 1974 issue of The Brave and The Give Us Your Quarter Kid, wound up not only being the scene of one of the more major (yet least hoopla’ed) comic book resurrections of the past several years, but of a reasonable examination of why a Captain Cannonfodder-level character is as minor a player as he is. All with some damned interesting and unconventional art to boot.

First off, despite what I just said, make no mistake: this is, in fact, the first totally unnecessary side story in the Avengers Vs. X-Men event. There is, after all, a reason the crossover is called Avengers Vs. X-Men, and if you are a superhero and you find yourself on an Avengers team, in outer space to stop the Phoenix Force, with no X-Men anywhere in sight? Welcome to the B-plot, pal. Look to your left, and look to your right. One of you is going to die. The other is probably Squirrel Girl.

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Versus #1 takes the Avengers Vs. X-Men event, strips out the backstory, the plot contrivances and the other useless crap that is being pounded into this event to make it hang together as a story, and it leaves us with the core idea which is all that almost anyone gives a tin shit about in this event: superheroes kicking the shit out of each other.

Let me offer an analogy: let’s say that Avengers Vs. X-Men is a Grateful Dead show. If that’s the case, then Versus is the smelly guy in the parking lot selling hits of acid for five bucks a whack: in other words, it’s far more entertaining, and if you’re honest with yourself, it’s the real reason you decided to attend the main event in the first place.

This book is fucking fun. It is meant to be fun, and it knows that it’s fun; any comic that opens on its recap page (and interesting choice for a first issue) with…

This book is about AWESOME BRAWLING! You want PLOT? LOOK ELSEWHERE, CHUM. You want a KNOCK-DOWN, DRAG-OUT WHUPPIN’? WE GOT YOU COVERED.

…is a book whose only ambitions vis a vis obtaining an Eisner Award to to snatch one out of Joe Sacco’s hands and use it to beat Grant Morrisson about the head, neck and face.

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Avengers Vs. X-Men #2 is a big old action movie of a comic book, where the first punch gets thrown by the second page and the hits keep on coming until we’re reminded by the last page that all this hot, sweet superhero-on-superhero action (wait, I think that came out wrong) is in service of a plot related to the Phoenix Force coming to destroy the world before the Avengers movie even has a chance to come out.

This book is filled with satisfying, balls-to-the-wall action… but it is also filled with overblown, florid and somewhat pretentious captions that read like a sixteen-year-old either trying to use his comics addiction for an easy C in Intro to Poetry, or to charm the Drama Club skank into turning a backrub into a front rub. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

If you’re looking for any kind of story advancement in this issue, you’re not gonna find much. The issue opens with the X-Men and The Avengers beating the unholy shit out of each other, and pretty much ends the same, with only the minor plot points of, “Yup, Phoenix Force… still coming,” and “Yeah, Hope… still getting jacked up on the Phoenix Force,” being advanced. If this was a modern Grandmasters’ chess game, this issue would be the equivalent of Bobby Fischer darkly muttering about Jews while some scabrous geek flips on the opposing IBM supercomputer.

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You may remember that I was very excited to review Fanboys Vs. Zombies #1 the other day. Unfortunately, my Local Comic Book Store, where the owner knows us by name and asks Rob wear his Gleek Underoos under his pants, did not have the book in stock. What to do? Take this as an opportunity to investigate the growing medium (sort of) of digital comics!

I downloaded Comixology onto my phone and an Asus Transformer Eee pad. From there, I was able to download a couple of books relatively easily to the app to read. I say “relatively” because, while the functionality is an easy “touch-the-button” user interface, it is a few long minutes before each book will appear on the device. So, there’s some wait time until gratification. And, while you can read any book you’ve purchased on any device on which you’ve installed Comixology, it appears you need to download books locally to the new devices. One digital comic book takes up 74 MB of space on the Eee pad.

Of course, once you have the books, how is the app overall for reading the books? That is the most important question after all.

Check out my video review of Comixology and the books I used it to purchase after the jump!

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Children of The Pixel. Feared and hated by those they have sworn to protect. These are the strangest spoilers of all!

Cyclops is a fucking dick.

– Crisis On Infinite Midlives Editor Amanda, every New Comics Wednesday since I’ve known her

So Cyclops, like Han, shot first. Except, unlike Cyclops, people actually like Han. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

Avengers Vs. X-Men, Marvel’s tentpole summer crossover event, is finally here, and now that it is, it’s hard for me to really know what to think of it. It has a lot of action, although almost none of it is the aforementioned Avengers Vs. X-Men action (Note to self: remember the “Vs.” “Avengers on X-Men” action is an entirely different animal), and loaded with character moments, which is important in the opening chapter of a story that requires one character to act like he’s simultaneously on the upswing of a bipolar cycle and the downswing of a complete psychotic breakdown to make his behavior believable in the slightest.