Eight Angry Men: New Avengers #3 Review

It’s hard to believe that it’s only been a month since Jonathan Hickman debuted his Marvel Now reboot of New Avengers, to generally good reviews, and, well, this one:

Christ, he thinks he’s making movies. That’s why I wasn’t completely satisfied by Avengers #1, and was actually kinda pissed off by New Avengers #1: they’re not really stories.

Yeah, it didn’t do a hell of a lot for me. Hickman started New Avengers in a way that felt like a movie trailer: a tease of a terrible, world-shattering apocalypse to occur at some point in the future, with a final assembly of heroes to combat this purely theoretical threat in heroic establishing shots with explanatory and expository slogans, followed by a team shot… all without a hell of a lot actually, you know, happening. All it was missing was some deep baritone growling, “In a world…” and an immediately-following commercial for Doritos. It was such a blatant setup for story versus actual story that it actually made me kind of angry.

That, however, was a month ago. This week, we have New Avengers #3, and the Illuminati is actually in a position to face the terrible, world-shattering apocalypse. So now that it’s here, how was it? Well, the downside is that the actual confrontation is, on the scale of action sequences, less the last ten minutes of the Avengers movie and closer to the last time I was shitfaced and tried to get the TV remote to jump to my hand using telekenisis. The good news is that, despite the somewhat anticlimactic action sequence, it features a hell of a lot of damn fine character work. And while there isn’t a lot of action, there is plenty of conflict. Some damned entertaining conflict, as a matter of fact.

The Illuminati have made plan to prevent the encroachment of parallel universes into Marvel’s, which would lead to the destruction of the 616, the end of Marvel superhero stories, and the inevitable reduction of Ike Perlmutter to forcing his friends and family members into waiting in line for a single bathroom. That plan involves reassembling the Infinity Gauntlet, of which each team member holds one component gem, and using its power to repel approaching Earths… but there are problems. The first being that Professor Xavier held one of the gems, and he refuses to tell the rest of the Illuminati where it is due to his stubborn determination to remain dead. However, Xavier has revealed the location of the gem to Henry McCoy, making him a de facto member of the team. A team that now has an alternate Earth to repel by having Captain America use the Gauntlet to wish it away into the cornfield, which works… kinda, in the sense that this plan is why the Illuminati can’t have nice things. In the wake of the semi-failure, the team meets to, well, yell at each other, and decide what they are prepared to do: for example, if the alternative Earth pulls a knife, will Iron Man pull a gun? If the alternative Earths puts one of theirs in the hospital, will I lift any other conversations from Sean Connery movies?

Okay, so there’s not a ton of, you know, action in this book. In a nutshell, Beast finds the gem, the Illuminati get some Logan’s Run lifeclocks (some kind of glowing communication / early warning device surgically implanted in the palms of their hands. Because that’s easier than an iPhone app, I guess. No, I don’t get it either), Captain America shoots at a planet that’s just floating there and not returning fire or anything, and then there is an argument. That’s really about it. So if you’re buying this book about a team of superheroes hoping for superhero team action, you’re going to be disappointed. On some level, this is the comic book equivalent of Red Robin’s Rules of Order.

The thing is: it’s the conversations where this book really shines, because there’s a lot of good character conflict going on between these people. What Hickman gets about this particular group is that every single one of them, to a one, is a genius or a captain of industry or, in literally three out of eight cases, honest-to-God kings. These are not people who are used to being questioned or disagreed with, and Hickman captures the kind of imperiousness and unilateral decision declarations this kind of person would make. Seeing Namor act dismissively of McCoy due to his lower station and then lose his shit in the face of Captain America’s failure was exciting and felt really spot-on for the character, and watching Tony Stark ruthlessly and pragmatically turn on Cap when they disagree, makes for some pretty interesting comics despite the lack of actual action.

And finally, after three issues, I think I finally get what Hickman might be going for with his reboot of New Avengers: it’s not about the action or about the nature of the threat or the fact that the nature of that threat is a stupid planet that keeps showing up and never shoots back. It’s about eight people who are at the height of their prospective fields, who are not used to being questioned or really to having to work with anyone as a peer… and stressing those people in a way where they will be forced to work together and collaborate in ways that do not fit into their normal ways of deciding actions or doing things. And at this point, it doesn’t look like they will do it gracefully or without tearing each other to pieces – they’ve already turned on the first person who disagreed with them, so what happens the next time it happens? It looks like we’re about to see eight people slowly turn on each other while the world burns, and now that I finally have a real sense that seems to be the direction Hickman has in mind, I’m a lot more enthused about the book. Watching the royalty of Marvel turn on each other in a true, angry fashion suddenly became interesting in this issue, and for the first time, I’m really looking forward to seeing how it continues to play out.

Steve Epting’s art is a good match for the book – better now that I think I have a handle on what Hickman is trying to do here – because the man does good angry face. His stuff is in a medium line, with realistic figures and expressive faces… although pretty much all but one expression in the book is either pissed off or determined concentration. Again, there’s not a lot of action for Epting to show off that kind of storytelling here – one punch from Namor and Cap with a Tower of Power fisting glove pointing at the sky like he’s calling his shot – but he captures the intensity of the conversations between the members of the team. And again, this is a tough book to address the visual storytelling at all, as there are long sequences of tight face shots in conversation that offers little to decode, but he gets the emotions of the characters. And in what is turning into a seriously character-based story, that’s enough, at least for now.

New Avengers is a book that, based on the first couple of issues, I was pretty convinced I wasn’t gonna like. It took a while to ramp up and it amounted to a bunch of guys talking about what they were gonna do instead of actually doing anything. And that’s still the case; there’s a lot more talking about the problem than there is solving it… but it seems like that’s the point. We’ve spent a few years watching the Illuminati working together to try to save the Marvel Universe, and making some good decisions and some bad ones… but now we’re starting to watch what would happen if a bunch of powerful people under stress really had to deal with each other. Things are gonna get worse before they get better, and I’m starting to look forward to see how bad it truly gets.