Marvel’s Mighty Avengers Mystery Spoiled By Spoiling Jerks At Marvel: Identity of Spider Hero Revealed

Editor’s Note: This story contains spoilers for upcoming issues of Mighty Avengers. So if you’re digging the mysteries that were presented in the first issue last month, please feel free to pretend that we are still upgrading our Web server, and that I am still shrieking impotently at our Web caching software, which apparently only accepts upgrading when it is convinced that you are who you say you are, and that game four of the World Series is safely past the third inning.

We really enjoyed the first issue of Mighty Avengers, written by Al Ewing with art by Greg Land. It was, unlike many recent Avengers titles, a more human, character-based story, with an interesting mystery at the code: who is the “muscular” and “intense” dude who has a history with Monica Rambeau and wears, at least for now, a rotten “Spider Hero” costume into battle?

There was a lot of speculation that it might turn out to be Miles Morales behind that mask, giving that character a place to go if the upcoming Ultimate Universe Cataclysm event does, as it appears it will, fuck all that Universe’s holes and leave it for dead. But regardless, it was meant to be a fun little guessing game for a few months before Ewing pulled back the curtain sometime in the next few issues.

Yeah, I said that it was “meant to” be a mystery. Past tense. Because Marvel went and gave the whole thing away.

Another Editor’s Note: Spoilers will follow after the jump. Last chance to bail, turn on the TV and watch the Red Sox show St. Louis how we do things in Boston…

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.