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.

An Abomination, Long Thought Buried: Nine Pages of Warren Ellis’s Avengers: Endless Wartime

It has been a good long while since we have seen any new mainstream comics work from Warren Ellis, what with his book deals and his columns in the mainstream press (well, “mainstream” compared to the comics press, which is widely populated by drunken amateurs who have just enough brain power to buy a domain name and install a content management system that allows them to publicly rant about comic books. Hi, Warren!) and his fat movie deals.

That drought will, however, be coming to a close with the upcoming release of the original graphic novel Avengers: Endless Wartime, with art by Mike McKone, in a couple of weeks (Amazon has a listed release date of October 1st). And if you’ve missed the news, here’s the official blurb as to what it’s about:

An abomination, long thought buried, has resurfaced in a war-torn land…

Hi, Warren!

…But now it wears an American flag. Faced with another nightmare reborn, Captain America will not stand for yet more death at the hands of a ghost from his past. Haunted by his greatest shame, Thor must renew the hunt for a familiar beast. At their side, an assemblage of allies united to end the threats no one of them could face alone. They are soldiers. Warriors. Comrades-in-arms. Mighty heroes led by a living legend, stronger together than apart. They are the Avengers. Also includes exclusive AR video content, a free digital download of the book, and an introduction written by Agent Coulson himself Clark Gregg!

It is safe to say that we will be picking up and reviewing the graphic novel when it drops, but if you’re on the fence, well, Google Books has released he first few pages of the book to review at your leisure. And if you don’t feel like logging into Google to see how it’s gonna look (hi, NSA!), well, you can see those pages after the jump.