This shit ruled so hard. Say what you want about what Bendis' Avengers books eventually turned into, but the opening arc on New Avengers was near-perfectly executed. Everything about this issue just got me completely fucking psyched for this book.
The first thing we see is lame-duck Spider-Man villain Electro. Mark Millar had recently used him to great comedic effect in his run on Marvel Knights Spider-Man, and Bendis ran with that sleazy, diminutive characterization here. A consistent strength of New Avengers is it's ability to use characters from all corners of the Marvel U as bit players, adding color to the storyline instead of unecessary plot elements. In the past, writers would feel like it was necessary to justify Electro's involvement in the storyline by bringing up shit from his pointless, forgotten backstory, or saddling him with some kind of new modus operandi that eats up page time and confuses the plot. Here, Bendis cuts right to the chase - dude needs money, so he shows up for six pages to do what he needs to do to get the money. We don't need to know anything more about Electro than that he is a douchebag in a suit with pretty self-explanatory powers.
Owing to the success of his less conventionally comic-booky runs on Ultimate Spider-Man and Daredevil, Bendis has complete free reign here to dedicate page space to character interactions and jokes instead of overly complex plot lines. A common criticism of dude is that his books are too talky, but it's the character moments that make this book shine. Marvel at Captain America and Iron Man eating bagels together on the railing of a S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier, talking wistfully about old times. Bendis masterfully manipulates our emotions, often knowing exactly what to emphasize for the greatest impact. When Captain America reaches his hand out to Spider-Man after a helicopter crash, it's a splash page that we see from Spider-Man's point of view. In any other case it's an odd scene to dedicate so much page space to, but here it works beautifully, because we as readers want to see as much of it as possible. We want it to be a splash page because that's how fucking happy we are to see Captain America again.
The first arc serves as a set-up to two of the major storylines of the series so far. Though Secret Invasion as a proper mini-series was sort of a letdown, it's still endlessly fascinating to look back and see the clues that Bendis had been leaving since the first issue. When Wolverine first runs across Jessica Drew in the Savage Land, he attacks her, because he doesn't recognize her scent. Years later, when she's revealed as a skrull, a nation of nerds slap their own foreheads. DURRRR.
The lineup of New Avengers featured, in a line-wide effort to introduce more new characters in their books, a little known dude called The Sentry who'd starred in his own fifth-week event written by Paul Jenkins a few years before. The Sentry was the perfect MacGuffin for the first arc - even if you HAD read the Sentry mini, you had no idea what to expect from this book. Bendis integrated him beautifully into the Marvel Universe - he gave you just enough details during the first arc to satisfy you, still laying the groundwork for a future storyline. All you knew about him was that he was this incredibly powerful superhero who was imprisoned, for some reason, in a Maximum Security prison for killing his wife.
What little you saw of the Sentry in action was tantalizing and fascinating - his one major action sequence involved him forcefully dragging Carnage into space and then ripping him in half. Marvel was a viscerally exciting place at this point in time - there were new characters and new concepts everywhere - though Cap, Spidey, Luke Cage, Spider-Woman, and Iron Man were familiar faces, you'd never seen them in situations like this before, and you'd never seen them all together. New characters like the Sentry were undiminished by years of continuity, and not beholden to any existing corner of the Marvel U. It wasn't just Spider-Man playing in the FF sandbox or The Avengers playing in the X-Men sandbox. It was a totally new place, which drew from the richer tapestry of the complete Marvel Universe. Within six issues, you had Foggy Nelson from the Daredevil book, S.H.I.E.L.D. political intrigue, the Savage Land, and Luke Cage beating up Electro outside a Bistro in Massachussetts.
Normally, this kind of interaction between the disparate spheres of Marvel was limited to What If? stories and alternate futures. But here it was - instead of a bunch of wildly different and wildly insular books, the Marvel U felt like a living, breathing, cohesive thing. It was awesome.
Posts
