Story: Jed MacKay
Art: C.F. Villa, Federico Blee
$4.99, Marvel Comics
Review: Kris Lorenzen
What It Is: The latest relaunch for Marvel’s premiere superhero team. No, not the filthy mutant X-MEN. THE GUARDIANS of the GALAXY? Who cared about them before 2014? THE FANTASTIC FOUR… Look, it’s THE AVENGERS! Volume 9!

The Good: The art is superb. Villa’s figure work is fundamentally sound with enough cartoony elements to make the action interesting and the characters emote legibly. Blee’s colors match and elevate the lively art so everything pops with kinetic widescreen super heroics.

It’s a small thing but burying Marvel’s dreaded recap/credits page on page five after a nice explosive teaser is the way to go. When I open a comic, on the first page under that cover, I want to see comics. And this is a good-looking one so it’s nice to jump right in.

The Bad: Jed MacKay can write fun and heartfelt superhero action books. See his recent BLACK CAT or MOON KNIGHT series. But those were satisfying done-in-one old school comic book awesomeness. This has ten pages (nearly half the page count) of assembling the team nothingness when, spoiler, they’re all clearly visible on the cover.

Did we need any of this? Well, continuity in comics is a double edge sword and it’s not always sharpened evenly. The higher-ups want Captain Marvel, Iron Man and Black Panther on the team, but didn’t Black Panther just try to dismantle the Avengers and isn’t he not Black Panther anymore and also didn’t Carol and Tony have a Civil War (II) with each other? Ans so the writer and the reader have to waste a bunch of time place-setting.

The whole issue reads kind of route. Start with an action beat, cut to earlier, assemble the team, dispatch the current threat (maybe?), end with a teaser. Is this deserving of a first issue or maybe just a shrug? Fingers crossed that the story picks up—MacKay is a much better writer than this.

The Score: 4 out of 10

Further Reading: The above-mentioned Black Cat series by the same writer and artist team is the way to go.