Series Review: The New Avengers, Volume 1

The New Avengers, Vol. 1, TPB #1

I started reading comics again about a year and a half ago, partly because I'd missed comics after having taken a break from them for a couple of years and partly because my kids had finally gotten old enough to read on their own, and I wanted to share with them the joy that I remembered from reading comics back when I was their age.  The nice thing about having kids and reading comics with them is that they bring such a fresh perspective.  As an adult comic fan, I'd gotten totally away from traditional superhero comics just because I felt like everything that the Big Two were doing, I'd already seen it and read it, and it just wasn't interesting anymore.  I'd started reading Vertigo and a bunch of indies, looking for a more complex kind of comic storytelling that was more suited to my adult tastes.  But a lot of that stuff is so self-referential or deconstructionist that it gets old fast.  Having kids changes all of that, however, because for them, all of the heroes are new.  And exciting.  And awesomely heroic.  For example, I saw The Avengers twice, and it was a very different experience each time.  The first time I saw it, I was with my wife, and the way I saw it was as a 39-year-old man, a guy who was already familiar with the backstory from all of the movies and from all of the decades of storytelling that underlay the entirety of the film.  Moreover, I was familiar with Joss Whedon's work, was an established fan of it, and wanted to see the movie at least as much because it was a Whedon vehicle as because it was a vehicle for Iron Man and the rest of the actual Avengers.  When I saw the movie with my kids, however, I saw it differently.  That second time, I saw it as a giant action spectacle, a fresh and spectacular event experience that showed me things I'd never seen before.  I saw it a way that only a child could see it, and I thrilled at every moment, especially when the Hulk "smashed".  With all of that in mind, I started reading a bunch of the Avengers' trade paperbacks (TPBs) from the various libraries around Fairfield County a few months ago.  Perhaps the most interesting part of that was Brian Michael Bendis's New Avengers, Volume 1, currently available as a collection of something like twelve TPBs, all of which reside in the Milford, CT, public library.


Yes, they have the entire series.  Yes, I read all it.

The answer was to "Disassemble"
the Avengers, in Issue #503.

Unfortunately, the story here is basically corporate.  Bendis and the other thought-leaders at Marvel got together and decided that what they really needed to do was to make the Avengers more central to the Marvel Universe's focal storylines.  Which is to say that if the Avengers is supposed to be the company's flagship title--it's Justice League, if you will--then it ought to have all of Marvel's top-line characters.  But before the New Avengers, the title didn't have all of Marvel's best characters; in fact, it didn't have any of the company's best characters except for Captain America.  Recall that before the first Iron Man movie, Iron Man himself was a B-level character who's book was an at best median seller.  Thor wan't even that, and Hawkeye and the Black Widow were outright niche characters who couldn't even stay in other peoples' team books with any regularity.  This is why Spider-Man and the X-Men got movies made first; they were the more valuable properties, and as such, Marvel was able to license them out for big money to other major studios.  It was only after those movies were making big money that Marvel itself took out a billion dollar line of credit and established a movie studio of its own.  The problem then was how to get Spider-Man and Wolverine into the Avengers.  The answer was to "Disassemble" the existing Avengers and introduce a new team, the New Avengers, this time with all the company's top characters and a few notables that the company wanted to push for the future.


Still, the series starts out pretty strong.  There's a prison break at Ryker's Island, and the New Avengers assemble quite by accident to help with containment and clean-up.  Bendis uses this event and subsequent events to start putting forward a couple of over-arching story questions: What's wrong with SHIELD?  Why is SHIELD, and thus the informal leadership of the entire superhero community, all screwed up?  To the extent that this series can be taken as a whole, it's these questions that drive the story.  And they're interesting questions.  Eventually, our heroes find themselves on the run, out-gunned, and out-manned, and all of that makes for some pretty nice storytelling.

Heroes for Hire are street-level heroes,
almost by definition.  The fact that
Power Man and Iron Fist are also
now Avengers is, to me, part of the
problem here.

The problem, to the extent that there is a problem, starts to come in what we might think of as the Second Act of the overall New Avengers story arc, i.e. Civil War and the Secret Invasion.  In the first place, Civil War and Secret Invasion were both major company events which got their own mini-series.  That's fine.  But the events of the actual New Avengers stories are intimately tied to the events of those two mini-series while the events of the various mini-series are only vaguely recapped in the actual New Avengers books themselves.  The storytelling narrative of the actual New Avengers volumes themselves therefore breaks down right in the middle, and that stinks.  Especially with Secret Invasion, first there was no actual invasion--at least not in the pages of New Avengers, and second, the climax of the story takes place immediately off-panel.  That is utterly maddening.  That strategy might have worked in the monthly magazines because the various issues came out in the same weeks or whatever, but reading it back in trade, it makes no sense whatsoever.  If you're gonna repackage the material as a trade, it's very important to make sure that all of the pivotal issues are repackaged together into a single volume.  In this case, I don't even know where to go to read what all I've missed.


The other problem here is more meta.  The Avengers is supposed to be Marvel's cosmic team, but the story Bendis wants to write is obviously not a cosmic story.  Just look at the heroes: Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, Echo, Clint Barton, Wolverine, Iron Fist, Luke Cage, Captain America, etc...  These are all street-level super-heroes.  They are massively overpowered, even by guys like The Wrecking Crew who're traditionally jobbers for Thor and other established bad asses.  There is no one in the New Avengers who can go up against, say, Ronan the Accuser, and it gets ridiculous after a while.  Even when the team is augmented by Carol Danvers and Dr. Strange, they still get their asses kicked with amazing regularity.  To be honest with you, that wouldn't be so bad if this weren't supposed to be Marvel's flagship book about it's flagship team.  I mean, if this was Heroes for Hire, it would've worked fine with the same cast.  But as an Avengers book?  Like I said, it's a little frustrating.  In truth, I wonder if maybe Bendis didn't really wanted to write Heroes for Hire, but the company needed him on Avengers, so he just shoe-horned his Heroes for Hire idea into the Avengers book that he was being paid to write.

The Search for the Sorcerer Supreme
was the high point of this series.

None of that is to say that I didn't like these books.  I read all 58 issues (or however many there were), and for the most part, the stories were very good.  The beginning was strong, and the stuff after Secret Invasion ended was very strong.  In fact, I'd call The Search for the Sorcerer Supreme one of the best trades I've read all year.  These are books that are worth your time, especially if you also have the means and/or the patience to dig up the separate Civil War and Secret Invasion collections concurrently.  However, I still like Bendis's work better when he's working on smaller stories about smaller teams and/or sets of individuals.  Bendis's run on Daredevil was excellent.  His run on Moon Knight was also very, very good.  Likewise, the issues in New Avengers that focused on Hawkeye's return from the dead or on Luke Cage's commitments to his family and his beliefs were also strong.  But when we get into the big action with all of its many players and disparate events, that's where the narrative here falls down, and unfortunately, it's that stuff that makes up a substantial part of what the Avengers, as a concept, is supposed to be about.  There is a lot of :"fighty-fighty" here, but it's a mess, often without any narrative through-line.


So.  New Avengers is good.  Sometimes even very good or excellent.  But I think it'll be a better reading experience if you go into it knowing what to expect.