I used to have time to read my comics in a coffee shop. Now I have to read them in the bathroom. Then I write reviews of them. I wash my hands in between.
AVENGERS ASSEMBLE #25
Is this book ending too?? Come ON, Marvel! You lure my fanboy ass in with a promise of important continuity with the other Avengers titles I collect, even though on the surface it appears to just be a book for new fans who jumped on board after the movie came out. The first arc DID pretty much only include characters on the team that also appeared in the movie, and sometimes shoehorned them in to do so. But as the book progressed, it became its own title and the characters came and went as the story required them, not to keep them around to fill some artificially mandated roster.
This latest story arc has been pretty entertaining. Kind of
like on-the-job hero training for Anya 'Spider Girl' as she's paired with
Avengers famous and not-so-famous over the course of recent issues. This
storyline sprang from the recent Inhuman-centric crossover that affected the
whole of the Marvel Universe. In a nutshell, Black Bolt, the Inhuman king,
detonated a terrigen bomb which triggered the latent mutant transformation in
regular humans around the world descended from the pure Inhumans. This caused
the humans to be enveloped in a cocoon while their new abilities manifested.
One of these cocooned humans was Anya's beloved teacher. His cocooned body was
summarily stolen/ kidnapped and Anya swore to save him. So she came to the
Avengers.
Along the way she worked with Wolverine, Black Widow and
Spider Woman, and others. All leading up to this issue where ALL the Avengers
join in the hunt. Along the way Anya has grown on me as a 'teen age superhero'
character. Regular readers of this blog will be well versed on my feelings
toward the younger set. It can be summed up as 'get offa my lawn and outta my
comics'. But this was different. She was still all ‘Ohmygodthisissocool’ about
it, but she did her own research, stood up for herself and ‘made her bones’
with the Avengers as they say. I liked her so much I bought the action figure
that just came out. And that, my friends, is a commitment.
So, like I said, in this issue all the Avengers convene to
rain down upon AIM headquarters (the guys that stole the cocoon). It turns out
that there’s another player in this game: The Toxic Doxie. Now, I been curious
about this character since she showed up out of the blue as Norman Osborn’s
Scarlet Witch in his 2nd Dark Avengers group. Like when Strong guy
showed up in Thunderbolts recently after becoming Lord of Hell in X-Factor, I
love it when characters show back up in books I wasn’t expecting to find them
in. It’s been fun to watch how crazy and funny she is during this adventure.
Her goal was to copy the new Inhumans’ powers for herself, hence the cocoon
stealing. She got the power of one of them, but is going for the second when all
hell breaks loose. There’s some laugh out loud (literally, my roommate was
concerned at what was going on in the bathroom) moments of banter between the
heroes in this issue and the day is nicely saved. There’s a nice (if
inaccurate) 1/3 page panel of all the heroes (including Anya) assembling. Then
the book blows it for me. The last two pages have Anya at home, geeking out
over getting a text from Steve Rogers. He then sends her a new ringtone which happens
to be the theme song to the ‘Avengers Assemble tv show that’s on the Disney
Channel.
Really.
Then I’m kinda blindsided as the writer, Kelly Sue
DeConnick, takes the whole last page to rewrite ‘Goodnight Moon’ as a farewell
to the book. What? I don’t get it. What mandate did it fulfill? Warren Freaking
Ellis was the artist for crap’s sake! What more do you need?
Marvel, you make it really hard to love you sometimes.
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