Comic: "Dark Avengers 1-2"
Published by: Marvel Comics
Written by: Bendis
Artist: Deodato
Reviewer: Max Burbank
Posted: 2/24/2009
Plot: Norman Osborn, a.k.a The Green Goblin, shoots the leader of the Skrull invasion in the head, and so as a natural consequence, is given leadership of SHIELD and The Avengers. SHIELD gets scraped in favor of HAMMER and the Avengers get a new line-up. Two Avengers stay on; Ares and Sentry. They are joined by villains passed off as old avengers. Bull’s-eye is Hawkeye, Moonstone is Ms. Marvel, Venom is Spider-Man, Daken is Wolverine. Oh, and for whatever reason, Marvel Boy is Captain Marvel. And Normie puts on Iron Man Armor with Captain America colors as… Iron Patriot. Sorry. And on their very first mission, the have to save Dr. Doom from Morgan LaFey.
Review: Okay. I confess. I like it so far. I have no faith in it, I think it’s a lousy story line, but if I said I didn’t like it I’d be lying.
The thing is, though, it’s been done before. And not just ‘it’s been done before’ as in ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’. It’s been done before in the original run of Thunderbolts, the very book Norman is coming from. Moonstone was a founding member, so she ought to have a powerful sense of dejavu. It was a lot of fun, and I loved it, until the premise ran thin as it was bound to. Some of the Villains playing heroes started to like being heroes so much they were forced to reevaluate their lives, they turned on the others, there was a big fight, everybody was exposed and then… then there really wasn’t any story left to tell.
‘Dark Avengers’ is fun. But it’s a retread of an idea that was fun, but had short legs. And Thunderbolts wasn’t weighed down by having to drag along the whole damn Marvel Universe.
Add two more huge problems to the mix, Daken and Sentry. Once upon a time, Wolverine was a great character. He still is, if you just go with the basics, but no one at Marvel seems to have been happy with that for a couple of decades now. As an enigma he’s awesome, but every hack with a pencil had to add to his back-story, creating a great stinking swamp full of crap like Robot Wolverine, Cyber and now Daken. It wasn’t enough that Wolverine had to be everywhere all the time in every aspect of Marvel, now we have to contend with his son. All we need now is Wolverine-Mite and Logan can be Batman in 1962.
Sentry was a great mini series. It was very Meta, a comment on the Marvel take on superherodom. Taking that character out of the artistically contrived alternate Marvel universe and putting him into actual Marvel continuity was always a mistake, and more than that, a complete failure to get anything the original miniseries was about. Make Sentry an actual hero in the Marvel universe and he totally fails to be a comment on the Marvel Universe. It’s more than stupid, it’s an insult. It was stupid as hell to bring him into the Avengers, and it’s stupider still to keep him on. Nobody can do a damn thing with him, because he was never conceived as a character, he was a device with which to tell a story.
Sure, it’s fun to have villains play heroes. It’s fun to have them become heroes, too. The Avengers have a proud history of turning heroes into villains. But that isn’t where this is going, and these writers are too ham-fisted to make this story arc ironic commentary on old tropes.
The short version? “Dark Avengers” is fun, but it’s already starting to smell a little. If you’re going to eat it, do it now before it spoils.
Overall rating:
(Scored on a 0.5 - 5 pickles rating: 0.5 being the worst and 5 being the best)