Avengers #5 - Mobile Edition

Marvel Comics
Avengers #5
By Hervé St-Louis
October 3, 2010 - 12:36

Marvel Comics
Writer(s): Brian Michael Bendis
Penciller(s): John Romita Jr.
Inker(s): Klaus Janson
Colourist(s): Dean White
Letterer(s): Cory Petit
Cover Artist(s): John Romita Jr., Klaus Janson
$3.99 US

The Avengers that have travelled to the future must find a way to stop Ultron from defeating them again in the future thanks to the tinkering by Immortus/Kang. But this time, as new heroes are brought in to fight Ultron in the timeloop, something is different. Is that the opportunity the heroes needed to stop Ultron?

I just realized that I never got issue three of this series and that it didn’t matter when I tried to catch up on my reading with issue four. Reading issue five, little has changed and it’s still a big mumbo jumbo. Bendis was betting that he could do pure super heroics but he can’t. Sure, the story is as cosmic and grandiose as anything he wrote before. It’s a departure and a focus on the simple stuff instead of the conspiracy material we’ve witnessed from Marvel Comics the last few years. But the story is boring. The characters don’t even say any of those fun one-liners Bendis is famous for.

I’m tired of Romita’s mumbo jumbo that passes for artwork. I never thought I would say something like that. While his work on Black Panther and the Eternals was well layed out and interesting. Here, Romita indulges in his greatest weaknesses. Characters have no real shape. Ok they look like cylinders so that must count as a shape. The story is full one full-page panels that attempt to look dramatic but aren’t. There are almost no backgrounds behind the characters and all the technology looks like a bunch of pipes plugged into bigger pipes. I understand that readers like Romita. Everybody likes Romita. But I feel like he’s pulling a John Byrne on readers. He’s a high level artist mailing in crap as work and readers are supposed to feel privileged to read this crap which is a pale shadow of the real work the artist is capable of delivering. Didn’t Frank Miller and Neal Adams try to pull that one too? Didn’t turn out too well for either of them...

Rating: 4/10