Marvel Comics
The Mighty Avengers #10
By Hervé St-Louis
April 19, 2008 - 07:58

Marvel Comics
Writer(s): Brian Bendis
Penciller(s): Mark Bagley
Inker(s): Danny Miki, Allen Martinez, Crime Lab Studios



MIGHTAVEN010.jpg
Sentry, Iron Man and Doctor Doom have been propelled in the past and must find a way to return home without disturbing the past which could affect the future of reality. How can the trio find a time machine that will allow them to return to the future? But can they stop their fight before someone notices them and forever affects the past, or is that too much to ask from them?

This is a simple story that was easy to read and used a few clever settings to make a compelling story.  Bendis showed all characters’ personality very well and how they played against one another. I still don’t like how Sentry was retroactively introduced to the Marvel universe and here, Bendis works hard to reinforce that. I wish he didn’t. I understand that Bendis has a lot invested in Sentry, but this fake Superman character that never was still has not risen to his potential. Therefore, forcing him to be relevant by using such tricks as showing him in the past is not convincing enough.

Using an older comic book style or colouring has been done very often to represent an older age in comic books. It’s a trick used in a few JSA stories, and the first issues of the new Justice League series, for example. If find it interesting about what this says about a comic book. Most readers and creators probably don’t realize this, but this is the creation of a new rule and language for a comic book. It is theoretically, a new way of representing time. What is fun about this is that it uses the visual information of a comic book as an element that breaks the suspension of disbelief that a reader temporarily, to constantly inform a reader about a what this story is meant to say.

So the concept that each comic book represents the overall reality of a comic book is broken in favour of using styles as visual cues. It’s akin to using black and white to represent the 1950s in a film. I’d like to see more experiment with this and I am glad that a standard super hero series like the Mighty Avengers is willing to try out such concepts. Of course with Bagley as the main artist, this was not a problem at all.

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