If Jeff Parker
showed readers in Hulk #38 how to
handle a summer event tie-in comic, then Brian Michael Bendis is showing us how
not to in Avengers #16. It’s not a
bad issue, per se, but it just felt out of place, though some may disagree.
The issue focuses solely on Steve
Rogers as he attempts to manage his grief at his second loss of Bucky over in Fear Itself. How does someone like
Captain America handle loss of a comrade? Why, by abandoning all of his duties
and the chaos in America and around the world to seek revenge of course!
Unfortunately, things don’t go as planned as Steve and his “Avenging Angels”
find themselves up against some his most dangerous Nazi enemies.
That’s really about all there is
to this issue but, despite that, it still manages to be rather confusing. The biggest problem is when this issue
actually takes place: before or after Fear
Itself’s story has ended. While this issue uses the same framing device of
talking Avengers’ heads looking back on events as the past
few issues (and this
method has more than worn out its welcome), the rest isn’t so clear. The whole
point of the story is Steve attempting to track down and get revenge on Sin,
one of the primary antagonists of Fear
Itself. However, over in that miniseries, Sin is standing right in front of
Steve as they are locked in combat. So this either takes places sometime after
Bucky died, but before Steve lead the charge against Sin, which doesn’t make
any sense since Steve already knew where she was, or takes place after Fear Itself where Sin has apparently run
off to Europe. It is made entirely unclear what kind of time frame the reader
is working with and this definitely hurts the story. Other than that, there really
is nothing much to the issue. There’s plenty of monologuing about what kind of
person Cap is, but it’s nothing readers haven’t heard a million times before.
The only place where the story is anything special is the very end, but it’s
too little too late.
As bland and somewhat confusing as
the story is, the worst offender is John Romita Jr’s artwork. I’m very vocal of
my dislike for Romita Jr’s art from anytime in the last 15 years and Avengers #16 is no exception. It
simultaneously completely ugly and boring and makes for an issue that I had to
trudge through. Even worse is that large chunks of the issue are silent, making
the reader rely on the art, but his work is far from good enough for this.
Detail is either lacking or nonexistent, especially in backgrounds and there
are multiple instances of people seeming to either not have pupils or no eyes
at all. The action is boring, his women look like men in some panels and
sometimes can’t even be told apart. And don’t even get me started on Cap’s “shield
jump” that’s just looks like something out of a cartoon. For an issue that’s
all about emotion and revenge, Romita is an especially poor choice as he has no
handle on how to illustrate these and it really, seriously hurts some of the
more emotional scenes and makes them almost laughable. I know there are tons of
people out there that love Romita’s work and this will likely be no exception.
Good for you if that’s the case, but I found this to be one of the single most
visually unappealing comics I have read in a long time.
I know this likely won’t happen anytime soon,
but Marvel really needs to get Bendis and Romita off of this series. Avengers is supposed to be Marvel’s big
flagship title, but this team is doing way more harm than good. It is not
accessible to new readers, it barely features any of the Avengers, has no
immediate visual appeal and a story that falls mostly flat and is slightly
confusing. Avengers deserves better
and I hope to see that sometime sooner than later. In the meantime, don’t waste
your money on this series, either as a single issue or in a trade paperback.