Avengers Arena #1-3, by Dennis Hopeless (writer), Kev Walker (artist), Frank Martin (colorist), with Jean-Francois Beaulieu on #2, Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Yeah, I decided to start with this. What the hell.The story, you probably know. Arcade somehow spirits away several teenage super-types from around the globe, and deposits them in some hidden location. Then he tells them they've got a month to kill each other. He expects only one of them to be alive when the month is over, or else he'll kill them all himself. Which he has possibly developed super-powers for the purpose of doing so. The kids scatter, some forming small groups, but someone is picking them off one at a time. Or appearing to pick them off.
That's the big thing about this story for me. There's an air or deception, or sleight of hand hanging over everything. Part of that is by design, since Hopeless and Walker are keeping the person attacking the various camps out of sight, and part of it is the things that don't quite add up. Arcade's powers, these Braddock Academy kids, some of X-23's actions. Everything is off, in a way that it feels staged, that all the most important stuff if happening off-panel. That's how I'm reading so far, like a mystery. Everything is a clue, and I want to piece it together before Hopeless tells us.
It's a detached way of looking at it, but I'm not indifferent to the characters. If you must know, I'm rooting for Darkhawk and Cammi myself, though things weren't looking too good for Chris Powell there at the end of #3. Like I said a while back, though, the deaths don't bother me much. If Marvel wants to ignore the results of this story, they will (assuming there isn't some trick to the deaths). In the meantime, Hopeless is trying to make us care about the characters. He hasn't done much with the Braddock Academy kids yet, but Rebecca Ryker's story in issue 2 was pretty effective. A girl who's been regarded as an instrument her whole life, by her dad, SHIELD, someone in this current group.
Kev Walker's art probably helps the book a lot. You can tell he's really trying to, anyway. I thought the campfire scene in issue 2 especially. He definitely tried to convey something about each of the Braddock Academy bunch with their postures. Kid Briton holding up the fiery sword in front of him, but the way he stares at it with this forlorn look. His faces are less busy than they were the last time I saw them (in Annihilation: Nova). No repeats of "Quasar as current Robert Redford" here. A less is more approach, stronger lines, but fewer of them. The action sequences look good, too. I don't know who to credit for the sort of blur effect on some of the flashbacks (like Cammi's). Seems like something Walker might be doing, but it might also be Martin, as part of his color effects. I do like the color work generally. A lot of action takes place in either snow, or at night, so Martin gets to show off against either a predominantly white or black background, which helps everything else stand out more.
I had been expecting this to be a lot worse. The dangers of reading too much Internet hyperbole. It's not a great book, but it's not the dumpster fire a lot of people have made it out to be, either. There's a lot of mystery so far that has me interested, there's Walker's very good art. Mostly, I have all these different suspicions and theories about what's happening, what will happening, and who is responsible, and I want to stick around for the answers.
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