"That Was the General Critical Response, Yes", in Avengers Arena #14, by Dennis Hopeless (writer), Kev Walker (penciler/inker), Jason Gorder (inker), Jean-Francois Beaulieu (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer)
There wasn't a full-page splash, at least not one in a Kev Walker-drawn issue I liked. But I didn't want to pass over this series entirely, so here we are.
I don't actually know what the overall critical response to the series was, either. Only that the few people whose stuff I read at the time weren't fans of it. I get the complaints. If you were a big fan of Avengers Academy or Runaways, you weren't going to be stoked about characters you liked being potentially tossed in a meat grinder. As a New Warriors fan, I've been there. Although the group that sustained the most damage was the Braddock Academy kids Hopeless created specifically for this series.
(I read once his original plan had been to have a book focused on those kids. Introduce them, flesh them out, then they get abducted into this mess. I don't know if it would have involved all the pre-existing characters once the abduction happened or not, though.)
But I generally enjoyed it. I wasn't a fan of Arcade being more invested in winning than just having a good challenge, but I could rationalize it that nobody enjoys losing all the time. And especially nobody enjoys hearing themselves shit-talked at their own birthday by friggin' Constrictor. I thought we got a lot of time seeing the different approaches all the characters were taking. The ones who were holding out hope they'd escape versus the ones gearing up to kill. The ones scheming versus the ones being manipulated. The alliances and the petty rivalries. The poor decision making under stress, with Arcade trying to ratchet things up from time to time to make it worse.
I was only really worried about Cammi and Darkhawk surviving, and they both made it. Cammi even got to be frequently badass. I was on-board with that. I really enjoyed when she knocked Chase the hell out. Never was much of a fan of Chase.
Kev Walker managed to hold up fairly well under a 3 issues every two months pace. At least once or twice, Hopeless seemed to work in issues away from the main action for the fill-ins. Like an issue where Molly Hayes goes to Hank Pym because she's worried about her friends being missing. Walker's work is less busy here than it was in Annihilation: Nova. He inks himself at least some of the time, so maybe that's part of it. He drew some pretty good fight scenes, and Beaulieu's color work was really excellent at times. There's a fight where Nico comes back from near-death and just wrecks Katy/Apex, where I thought the purple shade for her magic was really great to contrast a fight in a snowy forest.
2 comments:
I didn't read this, and I try to avoid all of the other arena of death storylines as well. Call me old-fashioned, but I've never really been a fan of having characters I have grown fond of be murdered for fun.
Marvel and DC were a bit too much into this sort of thing lately...and not so lately, and I don't really understand why.
The coloring seemed nicely done though.
It isn't normally my thing, but in this particular case it mostly worked for me. If the creative team spends time on the characters, what they're thinking, why they make the decisions they do, rather than just gruesome deaths, it's got a chance to not be horrible.
Going by what I remember of the sales figures, I was in the minority on this one, though.
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