Sunday Splash Page #55

"The Hand That Stole The Galaxy!", in Avengers Infinity #4, by Roger Stern (writer), Sean Chen (penciler), Scott Hanna (inker), Steve Oliff (colorist), Richard Starkings and Troy Peteri (letterers)

I picked this four-issue mini-series up out of a dollar bin early last year. It revolves around a threat that gets mentioned at some point in Avengers Forever, the Infinites, and involves a real makeshift roster of Avengers.

They're drawn in because Quasar finds a planet devastated by a bunch of self-replicating robots and calls for help from whoever he can get. Thor, Monica Rambeau (going as Photon at the moment), Moondragon, all happen to be available on Earth, and then Tigra and Starfox are jaunting around the cosmos. Why the hell anyone would willingly hang around Starfox with his creepy powers I don't know.

The team struggles to get on the same page, even as their problem escalates rapidly. Thor seems more headstrong than normal, possibly because he feels guilty about another Rigellian world being destroyed so soon after Thanos had done so. Moondragon doesn't work well with others, especially Thor, who has ample reason to distrust her. Photon's trying to take a leadership role, but getting Thor to listen would be a problem even if she was fully confident she should take command.

It's one of those stories that involves calling on a Cosmic Abstract to help, and then convincing the threat that mortals are special and shouldn't be treated like scraps to be discarded whenever. My mileage tends to vary with stories like that, but for the threat as presented here, there isn't another option.

Sean Chen's faces tend to be very similar, but he's a solid comic book artist. He handles the action sequences in the earlier issues well, and he's pretty good at drawing angry faces. Which is good considering so many of the characters are angry at each other throughout the story. He's good at giving the sense of the immense scale of the Infinites compared to everything else, really makes the challenge seem daunting.

It's an inessential mini-series, but entertaining.