Well, well, well, look what it is. No issues of the ongoing have survived my collection purges over the years, so this book's gonna bear the sins of its brethren. Besides, I did a nearly page-by-page rundown of my reactions to it 19 years ago.
First, Brian Michael Bendis disassembled the Avengers, and I said nothing, because I didn't understand what would follow. Then he re-started the Avengers, except now they were "new." And sure, he added Spider-Woman, Luke Cage, and Wolverine to the roster, which was new, so long as you ignored the long history of characters getting to be Avengers for the first time. Bendis certainly went to that well again and again. Daredevil's an Avenger! Storm's an Avenger! Squirrel Girl! And so on.
Beyond that? The New Avengers didn't do a hell of a lot of superheroing, I guess that was new. All those characters he added were lucky if they got one storyline to show what they brought to the table before the roster either got reconfigured or they just got lost in the shuffle. Some of that was Marvel's constant stream of Big Events, which produced "changes" that had to be addressed or reflected in the books.
A fair amount, however, was Bendis' glacial pacing. He might get one story done between events, if he was lucky. I guess, left to his own devices, a longform story about a team of superheroes trying to root out threats in the shadows and among themselves, where big, colorful super-villains were a deliberate distraction, might have been interesting. Emphasis on "might."
I also didn't find him very good at showing what characters brought to the table. I'm generally open to writers adding characters they like to the Avengers, as long as the writer shows them being useful. But Bendis stinks at scripting fight scenes, meaning you got stories like "The Collective" where it felt as though he created a threat, then had no clue how to make two-thirds of the roster he built relevant or useful in the conflict. Carol Danvers and the Vision, neither of them on the roster, get more to do than Luke Cage, Spider-Woman, or Captain America.
The book itself opens on a mass breakout from a super-villain prison, the majority of the team's roster being the folks who happened to show up or be present at the time. To be clear, not a bad hook! Captain America deciding he has to get a team together to round up all these escaped criminals, and trusting the people who were willing to jump in and get involved on their own. (Daredevil turns him down at this time, due to the shitshow his life was.) The book pays lip service to the mass breakout, for the first 10 issues. They chased down Electro, Sauron, the Wrecker.
But I think Bendis really wanted to do espionage stuff. The people in the shadows. Secrets. There was a mystery around who orchestrated the breakout, and who they were trying to free. There was a whole thing about how maybe Spider-Woman was a double agent for those people, or maybe she's pretending to be a double agent for those people on behalf of the Avengers. He added a character he created in his Daredevil run (Echo) to the team, under a different identity (Ronin), then had her trying to infiltrate the Hand. I think, or she was just monitoring them. "The Collective" is at least as much about Maria Hill (current SHIELD director) learning the Avengers knew why most of the mutants lost their powers, but kept it a secret, and her becoming more hostile to them as a result.
Even this Annual, which is probably the one Bendis-written Avengers comic I read that really felt like a good Avengers' comic, revolves around a mysterious guy, either working with or for AIM, approaching the Yelena Belova Black Widow, and convincing her to be turned into a Super-Adaptoid. The guy's identity is kept hidden, the Avengers unable to figure out anything about who sent her, and Iron Man ends up accusing Spider-Woman of being mixed up in the whole thing.
For me, New Avengers is notable for being the first title this blog helped me drop. Reviewing it each month as it came out helped me realize how little might happen in any given issue, and how little I was enjoying it. When The Collective - which seemed like his attempt to do a classic, multi-issue, Avengers-level threat - turned out to be a dud, it was easy to drop and not look back.
More or less. It was a tentpole book for Marvel, so it was hard to miss hearing about the stuff Bendis was doing. Nerfing Dr. Strange's powers in yet another storyarc about the Avengers fighting the Hand. (Wolverine and Daredevil routinely fight the Hand solo, but an entire team of Avengers is struggling?) Trying to establish over-matched wannabe The Hood as a big deal by trashing Tigra as a character. Nothing that made me regret dropping the book.
Which is too bad. I really did think the core group of his initial roster - Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, Luke Cage - could have been a neat group. There was potential in the variety of skills and backgrounds, but the book was never what I hoped it would be. Characters spend a lot of time sitting around talking, but rarely in service of advancing subplots for those characters or building interpersonal relationships or the larger plot. Just talking for the sake of talking.
I didn't really get The Sentry's deal, and I'm not sure Bendis did, either. Why have The Sentry tell the Avengers it's a bad idea for him to join them, then have them just blow that concern off? I didn't love Wolverine being on the team (in-story) specifically because Tony Stark thought they needed someone ready to kill (obviously the meta-reason was Wolverine's a popular character.) Then Bendis ended up making Hawkeye the guy who wants to use lethal force (once he brought him back from being dead at Bendis' hands during Avengers Disassembled.) Which was just stupid given all the other characters he'd put on the roster already well-established to have little compunction about killing.
Ultimately, the book was a mess, drifting vaguely one direction, then veering into a different course for event tie-ins, maybe finding its way back to the original heading later on.
2 comments:
Yeah, it never seemed as if Bendis knew what he was doing, and then on the very rare occasions when he did, it wasn't very good.
In theory, as you say, there are some good ideas in there, but none of them were executed well. It's telling that JMS was doing a better version of the New Avengers over in Amazing Spider-Man at the time.
(And even that wasn't great, but it was better.)
That Amazing Spider-Man story did survive in my collection longer than any of Bendis' New Avengers other than this annual, that's for sure.
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