Sunday, March 24, 2019

Sunday Splash Page #58

"Live From Bagalia, It's The Arcade Prison Special!', in Avengers Undercover #7, by Dennis Hopeless (writer), Kev Walker (penciler), Jason Gorder (inker), Jean-Francois Beaulieu (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer)

The follow-up series to Avengers Arena, where the teen heroes who survived have to deal with what happened during Arcade's little horror show. Made worse by the fact Arcade naturally recorded all of it and posted the footage on the Internet. So the whole world knows all the bad decisions they made.

After making another poor choice to seemingly kill Arcade, and getting "rescued" by Baron Zemo, they decide their only chance to redeem themselves is to pretend to work for him and then bring him down. Because 7 teen heroes were going to pull that off when Zemo had an army of hundreds of super-villains.

The series only lasted 10 issues, and you can tell Hopeless kicks things into overdrive to tie things up the last few. My guess is he was originally hoping for 12-18 issues for this. The general idea is sound, to follow-up with these characters and see how they're dealing with what happened. If you're going to put characters through the wringer like that, you really shouldn't just walk away and leave someone else to deal with your mess (that's called pulling a Millar). Plus the fact they think there's going to be some magic move that can fix all this, but they haven't thought things through remotely well enough for their plan to have any chance of working.

There is, however, the significant issue that these kids are thrown in cells by SHIELD for killing Arcade. Who you will recall was a successful hitman even before he started building homicide-themed amusement parks and torturing kids. Are we really supposed to believe SHIELD thinks these kids are now super-villains because they killed Arcade? 

I pointed this out at the time, but Wolverine kills like 50 dudes every week. Not even people that experimented on him, just random criminals and thugs he runs into while motorcycling through the Canadian wilderness (or Japan.) I don't see SHIELD throwing his butt in jail over the fact his body count is higher than some small wars.

Kev Walker draws most of the issues, and his work is still very good. The expressive faces and body language, and the way Bagalia is this bizarre patchwork of like a shantytown and Las Vegas' seedier twin. Beaulieu's colors pop off the page in the action scenes. I love that shade of purple he uses for Nico's powers. The other artists, mostly Tim Green II, aren't nearly as good, which is a bit of a disappointment. Especially since I liked Green's work quite a bit on Annihilation: Conquest - Star-Lord and some of the other cosmic stuff he did with Abnett and Lanning.

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