Four Avengers travel to a town where a bunch of vampires live and are under attack by a new team of Nightstalkers. The quartet - She-Hulk, Wonder Man, Living Lightning and Lightspeed - scuffle a bit, but ultimately protect the town. The main thing I took from that, besides remembering someone made Wonder Man a pacifist at some point (and it apparently still holds, for a particular value), is there's no sense of teamwork between this group. Last issue, you could tell Captain America, Hercules and Hawkeye had a track record of working together. This group, everyone just kind of splits up and flails about, fighting individual battles.
Meanwhile, Shang-Chi's figured out someone's been using the crises the team has faced as cover for heists and encounters this Tiger Snake. Who is a good enough fighter to sucker Shang-Chi into getting poisoned, though Shang escapes to alert Captain America. But the Serpent Society's got another new member, a very big one. OK, so? This Avengers squad has Hercules and She-Hulk. They beat up big dudes all the time. This is why the Serpent Society is a bunch of second-raters. "Our secret weapon is a guy on Pym Particles, but we named him after an extinct giant snake!" *extremely sarcastic golf clap*
I guess it's going to be a different artist every issue, then. Ferreira's art is a bit looser than Eaton or Smith's. Maybe a good touch to have when Bloodscream is sporting a mouth that could swallow a watermelon and huge teeth, but some of faces that don't belong to weird vampire-like people look kind of strange. He also likes overlapping panels, and squeezing together a lot of panels that are unevenly shaped. A tilted horizontal rhombus, on top of two narrower panels, all crammed into a quarter of the page. I don't know what effect it's supposed to have when I read it, beyond the sense maybe the page space isn't being allocated well.
Also, why the heck do characters keep saying it as "AVENG.E.R.S." I know, it's an acronym now, in that stupid, Vril Dox, "R.E.B.E.L.S. has another acronym inside it," way, but you can't pronounce the periods. It's just "Avengers." That's what it sounds like they're saying, they are Avengers, so just write it like that.
Moon Knight asks Iron Man to look at this new drug, but Stark don't know shit about chemistry, so that's a bust. I was thinking this was a job for Hank Pym, and sure enough, that's who Stark mentions. Too bad he's dead. Or not, since that Avengers Inc. mini-series Al Ewing did established Hank's still alive, I guess. Something Marc knew even before his most recent death, but thus far neglected to mention to Tigra.
Well, I'm sure that's going to be a calm and reasonable conversation. Especially as the cops have decided to barge into the Midnight Mission, I presume being on this Fairchild guy's payroll, or under his thumb, or whatever.
Oh, and Moon Knight tried to hit one of Fairchild's shipments, but got punked by some old foe of his with perception-warping pheromones. Cubist has a nifty design, though it seems like one a lot of artists would get tired of drawing quickly. Rosenberg and Cappuccio have the background tilt to match whatever direction the action is going in a particular panel, so that the characters seem like they're always hemmed in by it. Nice touch.
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