Saturday Splash Page #168

"The Mud King," in Seven to Eternity #1, by Rick Remender (writer), Jerome Opena (artist), Matt Hollingsworth (colorist), Rus Wooton (letterer)

Kelvin had mentioned this book in the comments of my Sunday Splash Page for Coda, as another book set in a world where the bad guy has already won. Beyond that, they're very different books. For one thing, it took five years for the 17 issues to come out. For another, here the Mud King has stuck around to rule, rather than depart for some other plane of existence. Which means there's still the option for resistance, but also the risk of reprisal.

Adam Osidis has spent his life living on the fringes. His father was friends with the Mud King when he was just Garlis Sulm, a couple of knights. But Garlis had a power to see through the eyes of anyone that would let him in. So all he had to do was offer them something they wanted badly enough. Adam's father held out, and got framed as a butcher and betrayer, retreating into the wilderness. But now he's dead, and Adam's dying, and the Mud King's found them.

What seems like a suicide run for Adam gets flipped on its head by the arrival of a small crew of resistance who capture the Mud King. They don't kill him, because supposedly every person who let him in will die, too, but there's a place they can take him that will break that connection. Then they can kill him. So Adam joins in, but that means there's opportunity to hear whispered offers.

Opena and Hollingsworth are an impressive art team, though. Opena creates a wide variety of characters, creatures and locales. Cities held aloft by balloons, massive reptilian behemoths with metal mouths that spit lightning. Spirits that burst from the barrel of a gun, or elongated serpents that rise at the playing of a flute. It makes Adam, as the closest thing to a regular human in the cast, seem that much more alone. There's no one around quite like him, no people that accept him willingly or without some condition. And that's how it's always felt to him.

One thing that comes up is the lies people tell themselves. The Mosak, the small squad that captures Garlis, I don't know how they know for sure executing Garlis will kill all the people who accepted his offers. Maybe they just tell themselves that as assurance that it was OK to take so long to make this move. They had to be sure, had to make a good plan because they have to take him alive. Definitely not hesitation over possibly getting killed themselves. (It turns out to be true, but I'm not inclined to give any character the benefit of the doubt as to their motives in this book.)

Some members of the Mosak look askance at Adam because of his last name, because of the lies the Mud King spread. They expect Adam to betray them because it's in his blood and aren't shy of expressing their contempt. Then they make the shocked Pikachu face when he decides to make his own play. "Self-fulfilling prophecy" is apparently not a term anyone in Zhal is familiar with. Adam's father no doubt had reasons for keeping the truth of things from his son for several years, then can't understand why a young Adam disobeys and talks to a girl that seems like she wants to make friends. He thought his son understood the danger, without ever explaining what the danger was.

Of course, Adam's lying to himself about why he's doing all this, too. If Coda had notions people could (with difficulty) pull themselves back together in the wake of catastrophe and build again, Seven to Eternity seems to say those efforts will always collapse in the face of individual desires. The best you can manage is to tear down whichever latest tinpot dictator has assumed control, but that does nothing to reverse the slow decay of your world.

Six Isn't His Lucky Number

"Yo mama" jokes are passe. It's all about "my daddy" jokes now.

Venom: The Savage Six is the end of Rick Remender's stint writing Flash Thompson's - aka "Agent Venom" - adventures, and the beginning of Cullen Bunn's. In fact, the two of them co-write issues 18-21, which form the actual "Savage Six" portion of the trade.

The three issues prior to that revolve around Flash having been drafted into the "Secret Avengers", which Remender was taking over as writer from Warren Ellis. Flash trying to adjust to being on a team with Captain America (until Hawkeye takes over as leader), putting his foot in his mouth around Valkyrie, and having a whole other set of people to lie to about the fact the new Crime-Master knows who's wearing the symbiote. All of which also means more lying to his mother, his now ex-girlfriend Betty Brant, and his pal Peter Parker.

The Savage Six story itself is mostly Flash scrambling to protect his mother, sister and Betty from the fairly random assortment of villains the Crime-Master assembled. There's the Jack O'Lantern Remender and Tony Moore introduced in this series, but also The Fly, Death Adder from the Serpent Society(?), some digitized goof called Megatak, and the Toxin symbiote, bonded to Eddie Brock. It's not a great team since I'm not sure what history Flash has with Death Adder or Megatak. There's no meat to their presence, they're just here to make numbers.

At least two of those are Flash's own fault, as the Fly plays him with some sob story about a kid so that Flash lets him escape custody in issue 16. As for Brock, he was going around trying to kill all the symbiotes, and messed up Flash's attempt to put a bullet in Crime-Master's skull. Flash had to bail, and let Eddie webbed up to another symbiote bonded to him.

Flash ends up pulling the Fly's wings off, while Flash's mom watches, while Brock goes up like oil fire along with the symbiote because Flash can't pull him free in time. Not sure what point to draw from that. He showed mercy to one guy, and that guy turned around and tried to kill him. He left Brock to the wolves, then fucked up saving him.

Maybe the conclusion is Flash sucks at this. The last issue in the trade is his final showdown with Jack O'Lantern, who went ahead and stole Flash's dad's corpse as a taunt. How convenient Flash spends the entire issue thinking about his abusive drunk of a dad, and how similar they are.

Artist-wise, this collection is a mess. I know, no big surprise from Marvel in the early 2010s. Lan Medina draws issues 15 and 18-21, with Robert Atkins handling some pages in issue 20. Declan Shalvey draws issue 22. Kev Walker draws issues 16 and 17. There's 7 inkers, including Shalvey inking himself, and Walker doing likewise, but only on issue 16. There's 3 separate colorists, and no, they don't correspond to the primary artists, as Chris Sotomayor handles issues 16-21. There's even two different letterers!

Of the various art teams, the Shalvey/Lee Loughridge pairing is probably the best for setting mood. Shalvey sticks to a lot of wide, short panels, and more than the other artists, remembers the way the symbiote looks when Flash wears it is just something he's making it do. So as Flash loses control or gets angry, spikes start to protrude from it, and there are panels where you can see it's shifting more towards its classic appearance. And Loughridge drenches panels in a particular shade, playing up melancholy or fury.

Walker's art has rougher texture, and he tends to illustrate the violence more vividly than Medina or Shalvey. He likes tilted panels with rough-edged borders, although at times it's difficult to tell if I'm supposed to read across two pages or finish one then move to the next. Either way, the more graphic approach feels like a good choice; this is Venom, not Spider-Man. What's more, it's a Venom desperate to fix his earlier mistakes, proves he's not a fuck-up who lets people down all the time.

Comparatively, Medina's work is cleaner, more straightforward. Easy to read and tell what's happening, but kind of flat next to the others. Walker's Flash looks tired, eyes narrowed, face pinched, and he's not even scrambling to keep people alive yet. Medina's looks way too clean for someone already beat up and allegedly feeling a lot of pressure.

Saturday Splash Page #47

 

"City Sweep," in Venom (vol. 2) #22, by Rick Remender (writer), Declan Shalvey (artist), Lee Loughridge (colorist), Joe Caramanga (letterer)

Venom had several mini-series in the '90s, and an ongoing written by Daniel Way in the early 2000s, but those were always focused on Eddie Brock as the guy inside the symbiote. In 2011, though, Eddie Brock was trying to stay clear of the symbiote, and the living tar pit had been peeled off Mac Gargan after his stint being Norman Osborn's lackey. Left in the ever-so-trustworthy hands of the U.S. military, they decided to find a suitable soldier and get themselves a super-weapon.

Enter Flash Thompson. Having lost his legs serving in the Army in the Middle East during Brand New Day, Flash seemed quite eager for the opportunity to serve, and also use the symbiote as a stand-in for his legs. Remender sets Flash against Crime-Master, with his own, new Jack O'Lantern as chief henchman, but Flash is probably up against his own worst tendencies as much as anything. Remender uses Flash's own troubles with alcohol, and his ugly relationship with his abusive, alcoholic father. 

Flash doesn't really know how to deal with problems in a healthy manner, so he lies. He's dating Betty Brant, but lies to her about where he's at, claiming he's speaking at events for veterans. He lies to his bosses about how long he wore the suit during a mission in the Savage Land, and doesn't tell them Crime-Master knows who's calling themselves Venom. Because he doesn't want to lose access to the symbiote, the power, the purpose it grants him.

Tony Moore drew most of the initial story arc, and the character design for this version of Venom reflects that it's worn by someone meant to think of themselves as a soldier. It shifts appearance to resemble, boots, shoulder pads, gloves. Flash is packing heat and pouches like it's the Nineties all over again, using the symbiote to hold and fire multiple guns at once. Don't let the Punisher see that or he'll start demanding an alien goo suit. Flash keeps the suit under control with sedatives, but as he loses control, the symbiote shifts to more closely resemble the design used when Mac Gargan was wearing it. The massive, steroidal monster that looks like it could swallow a person whole.

I've only bought selected parts. The initial 5 issues, and the "Savage Six" story that concluded Remender's stint on the book. After the first five issues, it jumped into several Spider-Island tie-ins, and two or three-issue arc, and then the "Circle of Four", which was some play off the New Fantastic Four by putting together "dark" Spidey, Wolverine, Hulk and Ghost Rider in the persons of Venom, X-23, Red Hulk and that lady that took over as Ghost Rider after Jason Aaron's run. Not sure I'd agree with X-23 being more morally dubious than Logan, but whatever, I'm not dealing with that. Issues are surprisingly pricey, and Remender was replaced by Cullen Bunn, whose writing does zilch for me. 

Also, just from what issues I do own, they weren't great about keeping a regular artist. Six different artists in 13 issues, and while Kev Walker and Declan Shalvey aren't too far apart, wedging Lan Medina smack in the middle doesn't work so well.

The comic never does, in the parts I read, address any ethical concerns about drugging what is clearly a sentient being so it can be used as a weapon without its consent. Even when Remender adds Flash to his Secret Avengers run, it's unaddressed other than Hanks Pym and McCoy devising a more efficient way to keep it drugged and compliant. I'm not expecting any better from those two, Hank McCoy may have lapped Pym and Stark both with it comes to be ethically compromised, but still.

Working for the Man's Like Venom in Your System

Best Behind the Music voice: 'In an effort to curb his hunger for brains and get his career on track, Venom turned to pills. But what he couldn't see was that in the rollercoaster of his life, those drugs would carry him to new heights, before plunging him to the pits of Big Event despair.'

Back in March I wrote about the idea of having the Black Cat and Flash Thompson run across each other during that stretch where Flash had the Venom symbiote. Probably because of that, I picked up the first volume of his series, written by Rick Remender, with a whole mess of different artist (Tony Moore, Tom Fowler, Karl Kesel, and Sandu Florea for a grand total of one random page in the first issue).

The gist is that Flash wears the symbiote as part of some government agency, and goes on missions to serve America. He's not supposed to wear it for more than 48 hours straight, or it'll bond permanently with him. He carries sedatives to make it more compliant, which doesn't necessarily help if it can take control whenever he starts losing his temper. And there's supposed to be a bomb inside Flash that will kill him if the symbiote gets out of control. The benefit for Flash is that he gets to serve, he gets to be active, and the symbiote acts as legs for him (since he lost his serving in the Middle East during the Brand New Day era).

The first five issues establish the set-up, and put Flash up against a new Crime-Master, who seems like more of an arms trader than a would-be Kingpin. The guy figures out who's wearing the symbiote after they get separated during a clusterfuck of a mission in the Savage Land, and he gets Flash over a barrel with that. 

 

He's got himself a souped-up Jack O'Lantern as a henchguy, in what's a much more Halloween-themed design. Darker colors, ragged cape, ditches the Pogo Platform for a witches' broom looking thing. It's probably a better design overall than the original, but especially so for fighting gun-toting, sentient goo-wearing Spider-Man wannabe.

Flash wants to be like Spider-Man, so Remender gives him that, complete with Flash lying to his girlfriend Betty Brant about why he forgets important dates and goes silent for days at a time. Crime-Master threatens her at one point, which gets Spider-Man involved, leading to a misunderstanding battle. It is amusing afterward, when Betty is sure she was abducted because of her recent expose on organized crime, Peter's sure it has something to do with Spider-Man, while Flash knows it's about Venom.

The design for Agent Venom is essentially the symbiote making itself look like a combat outfit. It retains the color scheme and the symbol, but it makes itself look like Flash is wearing shoulder pads and boots and the whole magilla. I think that's supposed to be Flash imposing some kind of order on that, probably to help himself feel like a soldier again. Because as his control starts to slip, Moore and the others will draw it as reverting back to its classic look. The teeth start to show up, the musculature begins to swell and the symbiote forms those little tendrils (which I always associate as a Carnage thing, but whatever). The more the symbiote is running things, the more it assumes that form.

 

I'm not sure whether I want to hunt down the rest of the series. The issues immediately after this trade are a Spider-Island tie-in, and before too long, Remender's gonna leave and be replaced by Cullen Bunn. I have a mixed track record with Remender's work (hated his Captain America run, but Franken-Castle was fun), but I have never read anything of Bunn's that did anything for me.

Bring The Bad Guy Down With His Own Scheme

Had a thought typing yesterday's post. Hawkeye couldn't shoot the Orb of Necromancy because of his firm belief that Avengers don't kill. Which is a largely emotional response.There are likely legal reasons, but for Hawkeye, I think it's simply a belief he has, that the Avengers stand for something, and that they don't kill, no matter the situation. Which is a pretty inflexible and possibly unreasonable approach.

The techno virus is described as removing emotion and replacing it with cool logic, asserting an objective reality. Removing emotion from the equation, in other words. Might have been a good ending to have the virus change Hawkeye enough that his emotions are gone.

At which point he releases the arrow and destroys the Orb. because if he's truly committed to stopping the Singularity, then he has to destroy the Orb. Objectively, there is no other way to achieve that goal, and it's only his human emotions that held him back.

If Remender wanted it established Father would absolutely control people through the virus, say the decision was made in the split-second between emotion deserting Clint, and Father being able to command him. If you want that left ambiguous, just make it a flaw in Father's plan. That he never considered that someone might oppose him, but be hamstrung by morals his virus would remove, thus freeing them to stop him.

In A Collective, Some Are More Collected Than Others

I noticed last week that every threat Remender threw out during his Secret Avengers stint involved some sort of unified mind. Father and his goal of a technological singularity. The Abyss and its desire to spread its nothingness over the world through others. That relative of Mar-Vell's who used his son's mental powers to make an entire world passively await the Phoenix' arrival*.

The last example would have led to the collective suicide of a world, against the general populace's will. The Abyss would do much the same to Earth, given the yammering its followers did about embracing the void. You could take that as simply an absence of individuality or free will, not unlike Earth after Darkseid got going in Final Crisis. Either way, it's not a good scene for the people.

Father and his plan are a slightly different matter. His claim is he'll elevate humanity, beyond sickness, frailty, blinding emotions, even death. They have physical bodies now, but in the long run, the plan seems to be to have some cloud of their collective consciousness moving about in space, unencumbered by physical limitations.

That sounds like a pretty good deal, provided you don't mind your mind linked to every other person in the world**. There's cause for suspicion, that Father, like Abyss, like Kree guy, will be in an elevated status. Certainly, the Avengers seem to think that's happening. Braddock attributes Pym and Jim Hammond's behavior to Father, and there's certainly credibility to it in Pym's case. I'm less sure about Hammond; he could have let his desire to not feel so different overwhelm any concerns he might have. Or he was being controlled.

But for Braddock, there's no doubt Father isn't on the up-and-up, hardly surprising when you consider what they'd encountered recently. In general, collective minds are presented as hostile, usually because they want everyone to be in the collective, willing or not, it's just a clever way for one person to accumulate absolute power, or just because it's different from us.

Was Father going to use it as a means to control everyone, or would it have been the great advancement he promised? Did the Avengers have good reason to be suspicious, or did they let past experiences Father wasn't responsible for color their judgment? In one interpretation, you could say Remender's point is collective consciousness doesn't work because someone is always going to try and assert themselves on another, and this can lead to extinction. The other interpretation is more about how humans tend to see patterns and correlations where there are none, and make poor decisions because of them.

Remender might not be driving at either of those, though. It might be about the importance of individuality, or how it's the struggle to achieve that makes accomplishing something worthwhile***. Hawkeye's archery and status with the Avengers are impressive because of how hard he worked to reach that level, not simply that he did.  Ultimately, it's individuals that decide things. Jim Hammond decides it's wrong to force this change on humans, and destroys the Orb. There's nothing a collective can do about it. And they're all brought low by it, save Parvez, who never seemed affected to begin with. When the Avengers arrive to rescue him, he isn't hostile, he's glad to see the Black Widow. For whatever reason, the true Descendant was never part of the Singularity at all. Which may be how he's the true success of Father's plan, by carrying their genes on to future generations, gradually integrating them into humanity in a less intrusive manner. 

* You could argue the threat in that arc was the Phoenix, but the team wasn't going to stop the Phoenix, or die against it, because they were just in an AvX tie-in. Anything like that would be saved for the main series. For the purposes of that story, certainly, the Phoenix was a MacGuffin. It might have been one for all of AvX. Something to get the team near that particular Kree world, so they could run afoul of Mar-Vell and his cousin.

** To me, that sounds like hell, and yeah, that's strange coming from a guy who's been mouthing off on the blog to whoever reads it for seven years, but I choose what I share and don't share, just as you choose whether to share or not in the comments, or on your own blog. The idea that people are privy to your thoughts constantly, and you to theirs, or that you can't even tell where the line between them lies is not appealing. If you're someone who enjoys their solitude, where do you go?

***  I don't know if I'd agree with that, but there is some research that suggests people appreciate something more if they worked to get it.

That Sense Something Is Just Out Of Place

There are times when I'm reading Secret Avengers and I think it must be taking place in some alternate Marvel Universe from the one I'm mostly familiar with. Hidden cities filled with artificial intelligences convinced the Avengers wiped out mutants and will do the same to them. "Red light nations" where Arcade is a bartender at a strip club, and people are absolutely terrified of Taskmaster.

Don't get me wrong, Taskmaster's no slouch, but he's lost enough fights that I wouldn't expect his reputation to be that highly regarded.

It's like everything is almost how I remember it, but just slightly off-center. Maybe because it's sort of an espionage book, everything is a little darker, a little more grim, a little uglier than I thought, so it feels like a universe where the heroes have fallen behind just a little too much. Like, you're trying to catch up on paperwork, yardwork, whatever, but you find once you get a certain distance behind you just can't seem to make up the ground, and thing snowball. Or, there was a study in Australia about whether foxes could be used to control the rampant rabbit populations and they found they could, up to a point. But once the rabbits' numbers reached a certain level, the foxes just didn't eat enough of them to bring the numbers back down.

That's kind of what it feels like. Which really ought to feel right, since pretty much every future we've seen for Marvel Earth is lousy, and it had to start going down hill sometime. But those were always possible futures, so they could theoretically be averted, and they were always, you know, in the future. They hadn't arrived yet. This one seems to have arrived.

Secret Avengers - The Descendants by Rick Remender and Gabriel Hardman

I read "The Descendants", Rick Remender's opening arc in Secret Avengers earlier this week. Figured having the whole thing, it might work for me a little better. Lo and behold, it did. Quick recap: Captain America put Hawkeye (in his movie uniform) in charge, along with adding some new members (Captain Britain, Venom, the original Human Torch). The team comes across a woman with energy powers, and she and her son are abducted by new, really advanced Adaptoids. Ant-Man stows away and ends up in their underground artificial intelligence society, led by a geezer named Father. The Avengers show up, mostly get their tails handed to them, but do escape with the boy, believing erroneously they destroyed the city. All of which fits into some plan of Father's.

Father's plan, I won't say makes more sense now, but I'm grasping that there are layers of deception involved in it I wasn't picking up reading the issues separately. I was taking him at face value about this being all about the Homo Synthezoidous, so the shift to tricking the Avengers seemed abrupt to me. I guess that might have worked if Father is supposed to be Deadpool-crazy and thus prone to changing plans at a moment's notice, but I don't think that's the case.

Having Gabriel Hardman as artist doesn't hurt the book any, either. I like his take on all the different species, I suppose, of artificial beings living in the Core. You can tell what they're based on, but most of them have some sort of stylistic difference that shows they stand apart. The Sentinaughts have larger foreheads, more reminiscent of M.O.D.O.K. than a standard Sentinel, for example. His depiction of the Core, especially from above gives a hint of a patchwork city, suggesting each group generally keeps to themselves and builds their own neighborhoods. Hmm, not much of an improvement on humans there. I imagine that's done by design by Hardman and Remender. I love patchwork cities in fiction, that idea that around every corner can be a completely different world with its own rules. Big part of why GrimJack (set in a pan-dimensional city) appeals to me so much.  While we're talking designs, though, I should mention Hardman seems to have regressed the Beast to pre-secondary mutation form. He certainly more closely resembles the Beast I remember from Kubert drawn X-Men comics than the cat/dog/goat/whatever-headed thing of the last decade. Also, I kind of hate he's saddled with the movie Hawkeye costume and the current Ant-Man suit. I liked the one O'Grady had in his own series, instead of the more 60s style look he sports now. Neither of those is Hardman's fault, though if he's chosen to go off-model with McCoy, no reason not to with the others. C'mon Mr. Hardman, go with the better looking costumes!

Anyway, Hardman always knows how to draw a fight scene, and the violence is brutal and ugly when it needs to be. The Avengers bleed a lot in this story. Some of the figure work seems a little awkward. Example, when Valkyrie tries to leap across a gap between buildings and gets slammed into by an Adaptoid in #24, I'm not sure what direction he came from to hit her so she was in that position. I think the side, but the way the panel's laid out suggests from below, which really wouldn't have made any sense. That's a rare problem, and mostly Hardman does good work there and with the facial expressions. There are times I think either Hardman's inking or Bettie Breitweiser's coloring washes out some of the details, which sort of irritates me a bit.

Other than that, Breitweiser's coloring works very well. The Core is a very shadowy place, perhaps to mask it from outside detection, but the Avengers and their adversaries both are bright enough they stand out, without seeming too bright. It would be strange if they were almost glowing bright (except for the Torch, who does glow), given the shadows, but you don't want them lost to the reader's eye. Also, the lighting for scenes outside, such as when we first meet Yalda, or when Captain Britain is fighting Mob Rule, is distinctly different form the lighting inside the Avengers' new tiny hangout. There, everything is bright, but things are still sharp and in focus, because of course the Hanks (McCoy and Pym) would design lighting that isn't too harsh. In the exterior scenes, the light can be almost overwhelming. Not to the point it obscures Hardman's art, but you can feel it on the verge of it, especially in the desert scenes. You ever been out in weather like that, where it's so hot and bright you hardly want to open your eyes? That's sort of what it reminds me of. Which is pretty cool.

As to Remender's writing, it's a bit of a mixed bag. I can't help feeling I'm missing some critical information from one of his Uncanny X-Force stories, especially when it's mentioned Deadpool killed Father some time recently. As there are no footnotes suggesting I go buy some trade, I can't confirm this suspicion, but ti's there nonetheless. The problem is this makes me wonder whether the scheme is really as mysterious as I think, or if Remender's explained it all someplace else and assumes I've read that story already. I don't mind if he has plans down the line to clarify things, but I do mind if he did and nobody at Marvel felt it was worth letting readers know that.

Remender opts to split the team up once they reach the Core, so he can do some character building and advance the plot in multiple directions at once. We get to see how the Black Widow and Valkyrie have formed a bond, and not simply a grimly serious warrior thing, they toss some humor about. They also let us see how the Adaptoids view themselves, and how Valkyrie sees the Adaptoids, which unfortunately confirms the Adaptoids' beliefs about how the Avengers see them. Remender uses Captain America at first to introduce us to Jim Hammond (and also Flash Thompson/Venom), then uses Hammond to get Captain Britain to explain his powers. I still don't entirely get it (the suit absorbs magic as a power source, but how much it can absorb is determined by his nobility?), but it shows us a little more about each of them, and gives us a better idea of Father's plans, in that we see what he wants the Avengers to think. Hawkeye and Beast get some time together so Hank can critique Clint's leadership style, and we can see that perhaps not everything is under Father's control down here. Splitting the team up to advance characters and plot more readily in a less cluttered setting isn't a new trick, but Remender does it pretty well.

I will say Remender's Beast is kind of a jerk. Maybe he's trying for Hank's jocularity, but it comes off as more dickishness. Yes, Hank Pym accidentally created a genocidal artificial intelligence. And Hank tried to cure himself of his mutation only to sprout fur instead. Nobody's perfect, get off his back. Constantly rubbing Pym's nose in his failures is never an intelligent move, unless you want him to have another breakdown or suicide attempt. Also, McCoy was on team's lead by Cyclops for years, but Hawkeye's being too much of a jerk? I find that hard, nay impossible, to believe, unless extended time away from Scott Summers has obliterated Hank's resistance to it. I do agree Hawkeye's pushing too hard, but Beast isn't exactly winning many points with me for his approach to team-building, either. I've said it before, but I see nothing wrong with Hawkeye having strenuous objections to Venom being on the team, whether he turned the tide this time or not.

So perhaps unsurprisingly, the characters I like most on the team are the ones whose presentation by Remender bothers me the most. I do think Remender has a handle on the characters, it's just the tone that feels slightly off. Like a picture slightly off-center, it's hardly off-putting, yet it picks at my focus every time. That being said, I'm still undecided on how long to continue buying the title. Not because of this arc. It's well-done all around and generally intriguing (for some reason, I really want to know what Lady Deathstrike and the Reavers are doing there). It's a question of waiting through the tie-in issues that will be running for the next several months, just to see if a) Remender and Hardman are still on the book when they end (would it surprise anyone if Marvel shuffled the creative teams after AvX), and b) if they do stay, can they get things back on track? I still haven't decided on that yet.

The cover art I included in the post to break up all the yapping is by Art Adams and Laura Martin. I like the figures on the cover for #22, but not that horrible orange color background. Hurts my eyes, disgusting. Adams and Martin can't really make Hawkeye's costume work for me either, especially not with the sunglasses on in #23. Also, I find it a little silly the Widow's always turned to the side, though I suppose she could be trying to present a smaller target by standing in profile, though that's somewhat hard to believe given the dimensions she's given. I guess I like the cover for #24 the best. It's the most dynamic, and I like the city in the background. From a certain point of view, it makes me think of some English village from the Middle Ages, but from another I spot different details that make me think of the Narrows from Batman Begins, or maybe Madripoor, if we're sticking with Marvel Comics. All the narrow alleys and buildings sitting short, squat, and crammed together.