I'm really excited for tomorrow's Avengers #1.
Marvel Comics was gracious enough to send retailers participating in their Avengers Day Launch Party a personalized (!) advance copy of the comic, which obviously is really sweet. I broke my rule about not reading comics I care about in the shop (too hard to concentrate) to check it out, and, well, I was impressed.
Avengers #1 is a good comic. Hell, it's a great comic. Well, I think so, anyway. And that kind of took me by surprise. You'll know if you read my earlier post about Siege that I didn't really like that series when it started, and my feelings toward it didn't change at the end. It just didn't grab me; it still felt more like a Cliff's Notes outline of a plot than an actual, honest-to-goodness STORY. It truthfully made me about ready to give up on Brian Michael Bendis and the Marvel crew. There was redemption to be found, though, in last week's New Avengers Finale, which I found to be an engaging and even touching send-off to a series I'd followed (and mostly loved) from issue #15, and, well, it gave me hope for this newfangled Heroic Age thing Marvel's doing.
Avengers #1 has turned that hope into full-blown optimism. It's true, I'll always be more of a DC guy at heart, but if Avengers #1 is indicative of what I can expect from Marvel's team books in the coming months -- well, I'll be reading a lot more Marvel books than I thought. In the interest of not spoiling anything I'll save my actual critique of the book until it comes out, but, yeah, I'm a fan.
To end this post on a bit of a promotional note, I'm quite looking forward to Stand-Up Comics hosting the Avengers #1 launch party tomorrow. I hope the comic-buying public is as stoked for the new Avengers series as I am, and I also hope they're ready to get one of these killer prints from JRJR:
So join us for the Avengers Launch Party tomorrow! EXCELSIOR!
1) Superman was not on it.
2) The spot that names who wrote the book said "James Robinson".
Here's the cover for the issue that came out today...
So... I guess we're halfway there.
Ooops, sorry. I forgot a few letters there. Let's try that again.
I am underwhelmed by Siege #1.
I was really excited for Marvel's new event series, too. If you read my 2009 wrap-up blog, you know that Brian Michael Bendis is one of my favorite superhero writers, and Dark Avengers one of my favorite books. How, then, could Siege not be good? And yet here is evidence to the contrary staring me in the face.
It's not that I hated Siege #1, either. I just thought it was weak. For starters, less than half the book was actually new comic story. When you take out the ads, the promotional letter from Joe Quesada, the preview of that one Hulk book, and the 7-page preview story seen in tons of other Marvel books before, you have 16 new pages of story and 23 pages of basically junk. For $3.99. So that's not cool.
Second, and most importantly, the story itself: what do we get in Siege #1? Well, the set-up for the whole event is directly taken from Civil War #1 (and the fact that the narration admits of this doesn't make it any better). Then we have Norman talking to his team for a few pages, which is fine I guess but a little stilted, and then the very beginning of the siege of Asgard, in which almost nothing happens except for people looking at each other menacingly.
I was not a fan of Marvel's last event comic, Secret Invasion, in large part because I thought the pacing was awful -- eight issues basically took place over the span of what, a day or less? Siege #1 seems to be setting up the same kind of thing. We only have four issues in this series, guys -- it seems like a mistake to waste a whole issue on set-up. It also seems like kind of a rip-off.
Secret Invasion, too, was written by Brian Michael Bendis. That seems to beg the question of why I like so many of his comics so much, and his event comics almost not at all (I have to exclude House of M from this discussion, as I haven't read it in five years). I think it's because -- and this is truly just a guess -- that when Bendis writes an event book, it's totally perfunctory. It seems like he has a story outline in front of him (possibly not even his, but editorial's) giving him the bullet points of where the script needs to go, and then he just takes the story from A to B to C with little to none of the excellent dialog and superb development we might expect from Bendis given his other works, most notably Ultimate Spider-Man, which I contend is a masterpiece. A great example from Ultimate Spider-Man that we talk about at the shop sometimes -- there was an issue (in the mid 110s) which was almost nothing but the main cast spending a day at the beach. And it was AWESOME. The story flowed so well that you didn't realize almost nothing was going on in that issue plot-wise. Those kind of issues are a chance for his characters to shine. But in Siege, which I feel is oddly self-conscious of plot despite having very little of it--nothing really shines at all.
I'm hopeful that the rest of this series lives up to the standards of other Bendis work (I'm still loving Dark Avengers), but for now, well, I just kind of want it to be over.
Grade: D
