Avengers Academy #26 Review

It’s time for the students to make a choice.  Will it be Avengers Academy or another path to their futures.

Avengers Academy #26

Jocasta is alive, and with Veil, has come to Avengers Academy to shut it down.  However, the duo isn’t alone.  With them comes Jeremy Briggs, a super rich and idealistic kid who wants to plunder the Academy to guide these students into a line of work that bucks the old idea of people with powers being a force for good or evil.  Briggs has already recruited a load of former Initiative kids, and now, he’s giving Hank Pym’s students a choice…  Come with them to do real good for the world, or stay behind and face the greater risk of being injured or killed.

Christos Gage comes out of an arc that saw the students nearly killed by Hybrid and slows the tempo down.  There’s stuff to be dealt with now.  The first few days of the new Avengers Academy on the campus of the old West Coast Avengers compound wasn’t quite positive.  The class president, Reptil, was possessed with his future self’s mind.  On top of that, his intentions, while the part of having the original class come together as a cohesive unit 20 years into the future was good, he was willing to bring Hybrid onto campus to kill several of the kids to achieve his goal.  All this and Jocasta comes back to forcibly shut down the Academy in favor of Briggs’ ideals.  Things aren’t exactly going smoothly for Hank Pym.

While this book doesn’t have the action the last few issues had (obviously, I couldn’t expect this story to contain the horror elements of the Hybrid arc), there’s definitely a crossroads reached for this series.  For 25 issues, Gage has molded these characters and put them through attacks, in fighting, committing murder, and lastly a monster set on eating them, now it’s time to figure out where the next 25 issues are going to go.  There’s a closure reached with Veil.  She’s made her decision to use her capabilities to make the world a better place.  She has decided she doesn’t want to be a superhero and fight bad guys.  She wants to be a champion for the betterment of the whole world.  As much as there is a closure, there’s a potential threat on the horizon with Briggs.  Will he be a villain?  Maybe not directly, but he represents an ideal that is completely counter to the experienced Avengers like Pym, Hawkeye, and Quicksilver.  He can be a string puller, but more importantly, he’s the competition.  No one is really even sure he can be trusted.  Is his good nature an act?  Is he filling impressionable kids’ heads with a bunch of nice, slick talk, only to pull the rug out from under them?  Only time will tell, but he’s definitely one thing this series hasn’t always had a chance to focus on – a main “antagonist” of sorts.

Plus the end of the issue certainly keeps the future versions of the original class around with a somewhat surprising mentor.

More @ acomicbookblog.com/tag/avengers

Tags: Avengers Academy Avengers Comics & Avengers Comic Books Avengers Reviews Christos Gage