Avengers Assemble #1 Review
If you thought you couldn’t use yet another Avengers title, this one might just surprise you… Especially if you’ve enjoyed their exploits for longer than Brian Michael Bendis has been writing them.
Avengers Assemble #1
A new Zodiac is forming. This group is more powerful and dangerous than ever before by actually embodying the powers of their chosen symbols. Meanwhile, the Avengers are celebrating the opening of a new Avengers Tower and the citizens of New York are overjoyed. Out west, the Hulk is attacked by a water being. When it thinks it is going to drown the green giant, the Hulk decides to just drink him up. Hawkeye and Black Widow go after a group of Latverian criminals and is chased down by a beastly Taurus. When they call in help from Thor and Iron Man, Taurus makes fairly quick work of two of the more powerful Avengers with little effort.
After eight long years of a grittier and colder Avengers squad from Bendis, this book is like the first warm day of Spring. It’s not surprising Marvel wanted to bring together the characters that will be appearing in their big screen debut. In fact, it’s far more surprising that Marvel decided to launch another series written by Bendis when it’s not exactly gone unnoticed that both the franchise and the writer might just be a little overexposed. However, this book, at least for this first issue, really works well.
I’ve not exactly hidden the fact that I grew up on the Avengers. I love what they stood for and how unabashed they were about it. To me, they are the perfect sunshine heroes. They always seemed to battle against the destruction of the entire universe and win. They sometimes had to struggle and fight and go right to the edge of destruction, but they always won in the end. By the time the team of Kurt Busiek and George Perez were brought together to start the third volume of the series in the late 1990s, the duo lifted the team onto the shoulders of not just the regular citizens of the Marvel Universe, but also of the fans of the team. It was a time of fun, excitement, and greatness.
While that’s been gone for a while now, I’ve always yearned for the team to return to that sense of fun and excitement in true comic book form. This issue delivers that in spades. Bendis seems to almost take a cue from those Busiek/Perez days by showing the media covered frenzy of the new Avengers Tower. The scene even has Captain America doing what Cap does best – hyping up the team and their fans. It really made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I think I almost shed a tear of joy in those opening pages.
From there, the book continues to keep that fun and action-packed attitude throughout the entirety of the issue. The characters all seem like a big, happy family (you know, like they always used to be). It’s paced well and just all around happy fun time for this longtime and yearning Avengers fan.
To make it all that much better, Mark Bagley’s art made me shed another tear when all I could think about as I watched this classically laid out book play out. This time, the tear for how much I wanted him to have drawn Avengers instead of John Romita, Jr. If there’s anything this book told me is that Bendis and Bagley just nailed it and that an Avengers book can still be everything I fondly remember.
In fact, I had to pinch myself to make sure I didn’t dream this book or that I had some sort of fever dream about getting in a time machine and going back to a comic shop in 1998 to pick this comic up off the shelves.
A COMIC BOOK BLOG RATING
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Absolutely everything I waited nearly a decade to see in an Avengers comic again… Fun and excitement. | The book may have finished a tad too quickly and at a kind of odd spot, but my enjoyment of the rest of the book made this a non-issue. |
| Rating |
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1 Comment
Another Thor beat down….