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New Avengers #47
By Glenn Walker
The Secret Invasion ends this week, and “Dark Reign” aside, hopefully things will be getting back to semi-normal. “Secret Invasion,” much like “Civil War” and “House of M” to an extent, is an Avengers story at its core, and should have been told within the confines of the Avengers titles. As it stands, much like those two mini-series events, the Avengers titles themselves have only served as a place for the side stories, the background material and the other minutia of the event itself. That is a bad place for the team book that is supposed to be the center of the Marvel Universe to be.
New Avengers #47’s cover is quite possibly the last of Aleksi Briclot’s reproductions of covers of the past with a decidedly Skrull-style. This one Skrullifies the first issue of the original West Coast Avengers #1, an odd choice as none of the characters pictured, nor featured in that issue, appear in this issue. I have to wonder why it was chosen. And I also have to wonder how many Hawkeye fans saw this by chance and picked it up on a whim only to be horribly misled.
The page one recap, “Previously in New Avengers,” contains one tremendously annoying and telling sentence: “They (the Avengers) didn’t even know the extent of the invasion or which of them was – or could still be – a Skrull agent.” Does this mean that even though I have Secret Invasion #8 in my hands, and that the ‘battle’ is over, that it’s really not over? I don’t know about you folks, but as of this summer, I’ve just about had my fill of Skrulls, for a very long time. How about you? And it’s not like writer Brian Michael Bendis hasn’t used the ‘Previously’ page before to give information not actually in a story either – this is one of his old tricks.
The issue itself has a framing sequence by artist Billy Tan that occurs sometime in the now of the Secret Invasion and encloses a sequence from the past by Alias creators Bendis and artist Michael Gaydos. This isn’t the first time BMB and Gaydos have re-teamed to tell an untold tale from the Alias era. It’s not even the second or third time actually. If there are so many of these tales, why not just resurrect the Alias series rather than clutter up any future issues of Avengers to do this. Heck, I’d buy a new series by Bendis and Gaydos, and that’s in addition to the Avengers titles. With the upcoming price increase, I would think that’s a sure sale. Just keep these stories out of my Avengers books, okay?
Rant over, for now. All that said, Bendis writes Luke Cage and Jessica Jones well, and tells an entertaining tale in New Avengers #47. Always witty dialogue and connection between the two, these are characters that Bendis knows like the back of his hand. And although I like Billy Tan, I have to admit that next to Gaydos, he loses a bit of his shine. I think this combination was an editorial disservice to Tan’s fine work, and it’s a shame.
There are moments, and the second page shot of Luke’s distaste over baby poop is priceless. And while the Alias story was entertaining and touching, I really have to ask what the relevance to Secret Invasion is. All I see is the end of the book, and that’s about as relevant as only having red skies in a Crisis tie-in book over at the Distinguished Competition.
The classic Bendis cliffhanger ending didn’t faze me. Like many of the recent issues of the two main Avengers titles, the cliffhanger might not be picked up in the next issue, so for me at least, it loses its effectiveness. Like “Secret Invasion” itself, I can’t wait for that trend to be over with as well. I give New Avengers #47 two stars out of a possible five. It’s a nice little story, but it’s barely an Avengers story, or even a Secret Invasion story – bottom line, it’s almost like a fill-in. Not good.
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 Glenn Walker |
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| Glenn has been a fan of Marvel Comics' Avengers since the early 1970s, when their current adventures were chronicled by Steve Englehart and their early exploits by Stan Lee in classic reprints featured in Marvel Triple Action. He has persevered through many incarnations of the team and he still loves the Avengers to this day. |
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