Opinion

The Avengers

Writer: Geoff Johns
Artist: Kieron Dwyer and Rick Remender
Published by Marvel

Issue #57

Earth's Mightest Heroes have barely begun to recover their strength after fending off an invasion by one of their greatest enemies. The various additional team members drafted in during the crisis remain attached to the team, and decisions need to be made about how the newly proactive stance they had barely begun to adopt can be made reality. In the midst of all that, a new crisis arises, as the world's capital cities vanish into a series of voids. The Avengers are once again called upon to rise to the world's defence.

The second of this week's new Marvel creative team launches kicks off in a different style from the Fantastic Four relaunch. New writer Geoff Johns throws himself directly into a potentially earth-threatening epic with his first story, World Trust, which looks likely to involve a large number of the huge potential cast of Avengers he could make use of. This is probably a wise move, as this is one of those series that needs to be kept fast-moving to work.

One of the great strengths of previous (and long-standing) writer Kurt Busiek's Avengers is that he made great use of sub-groups of the team dealing with different situations at the same time. It's a solid technique for conveying the scale of the stage on which the team operates, and Johns picks it up and runs with it. Along the way, he positions one pair of heroes squarely in the middle of the new crisis, having them disappear along with Washington DC. In the fallout from the unexplained phenomenon, the Avengers are also moved into an entirely new position on the world stage, one not previously seen in the team's long and colourful history. I'm not sure where Johns will go with this after this story, but I'm intrigued to find out.

Over the decades, The Avengers have benefited from some truly outstanding artists, most recently George Perez and Alan Davis. Sadly the art team of Dwyer and Remender is not in the same league, though their showing here is far stronger than their efforts in the latter stages of Busiek's run. Fortunately, once World Trust is over, new regular penciller Oliver Coipel arrives, and as he's currently doing such excellenet work at DC I have high hopes for the fully-rounded creative team taking things to a fascinating new level.

Johns has a reputation for taking on so-so series and turning them into critical triumphs - he's done so at DC over the last few years, and it's interesting to see him demonstrating a solid, if not yet spectacular, start to this run, seemingly grounded in an appreciable understanding of what makes good Avengers.

The Avengers holds a special place in the Marvel Universe - bringing together its most powerful heroes and setting them against situations that really represent challenges to their combined power. It's a difficult series to get right, because the balance of plot and character is crucial, as demonstrated by Busiek's last epic, in which the plot rather got away from him and undermined what was otherwise far and away the strongest run for the team in more than a decade. It's early days for Johns, but I'm hoping, based on the evidence here, that he has the ability to get the balance right.