Broken Frontier

The Civil War has ended and with that a new initiative begins as Tony Stark reforms the Avengers with the help of Carol Danvers.

In some ways having a second team of Avengers makes perfect sense given the new political climate coming to the forefront in the Marvel Universe. Now with this group of heroes, Tony Stark has decided to share his responsibilities leading the team with Carol Danvers (AKA Ms. Marvel). This decision could ultimately backfire, but at the outset the team assembled during the course of this issue could potentially be one of the best groups of Avengers ever assembled.

In this case, the team gets off to a rousing start after Tony and Carol meet within the confines of S.H.I.E.L.D. Headquarters to pick out the new team of Mighty Avengers. Carol is quite surprised that Tony has offered her co-leadership, but she happily accepts the offer and then mulls over her new team mates. So after much debate and discussion, the pair chooses: Wasp, Wonder Man, Sentry, Black Widow and Ares. Of course both Tony and Carol will be joining the team, and it doesn’t take very long before a large scale threat erupts in the city forcing everyone out to test their skills. In the end though, the team gets an even bigger surprise as a familiar face with a different look makes an untimely appearance setting up an interesting confrontation for the following issue.

Now as for the story itself, the plotting flipped flopped from a then to now scenario, giving readers a much unexpected turn of events for a first issue. Bendis of course was on his game here by contributing some solid moments, especially his sharp dialogue shared between Tony and Carol as they debated the merits of each hero being chosen for membership. The other interesting component to the story was the use of thought balloons and I found this added to the conversation for the most part, but in some spots it was not necessarily needed. I liked the idea of employing thought balloons because it gave us an altering view of both Tony and Carol to full effect.

The art of Frank Cho was a bit of surprise in some ways. Now I have always been a fan of Frank’s Liberty Meadows, but I haven’t found his superhero work as appealing. I think a part of that is because his characters tend to be static in some panels and he often enjoys filling out the female form, but skimps out on everything else around them. Thankfully I didn’t find that to be the case with this first issue and I rather liked his approach to the layouts in many of the pages. He obviously spent the time on defining the action going on in each panel, and it was done with a certain amount of finesse. I hope he continues to build upon his successful attempt here at crafting a high octane story filled with moments that exemplify a typical Avengers tale.

Now overall, I thought this issue was solid with the combination of quality story and art. Oddly enough, I did notice this issue felt more like a classic Avengers tale, than the first issue of New Avengers did. Perhaps the outcome of Civil War had something to do with this, since things seem to be settling down now that Cap is no longer a part of this team. This now all belongs to Iron Man and he must be able to prove his merits as a leader, but there is still some question as to whether he can lead this team legitimately in the same way Cap once did. I guess only time will tell.