Broken Frontier

The Avengers would have a much easier time trying to stop Lindsay Lohan from shoplifting jewelry. Instead they must contend with the Hood and his quest to steal the Infinity Gems.

Not much is going on personally after last issue’s coda about the Hood and Madame Masque. It’s a race to keep the remaining Gems out of the Hood’s hands. Various groupings of Avengers and allies must travel to different places where the Gems have been hidden and battle various dangers to get them. As in mythology, you always have to go to a remote and forbidding place to find a treasure and face something nasty to get it. Iron Man’s group goes to a very interesting place to find the one that he has hidden, which says a lot about his position not only among superheroes but in the rest of the world. Unfortunately, the Hood has already gotten there, setting up what will presumably be a big action piece for next time.

John Romita, Jr. and Klaus Janson (with Tom Palmer on some pages) have done a commendable art job. The underwater sequence with the Sub-Mariner, Thor, and the Red Hulk is nice looking, as is a skirmish in the ruins of the Danger Room where Professor X leads one contingent. The one slightly jarring visual note is the inking on some of the pages where you can see a shift in style from Klaus Janson to Tom Palmer; the Palmer pages have a curiously plastic and artificial look to them, a quality that he has brought to the sections of previous issues he has inked. It doesn’t ruin the story; it just looks a bit “off.”

In writing, aside from the bit about where Iron Man stashed his Gem, Brian Bendis gives us one amusing little bit about the Protector—an expatriate Kree—trying to understand Spider-Man’s sense of humor and some of the other Avengers trying to explain it to him. It’s a diverting bit of character observation in an issue that is mostly plot. Not that that’s a bad thing; it’s actually a bit heartening to see that Bendis—or anyone, in these days of market-driven comics—remembers what storytelling is.

So The Avengers soldiers on through its latest six-issue story arc that will make another nice trade paperback for the bookstores. May the next couple of issues bring more good action, more reveals about the Hood’s motives, and more good little character bits like the ones here.