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First Time For Everything: Avengers: The Initiative #3
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Location: Blogs Atomic FalloutCritical Mass |
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| Posted by: Jake Bell |
Friday, June 08, 2007 3:53 PM |
 Every week, Greg Burgas, a regular contributor to Comics Should Be Good and the creator of Delenda Est Carthago, grabs a book from the new releases that he doesn't normally read to examine how "new reader-friendly" that issue is.
Avengers: The Initiative #3
by Dan Slott and Stefano Caselli
$2.99, Marvel.
A first-time comic book reader may have picked this up because Spider-Man is on the cover, and Spidey's way cool. So what would they discover?
Marvel does a nice job with the recap pages in the beginning. We learn about the Initiative, which is a superhero training program, and get head shots of the principals. It's a good way to bring us up to speed. The issue alternates between solid action that is easy for a neophyte to follow and some more obscure stuff that doesn't make much sense out of context. That's the danger of reading a mainstream Marvel or DC book, and the trick for any writer is to make sure the new reader isn't swamped with the heavy continuity junk.
Slott does a pretty decent job with the balancing act. He gives each character a personality that is relatively easy to digest. They're a tad bit stereotypical, but not to the point of annoyance. He also manages to reference certain events in recent Marvel history without losing us, such as Dani Moonstar's loss of powers. A new reader doesn't need to know about M-Day, just that she lost her powers. Trauma shows the Beast what he most longs for, which is a return to human form, and it's handled deftly, but showing Dani a demon bear works less well, because a first-time reader wouldn't know what that signifies. A lot of regular Marvel readers might not know what that signifies, considering the story Slott is referencing is 23 years old. We also get a brief bit with Dr. Connors, and it gets a bit confusing, especially if a new reader only knows the character from the movie. Hank Pym and Connors discuss Komodo's use of his "lizard-formula," from which we gather that she turned herself into this somehow, but it's unclear.
Slott does a good job showing the team working together and training, although the fact that a Russian character (I think it's Black Widow, but I'm not sure) says "Boze Moi" is really annoying. Slott is dipping into the Claremont well of character development there. So he sets up the team pretty well, and a new reader could easily follow what's happening. The biggest pro'blem a new reader would have is with the whole idea of a superhero training school, but thanks to the first-page recap, that's not an issue.
Slott then moves on to the actual mission, which Pym and "Commander Rhodes" send Komodo on. They tell her about the devices they've developed that, when injected into a person, inhibit their powers. Rhodes says they've already successfully tried it on She-Hulk. They want her to go out and shoot the devices into four people--three villains and Spider-Man--who are fighting on a rooftop in New York. Komodo and Rhodes engage Spider-Man and the villains, and we get a pretty good fight scene. Caselli's art is good throughout, although his Rhodes doesn't look like a man in armor. The fight scenes, however, are nicely drawn. We see the villains, who have run for it, get captured by a bunch of guys wearing weird Spider costumes. Again, we don't need to know that this was armor designed by Tony Stark for Peter Parker to appreciate the coolness of the scene.
Spider-Man, who's about to be injected by Komodo, makes her doubt her position just enough to escape. He makes her think she's going to be injected herself if she doesn't do her job, and she breaks down because she no longer wants to be a "normal" person. It's a nice little character moment, although it doesn't resonate quite as much as it should because we have no knowledge of the "normal" person she wants to forget. Still, not bad.
Slott does a pretty good job bringing us into the story, both with the training exercises and the fight with Spider-Man. The only character who really gets to do much is Komodo, and we just assume she has lizard powers, but we learn about Trauma and Hardball as well. Even if you missed the first two issues, you can easily sort out what's going on, which is pretty impressive for a book with this many characters. Spider-Man is funny and clever, and comes off looking like the hero he is. But the Initiative people aren't portrayed as villains, even if you disagree with the idea of registering and training superpeople. The conversation Hardball has in the bar with the guy who wants SHIELD's technology is pretty cliched, and Hardball will be stupid to fall for it (Slott leaves us guessing). I mean, hasn't he ever seen a movie? Never trust the guy who buys you a drink and asks about your super-secret technology! It's silly, but not anything to ruin the book.  I think a new reader should be able to follow along, because these are relatively new characters, so they don't have a lot of history. The bosses come off a bit more mysterious, because we're not quite sure what's going on when they talk about things. If you have no idea how Spider-Man's powers work, Slott even gives us clues. So that's helpful.
All in all, this is a standard superhero book, but slightly better than average. It takes the reality of the Marvel Universe and does what it can with it. If parts of it are a bit oblique, there's nothing here to make a first-time reader run away in fear. They might even come back for more. And that's the whole point, isn't it?
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