Jerome Opeña

Tony Stark and Captain America decide they need to reorganise the Avengers to face threats and dangers that seem to be geeing bigger and badder. Sure enough along come a big bad threat, three aliens on Mars who want to either remake the earth or destroy it based on some ancient fascist eugenics alien programming, the sort of sci fi Big Idea Hickman is bringing to bear in his run but which seems divorced from anything, I dunno, relatable? Can you get away with an alien race sending out show more automated drones to wipe out life on every planet until they finds one that can be perfected? I mean, as a project it sounds inhuman, which is presumably the point, but I dunno, aliens are people too, surely?

Anyway untold billions of deaths across the Galaxy and then they reach Earth and because Earth is a setting in a Marvel comic they get stopped, but not before killing millions of people in a few panels. I'm saying the casual incessantly huge body count bothers me in an otherwise crisply executed comic that manages a large cast and lots of ideas and epic sweep really well. Dunno why, I grew up reading 2000AD, they'd cheerfully off millions every few pages. maybe if I reread them now they'd bother me, too. Anyway, I expect there'll be a lot more of this in volumes to come, let's see how long I can stick it. show less

I have a new favorite artist - Jerome Opena. I could stare at this art all day long and I like the story only slightly less than the art. After about 45 years of reading about dwarves and elves fighting dragons and orcs, this is exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for. Fresh ideas, villains who aren't evil for evil's sake, unique environments and systems of magic, non-standard races, I'll take all of it.

Kurt Busiek did his damnedest in the introduction to make me think Ultron is a cool and primary foe of the Avengers, but then I read the story and remembered I don't really like this dumb robot and his messed up beyond repair creator, Hank Pym. The story had a couple interesting moments. The art was fine. I just don't care.

Oh, I get it! The Marvel big summer event now is just a movie treatment! For a movie treatment, this was pretty fucking entertaining, but for a comicbook epic it's no Dark Phoenix or Kree–Skrull War despite having a lot of the same dudes. Oh, and three different characters use the word "very" as an intensifier, as in "You have saved so very many lives," "Enjoy your last breaths. You have so very few of them left," within like three pages. I just used it today in another review and the show more first time it is satisfying, but thrice is like Jonathan Hickman-->Jonathan Hackman, obvs. show less