Enjoying the way that the superhero group The Avengers and its individual superhero members have been presented at the movies these past few years, I thought I'd take a gander at how the characters are being portrayed in the comics these days. So I recently picked up a nice-looking trade paperback called Avengers, Volume One: Avengers World.Alas, this collection of the first six issues of yet another Avengers comic book title (there are many these days due to the success of the movies) delivered a fairly entertaining reading experience but not much beyond that. The artwork, production values, and printing are first-rate, I'll say that. But I found the stories to be just okay, and often murky and dull.
The first three issues collected here deal with a weird group of aliens trying to destroy, re-make, or recreate from scratch all life on Earth (again, the aliens' aims and motivations were murky). The final three issues mostly center around our heroes dealing with the aftermath of that attack (lots of clean-up required), with a couple of updated superhero origin stories laced into the proceedings. Again, all that was okay, too, but there wasn't much excitement or real drama to kick things up a notch.
To be clear, I wasn't looking for continuous mindless action-- just cleverness, momentum, high stakes, memorable conflict, etc. You know, good 'ol superhero melodrama. The storyline here had some of that stuff, but not enough to make this the fun ride it should have been.
No comments:
Post a Comment