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So. Four issues of Secret Invasion, four Bendis-written issues of this crossover since anyone bothered to comment on Barbelith. We're about halfway through, I'd say, with 13 issues of SA and NA and MA published. Anyone give a shit anymore?
I've just read the last five issues, feeling I ought to know my stuff before posting. I've already forgotten most of it. They're so inconsequential. Perhaps because Bendis has chosen the lazy option of filling each back-up issue with one whole story. If the Spider-Woman and Elektra stories had been published earlier, instead of being so long after the yeah-they're-Skrulls fact, there could have been some tension. But what do you get? Jessica was replaced at a point where it made little sense to do so and lucked into the Avengers. That's a whole issue. (And I think I saw someone suggest it online, but are those breast implants on the table when she's about to be operated on? What else could they be?) Elektra killed some Skrulls, died and was replaced, thankfully without the whole cliched ceremony we'd seen twice already, in apparently the perfect position to die and kick events off. Which is to say the whole unlikely circumstance of the New Avengers being in Japan and killing Elektra, something they are not normally wont to do, was integral to the Skrulls' plan.
Another unlikelihood: Hank Pym. I've griped at length previously about the randomness of the Mighty Avengers thrilling adventures so far. Now Ulton, whose appearance remains unexplained, came along just in time to give Hank Pym vital information for the Invasion. Was he responsible for that? The comic doesn't say. And, given the amount of treading water Bendis is doing in these backups, he'd say. He could get four or five pages out of saying, a lifeline to a struggling man.
The Skrulls, then, take over some obvious choices - Jarvis, Dum Dum, people with access but little scrutiny or danger - and some completely random bastards. Second and third-stringers. They do it in a very boring way. To take out a hero a) sneak up on them and kill them b) fight them and kill them or c) fuck them and kill them. I guess Spider-Woman was tricked, big whoop. The back-up stories should have been illuminating fire. But they've been tortuously slow and shamefully unoriginal.
Meanwhile in the main crossover, the fight that started at the end of #1 continues. The fight in Times Square has... ended? Who was in it again, the Young Avengers, the Initiative and the Howlin' Commando Teens? There are intriguing plot threads being dropped about: the Void's return, Captain America, that Thor-a-like, Skrulder-Woman in House of M, Mockingboid's resurrection. But they get ignored for a dinosaur. And who's the girl with green hair? I mean I've been reading this motherfucker and I've even reread but I've no idea.
I'll finish it. After that, though, maybe Bendis should take a break. Has there been a decent comic from him since Civil War? |
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