Management Skills
Recommended!
The behind the scenes look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe continues in this week's installment of the Avengers Prelude mini-series. It is all those parts of the movies you knew had to exist, but just assumed happened off-camera. And while this mini is all about "Fury's Big Week", this issue is all about his management skills - focusing on a few of his 'favored' agents: Phil Coulson, Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton.
In this one issue alone, we see Agent Coulson deal with mysterious atmospheric anomalies, a nearly destroyed Malibu mansion and a strange ' alien object' in the desert of New Mexico where Fury also has assigned Agent Barton as backup; while Agent Romanoff has to pick up the pieces in Malibu, assist Tony Stark and Rhodey Rhodes in a battle against Whiplash, steal tech secrets from HAMMER and get eyes on Dr. Bruce Banner in Virginia. This glimpse behind the scenes paints a very different and new picture for the Marvel Cinematic Universe continuity and at the same time highlights the severe lack of work/life balance for S.H.I.E.L.D. agents.
By forcing all these movie plot lines into the same week and assigning specific containment responsibility to the various S.H.I.E.L.D. agents the creative team on this mini-series has certainly made each of the individual movies "gel" together, albeit in a somewhat forced manner. They have also "humanized" the overarching story, changing the focus away from the superheroes and on to the "common man" - well "common agent" anyway. What this has done for me, as the reader is made the entire thing a bit more difficult to believe. I do not see why they had to force each of these very different movie plot lines into one week. Sure, they could happen in the same universe at nearly the same time, but in the same week? Really? And by "humanizing" the situations, it changes the feel of S.H.I.E.L.D. from kick-ass super-team to highly administrative and taxing - I think we have enough going on, we can do without the middle management.
Now, don't get me wrong, I still really enjoyed the issue - I just had that one gripe and apparently had to get on my soapbox to feel better about it. I must have repressed middle management issues... ;)
All boring middle management decisions aside, I do have to commend the creative team on actually pulling all the various movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe into one cohesive story. While I have to suspend a lot of my disbelief that all these stories overlap during the same week, they went about connecting them in the best way possible (at least they didn't rely on time travel or some other magical plot device).
I was also pretty impressed with the art. It is a very difficult task to draw something and make it look good against what we already know and are used to from the movie - it takes away a lot of the creative freedom some art styles take advantage of. The covers for this series have been decent as well - it is hard to go wrong depicting various teaser scenes and concepts from the movie.
Overall, this mini-series is a fun read and really provides great reminders for aspects of the movies that you may have not seen in years. I believe it hits the mark on story (re)introduction related to the upcoming Avengers movie. It is very apparent they are working hard to tie everything in and at the same time add a few fun "easter eggs" to see if we are paying attention. At the very least this mini should help tide you over until May 4th.