Secret Invasion 7
The penultimate episode is also the least satisfying for me in the series so far. Why so? Well, basically it's just one big fight, albeit one that was somewhat expected (on the basis of how episode 6 finished) and reminds us all that this is, well, a war, after all. Here's my problem, though. I like nuance, detail and that's often hard to convey in a big battle. I suppose it's irresistable in books like this where there's a huge team up of characters to have these huge fights but it's like so many of the old superhero books back in the day ("Spiderman! Hulk! Together at Last!!"). You know those books where two or more of the big names get together, have a misunderstanding, fight each other, realise who the real villain is, sort him out and get back home in time for supper. They sound great on paper but more often than not are underwhelming. When you have a huge cast like in Secret Invasion, this is doubly so - there's a mess of characters flying at each other, limbs hurled this way and that. It's so confusing and the idiosyncracies of each hero is actually lost. It's quite unsatisfying.
However, thankfully there are details here that do make the book worthwhile. These tend to occur more in the second half of the book, so I'm reluctant to say too much but I did enjoy Jessica Jones making a bad choice of babysitter and Clint Barton picking up the arrows again (moments to savour, folks). A throwaway line of dialogue in issue six is shown to be a key moment for the conclusion of the issue, which builds up to a very big (ahem) moment. There's also some interesting 'hint, hint' dialogue in this issue, particularly regarding Mr Fantastic, that remains unresolved and leads on hopefully to a fine finale.
