We Are Super Heroes
Avengers The Origin is both a retelling and an expansion of Avengers #1 from 1963. The time of the issue taking place is roughly inline with the fabled sliding Marvel time, albeit with the odd technological discrepancy here and there. As before the story begins when an embittered Loki tricks The Hulk into attacking a train in the hopes of drawing out Thor.
The plot has been modernised to the point of error in my opinion. The technology and fashions are fairly clearly of modern day, but even by the ever transient Marvel Time this really has to have taken place a decade ago to allow for all the events that follow. It creates a bit of a disconnect for me, as you see Stark in his earliest Iron Man armour suit next fully modern flat screens. If you ignore that the plot feels a little slow, as it’s effectively taken roughly five pages of the original Avengers comic and turned it into a full book. There’s no big battle at the end just a cliffhanger for the next issue. That said all characters were treated well and were given a chance to be introduced to the readers all over again, and the presentation Stark did on a prototype SHIELD helicarrier was a lovely little plot flourish.
The art in this issue is of a high quality but not to my taste. Perhaps I have spent a little too much time reading comics of ‘63 but there’s something a little off about the art here. The shading on all of the characters faces just doesn’t quite work for me. I just don’t think it works very well everyone looks very unemotive. I’m a big fan of the background details here, Noto has done a wonderful job packing in lot’s of little features that gives character to all of the different locations we see. Finally I’m not a big fan of the cover here. The scale of Hulk looks a little off and the characters don’t feel like they’ve been posed together, more that they’ve been dropped on the page one after another without much of a thought for group composition.
As it’s own issue this feels lacking. It is very much all setup no payoff, building for the things to come without paying off much of anything in it’s own right. All we get is a very brief confrontational cliff hanger. A lot of pages were spent getting all the characters reintroduced and into place that we seemed to run out of space for any sort of conclusion for this issue. Alone it feels incomplete. The detail of the art raises a two star story into a three star comic but this one is far from essential reading.
P.S This issue was not available on Marvel Unlimited at the time of writing. I had to purchase the trade paperback to get a copy. With that in mind there’s not a lot you are missing by just starting on issue two here, especially if you are familiar with all the characters that make up the initial Avengers line up (and being on a comic book site I assume you would be).
We Are Super Heroes. Ant-Man And The Wasp. Let's Ride.
Hank Pym
