The Good
The phrase “the stakes have never been higher” gets thrown around a lot. Jonathan Hickman is real, real good at earning rhetoric that is normally nothing more than mere hyperbole, and truly the stakes have skyrocketed over the last few issues, culminating here. Hickman brings out the Mapmakers, the Alephs, the Builders, and, at long last, the Ivory Kings. We got a glimpse of what was to come at the cliffhanger of last issue and now we get a big ol’ infodump on just where Hank Pym has been for the last several months. Spoiler alert: things go very, very badly. Very. Very badly. Cosmically badly. Universe-endingly-badly. It’s bad. Things are bad. Hickman also gives us a glimpse at the fate of the Captain Britain Corps (with a sota tie-in to AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #15) and ends on still another gloriously hair-pulling cliffhanger. The stakes are set up, the main threat is established, things are coming to a head and it the look of Secret Wars is becoming clearer and clearer. Hickman has always been especially adept at building the stakes slowly so it never feels overwhelming or perfunctory, and it’s not the easiest thing to make the fate of the universe feel as personal as it does in this issue.
Dalibor Talajic handles pencils and does a generally good job. The way he’s drawn the characters gives a weighty, clear-cut feel to their emotional resonance and impact that they’re currently going through, and makes the reader feel it right along with them. He also brings a tremendous sense of scale, letting the epic nature of this story breathe and become something that inspired awe and horror in equal parts. Rick Magyar provides inks and also gives the issue a sense of import and meatiness that makes the events feel equal parts intense and grim while Frank Martin’s colors breathe a kind of dark, dreary life into what is a very dour issue.
The Bad
Hickman seems to be very much writing with an eye toward collected editions as issues like this have become rather standard for regular readers of this series. Hank Pym dominates the dialog this issue, and his voice is just about the only one that gets represented and while it’s not a BAD Hank Pym voice, it doesn’t do a great job establishing that this is HIS character that went through this. It feels like it could have been any number of the heroes who are narrating this, and that leads into the other problem: by making everything a recap, it lessens the impact of what’s going on. It would have been more interesting to have an entire issue from Hank’s point of view as he experienced these things in “real-time.”
While the art generally does a great job with things like scale and character’s facial expressions, there’s a lack of detail in some of the bigger moments and the characters lack fluidity and have a tendency to feel posed.
The Verdict
This isn’t a bad issue of NEW AVENGERS, but it’s not a great one, though it likely is leading to something far, far greater, as these issues often do, but standing on its own, this isn’t a terribly strong issue. It sets up a lot of great stuff, and there are some very, very solid moments in it, but it ultimately comes off as too clinical and detached for its own good.