It’s really difficult to decide exactly how to review this book. If you are the sort of person who is reading Marvel comics as if all the titles are basically one book– a person who has been following a years-long story as it snakes through Secret War, Civil War, New Avengers, Secret Invasion, Power Pack and Howard the Duck– then on the whole I guess it was a pretty good read. The art is the usual Maleev excellence, the story starts filling in the gaps between all the books you were reading in 2005, and the secret plot points start getting dutifully ticked off. Fabuloso.

But what does it have to do with Mighty Avengers?

If you had been reading this title and no other since it debuted, you would have seen a certain consistent style and approach to storytelling that was very distinct from the rest of the line. The book had a certain kind of artist doing a certain kind of thing with a certain kind of story. Its mission statement from the beginning was to bring back a lot of the color and bombast that had been missing from the decompressed superhero books of the era. Thought balloons made their return as streets ran rampant with Venoms and Doombots and planes fell out of the sky and Sentry held helicarriers in the air. There may have even been BIFFs and POWs. I’ll bet there were.

And then, suddenly, we’re visiting downtown Graytonia with Alex Maleev and his photorealism as sets of two people (almost none of whom have ever appeared in the book until this moment) sit in drab rooms talking about their feelings. How is this an issue of Mighty Avengers? If I tore off the cover, what would you guess you’d just read? You would guess Secret War II, Nick Fury #1, or the long-promised Spider-Woman series before you said “Mighty Avengers” as a joke. I have been waiting to see what was between these covers for a long, long time, but as I read it the whole thing felt like someone said, “Well, we have this story we need to stick somewhere… no, not in Thor… wait: what are we doing with Mighty Avengers this summer? Anything?”

It is tricky to handle a book like this when all its characters are spending the next eight months having their pivotal development occur in another book. Maybe when I try to treat it as something other than a cog in the overall Universe Story, I’m complaining on behalf of a reader that doesn’t exist. Still, while I look forward to seeing where all this goes, I don’t feel like any of it should have gone here.