(Born of a Kryptonian father, and his Skrull companion, Akamuu was sent to Earth when his planet was doomed by the approaching Phoenix. He uses the shapeshifting powers he inherited from his mother to accomplish the mission of his father: To write comic reviews that no one pays him for. This week he’s pairing two comics in his reviews based on an algorithm that even he does not understand.)

This one may be a little on the nose, but I’m going to be comparing this week’s issues of the two (Insert Adjectives Here) Avengers books.

Rick Remender and Brian Michael Bendis are two of my favorite occasionally I like them writers. Remender’s Fear Agent and Uncanny X-Force are among my favorite comics, while his abrupt switch from Punisher Vs. Norman Osborne to Frankencastle turned me off the title (if you enjoyed it, I’m happy for you, I’m not saying it was a terrible comic…it just wasn’t the story I was interested in reading). Likewise, I love me some Alias, House of M, and Ultimate Spider-Man but am bored by his recent Avengers books, and find Powers intermittently good.

Neither Secret nor New Avengers will be going in my Pick of the Week pile.

Bendis’s New Avengers is one of the rare examples where Bendis’s dialog rings completely hollow. No, not because all the characters talk like Peter Parker, but because he’s trying to tell an Iron Fist story, and resorts to using choppy English, and putting the adjective after the noun, in what I can only imagine is an attempt to sound Asian. It doesn’t work.

The girl with hair crimson gets echoed quite a bit in these pages, and it’s clunky. There’s also an inconsistent use of “Master” and “Sir”. I realize this is nitpicky, but this is Bendis, whose bread, butter, jelly, fluff, and Toblerone is supposed to be his strong dialog.

The story itself is a three page story extended into twenty pages. I believe this is mostly for the art (see my review of The New Avengers), which is phenomenal. But I didn’t really need twenty pages of a previous Iron Fist’s possible relationship with The Phoenix. It did not excite me for the future issues of the series.

By contrast, The Secret Avengers story is very integral to the whole AvX storyline. As Beast, Thor, Capt. Britain, The Vision, War Machine, Ms. Marvel, Valkyrie, and No-var try and imprison the Phoenix force in the M’Krann Crystal (Fake Spoiler: It totally works, and AvX is over!).

What may be the biggest surprise when looking at these two books together is how many more word balloons there are in Remender’s book than in Bendis’s. This is not a criticism of either the writers or the books, it’s just somewhat akin to discovering a Walt Whitman poem with more punctuation and odd line breaks than E.E. Cumming’s works*.

If you’re a budget conscious AvX fan who can only afford one tie-on book this week, I’d recommend Secret Avengers for the story, but I’d suggest at least picking up New Avengers and basking in Deodato and Conrad’s art. Then buying that, too.

The scores below are purely for Secret Avengers 26. For New Avengers 25 see that all-new, all-different review.

*-If you understood that, you’re a nerd.