It’s official.  I’m dropping this book.  I appreciate what Bendis and crew are doing, but frankly, I’m really disappointed with this issue.  There’s a number of problems that I had with this issue in particular, but as a whole, this series has been up and down for me.  It’s been littered with positive moments and then there’s just been some down right uninteresting things.  It could just be that there’s so much team overlap from New Avengers (which I feel is the stronger of the two), that I just feel burned out by this title.  But I digress.  Let’s talk about this issue.

First off, while I usually love Bendis’ snappy dialogue, I felt it was very out of place with Ultron-Tony Stark exchange.  I’ve always envisioned Ultron as a reasoning machine with little personality.  His cold calculation is what makes him so dangerous, but here, he’s bantering with Tony Stark like they’re old pals.  While I enjoy the way the conclusion is brought about between that conversation, with Ultron understanding the full stakes of war with Kang, I feel that the climatic parts of this issue are just plain anti-climatic.  We’ve been reading this for six issues, and in three pages, Bendis wraps up this whole storyline.  Really?  I can see that Bendis has used this time traveling story as an excuse to seed future storylines, and while some of these pieces of information are interesting, on the whole, they’re just not satisfying enough not to justify six issues in the future.  In a way, some of them are vague enough that if they never come to pass, it won’t be a big deal.  Maybe that’s typical of most foreshadowing, and I could just be a little whiny tonight, but that’s my impression.

On the art side of things, this issue looks absolutely awful.  There are pages that look nice, but there are also pages where Romita didn’t even take the time to fill in any details.  His shapes and figures are inconsistent, and my copy had some weird coloring issues where parts were over saturated or the lines were too thick.  The first half of the book is pretty well drawn, but the quality of the issue really stumbles as the book works its way toward the end. You can tell that with his other drawing obligations, Romita is just not able to give this book the love it needs, which is a shame because he’s always been one of my favorite artists.

So, for now, I’m off the Avengers proper.  There’s just too much other good stuff out there, and this title is just not gelling with me at the moment.  I’m sure somewhere in the future I’ll pick it up again because it will do something that interests me, but for now, no thanks.