I bought this book soley because of the name Greg Rucka , and I was not disappointed by his work . Unfortunatly the rest of the book was not good , the remaining stories ran the gamut from cute to just plain stupid . The idea is sound short stories about the Avengers , but the shoices of charecters is mindboggling , Vance Astrovik , Firestar , Jarvis and D-Man. Definetly not the Alist guys …hell these are’nt even considered Zlist on a good day .

Greg Rucka’s writing on Post Mortem was truly amazing , this showed the true cost of freedom and not in a hackneyed melodramtic way either . It was a quiet exercise in minimalism . Steve Rogers went from being a larger than life icon to being the kind of commanding officer we would all like looking out for our soldiers . This could have easily turned out to be an over the top republican bullets and bayonets propoganda piece , but Rucka is way too talented to let that happen . The writers at Marvel should learn from Rucka on how to improve their own stories , especially the other gentlemen writing in this book .

Sean McKeever’s story read like a really bad episode of 90210 and I mean really bad .Paul Tobin’s peice The Journal of Edwin Jarvis was just dumb and very predictable . Dumb I can handle but predictable and dumb is too much . The last story was written and drawn by Jacob Chabot , and this was hands down the worst of the bunch . It was so stupid that it was insulting . It was supposed to be a sweet funny little one page peice and it turned out to be the an immature peice of stupidity that I would have expected to see in some badly written high school newspaper .Honestly this whole book with the exception of Greg Rucka’s story made me wish that Marvel would hire better writers , you know like the guy who that Sentry story .

 The art was also kind of a letdown to,  it was’nt all bad but it was’nt particularly good either . It was alright not overly interesting . The worst  was the Mike Mayhew work on Closure . The figures looked stiff and unatural , not very dynamic , and just not good . The appalling thing is that with the exception of Micheal Lark’s work this was the best of the bunch . Now on the other hand Micheal Lark’s work was very good . His figures used body language to and facial expressions to convey emotions better than words ever could . My only gripe is that Matt Hollingsworths,s colors were kind of uneven and did very little to enhance the story . But that is a minor gripe considering how good the overall story was.Its just a shame that the rest of the issue could’nt be half as good .