The latest issue of Mighty Avengers(#23) exemplifies everything that annoys me about the current state of the comics industry.  Absolutely no idea how to tell a visual story.

First of all I hate the idea of portraying Tony Stark inside of the Iron Man armor as a naked man standing inside a dark room surrounded by video monitors.  They're currently doing this in Dark Avengers as well, to portray Norman Osborn inside his suit of armor.  The problem is that it doesn't make any sense and is confusing.  It's obviously not an accurate representation of how it would work.  The suit is basically skin-tight and the way it's being portrayed here is as if he's standing in a room.  Preposterous.  So the reader tries to fill in the gaps.  It is an abstract representation of how Tony interacts with his suit?  Is he actually operating it by remote-control?  (this actually seems to be what's being portrayed, but isn't born out by anything else in the magazine)  Has Tony been shrunk down so that he's actually really small inside the armor?  Or is there some kind of tesseract technology at work making the inside of the armor much more spacious than the outside would indicate?  Bottom line is that it takes me out of the story and makes me wonder why the creative team didn't make better choices.

And then there's the confrontation between Iron Man, Hercules, USAgent and Chthon.  Where the hell are they in relation to each other?  This whole sequence is just a series of close-up shots of all the characters involved.  I know the heroes are attacking a mountain (the source of Chthon's power), but where is Chthon while they are doing this?  The other side of the country?  The base of the mountain?  Standing right next to them?  The key element missing here is what's called an establishing shot.  This is visual story-telling 101.  Again, I'm pulled out of the story to wonder what the hell is going on.

The highlight of the frustration is when Chthon finally attacks Iron Man and crew.  Chthon shoots a bolt of something off to the distance.  It's not at a mountain (where the heroes are supposed to be) but rather just kind of off in the distance in a nebulous sort of way.  And then there's three panels of each of the three heroes being affected by something.  It kind of looks like they're being attacked by an angry light-show or a golden shower or something.  The way it's drawn it doesn't even really look like the heroes are reacting to this supposed attack very much.  And the results of the attack are certainly never shown.  Are they knocked for a loop?  Put to sleep?  Turned into frogs?  We'll never know because that apparantely wasn't important enough to the story to show the reader.

These are all visual story-telling problems.  Whoever was driving this story was NOT thinking visually.  I don't know if it was a matter of the writer not giving good descriptions or trying to pack too much visual info into too tiny of spaces.  Or maybe the artist just simply isn't sophisticated enough to handle this kind of epic story.  Or maybe the editing just didn't care enough to point this out to anyone who could fix it.  Regardless, there's an old saying for writers who don't properly give pertinant details to a story.  It's that they "left those details in the type-writer."  I'd say, in this case, the creative team left a lot on the drawing table.