NEW AVENGERS #51
What did the
iFanboy
community think?
Pulls
Size: pages
Price: 3.99
I want to like the Hood as a villain as much as the next guy. I really do. However, is it me or is Bendis going to the Hood well a bit too much lately? The erstatz Masters of Evil arc was fine. The use of him in Secret Invasion was okay. However, we JUST got him as the Avengers’ physical opponent of the last arc and NOW he’s back with his team suddenly gone and that little plot thread from a few months ago picked back up again after dropped almost immediately during Secret Invasion. Bendis clearly likes the character but it seems like he can’t decide on what to do with the guy. Does he make him the uber-competant ringleader or does he make him Norman Osborn’s button man or the Galvatron to Dormammu’s Unicron? It feels like Bendis keeps pulling the Hood into all these directions and really doesn’t want to pin the character down to an actual character, more a “hey, this seems neat” plot device.
As far as the the art, I was not liking it at all. With Bachalo, it’s mostly a style thing. With Tan, there’s just problems with figures and structure. Hawkeye looks needlessly large and I couldn’t even tell who the blonde chick was until Clint called her Carol. There was one page where I could understand a little of the layout for a bit. This issue was a real stumble for me. The writing feels mundane and flails around a bit and the art, I believe, really hurts the story here. Still, the Peter/Jessica thing was pretty funny, so it’s got that going for it.
Art: 3 - Good
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Good review. I find it strange that you’re still willing togive this 3/5s, though. All too often it seems that readers feel that every issue is granted a perfect score by the grace of God before they open the issue, and then they deduct points from that. For me, a comic (or any other work of art) has to earn every point–it starts at zero and has to justify my otherwise wasted time that I spent trying to appreciate it.
I totally agree with your evaluation of the Hood. I haven’t read New Avengers in over a year, but I thought/feared that the Hood was never going to evolve past the "hey, this seems neat" plot device. Sorry to have been proven right, apparently. Not sorry to have dropped this title when I did. I think that, overall, mainstream comics are better than they were 15 years ago–and Bendis is partly responsible for that upturn–but New Avengers is the 2008 version of X-Force or Spawn in 1993. The quality just isn’t there. It’s become standard to laugh at how people used to buy old Image books for their gory violent pencilling; maybe 10 years from now comic fans will be laughing at how people in the 2000s used to buy Bendis books that went almost nowhere from issue to issue, were written in by-the-numbers hipster dialogue, and took like 5-6 minutes to read.
I just like your analogy to Transformers to define the Hood/Dormammu relationship. Sadly, it works- and I say sadly because I’d rather see the Hood as an independent character able to do his own thing without having an uber-demon (a creator stand-in, maybe?) shove him back onto the track. Haven’t read this yet, but at least it sounds like it won’t be horrible.
I’m going to give Bendis the benifit of the doubt that his plans with the Hood are a bit long-term. It’s pretty obvious that he sees something in the character that nobody else seems to, so we’ll see if he can take him a good enough place to make me care about this guy (or at least fear him).