For whatever
reason it may be, the Marvel U is currently under siege – not from Skrulls,
super villains or even mystical beings from the Negative Zone…  no it is under siege by a battery of
books messing with the time stream. 

I don’t
understand how so many books can suddenly decide to start taking on the time
stream (Aaron is doing it both with this arc AND his Astonishing Spider-man
& Wolverine story for example) but where every writer usually crumbles when
dealing with extreme time traveling is tying the story up and unless they have
a major ace up their sleeve (Second Coming for example) writers usually find
themselves falling into a pitfall of confusion.

It is this pitfall
that Aaron jumped AND cleared, only to stumble and trip backwards into at the last
second. The story becomes just a bit too confusing and stuffed with time
travelling craziness that the story in the end, just looses it’s way. It will either have you;
scratching your head, trying to fathom just what the hell is going on… or it
will have you frantically re-reading the comic in the hope of trying to pick up
the missing thread.

Someone once told
me that a time traveling story is only good if it makes your head hurt and
causes you to sit down and rethink every step of the journey, this person was
also a bit of an asshole as he then went on to tell me why Back To The Future
sucked because the story was overly simplistic. Yeah exactly. To put it simply:
Aaron tried to do a big grand story as his last big arc before the name change
and while it worked for three issues, it just lost it’s way ever so slightly
towards the end.

That’s not to say
it’s all-bad. In fact the man has once again shown that he writes the street
level characters quite unlike anyone else around for Marvel at the minute. The
guy at the very least should be writing a new Heroes for Hire book, because his
Luke Cage and Iron Fist have been outstanding. In fact his Spiderman is one of
the best around as well, both cocky and witty – the way he plays some of these
characters off of each other is outstanding. If anything I think a street level
avengers team would be right up his ally New Avengers
… c’mon Marvel, I
think Bendis has had long enough – let some new blood have a try- we all know
he deserves it!

-Josh “Dredd” West

Origami Kid