Advanced Review: Avengers #1

Whether the world has been breathlessly waiting months for this or not, I do not know. But I have, and so have many fellow readers at my LCS.

The consensus: Superb! And beyond …

Right away, that creative hand that had perhaps the second greatest run on Fantastic Four is evident, and so are the plans. Read one word: cosmic!

The intro to this magnificent beginning for Avengers #1 may be deemed slow by the ill-advised, but the words and the actions lead to payoff and a great ending page that can only lead to more payoff.

Right away (I said that before?), scribe Jonathan Hickman manages to get a handle on all of these characters (especially Stark and Cap) better than I think Brian Michael Bendis ever did (although his Cap was decent, and he had others: Cage, Spidey, et al).

One hurrumph from the God of Thunder says more than all the talking head scripts in the past eight years, and that feel … I dunno, the feel we Avengers fans call “classic,” I guess … is there and ready to take off.

This is a magazine in which to handle a second Kree/Skrull War, in which the concepts of the New Universe can be utilized well, in which Captain Universe and a member of the Imperial Guard can become Avengers.

This is a magazine I will be looking forward to every other week. Can Hickman and a team of great artists pull it off? Here is one fan who is hoping so.

Sound storywise, artistically beautiful and reader-friendly even to those who did not see the movie, Avengers #1 offers all the idealized hope that the title originally had, as Stark points out, “when we first found you (Cap).”

That is saying a lot these days.