The way Jim Lee and his followers insist muscular men have these deformed, huge wrists is very funny to me. Like it’s Lee making a peculiar drawing choice, and then a literal generation of people copying it. There’s not a whole lot of muscle to build there, guys, buff or not. Wolverine’s wrists look like he’d have trouble moving his thumbs here. But that’s exactly what Jim would have done. Well, at any rate, we’re back where we left off, many of the New Avengers running from a dinosaur, until Iron Man gets chomped and blows up its head. That feels kinda uncalled for. Not the dinosaur’s fault you showed up here. Spider-Man then stops to wonder where Luke and Spider-Woman went.
Bendis rule #1 is torture Wolverine because he can take it. Luke and Jess bring him back to the others, and they argue about whose fault all that was, and then Logan gets around to saying why he’s here. He’s being hunted and couldn’t take any chances, hence the aggressive entrance. To begin explaining what’s going on, he asks if any of them know who Karl Lykos is. Hey, what luck!
I have always wondered what happened with Wolverine’s webbed hand down at the bottom. Clearly not on purpose, but how’d it happen? I still can’t tell if it’s inking or coloring where it was added. Well, now’s the perfect time for them to all get jumped by the mutants, and one of them has a power dampening ability (Which, unfortunately includes Spider-Mans “new creepy organic webshooters,” as he calls them). Everyone passes out. And then they wake up in a real classic X-Men-style trap, all hung from the ceiling, only unlike a classic X-Men-style trap, they’ve all be stripped nude first. Rather incredibly, Brainchild, the genius mutate, is there, and says he looks forward to continuing his experiments on Spider-Man. That’s a reference to Marvel Fanfare 1 & 2! That’s a deeeeep pull in this continuity-averse era! Cap says he demands to speak to Karl Lykos.
Brainchild and Lykos start squabbling, and Tony asks Steve if he’s heard enough. Then he remotely activates his armor, which converts into a sort of flying tank mode. He tells it to attack Lykos. In the process, it blows up Branchild’s big computer console and happens to free our heroes. As the armor makes the mutates flee, they get their kit back on.
First time for the new team. As they all do their thing, Wolverine goes after Lukos, and just stabs him in the gut. But, as the horrified Avengers look on, he turns into his other form. I mean, he had to.
There’s no one on this team who should know better than to let a mutant near Sauron than Wolverine. That didn’t make a lot of sense. Well, it’s Yelena Belova, the random new Black Widow Devon Grayson and JG Jones created a couple years before this. Things don’t look good for the good guys. This month’s letters are getting more and more positive. It’s funny, the topic of this book being a “ripoff of Justice League” because Spider-Man and Wolverine are on the team comes up. This was a hot debate on the comics internet from the moment the team was announced. The lore has it that, at one of Marvel’s writer’s retreats where various writers reveal their plans for the future, event stories are kicked around, and so on, Bendis said Spider-Man and Wolverine should join the Avengers, that Marvel’s most popular characters should be on their premiere superteam, and the room exploded into a heated argument. At which point Joe Quesada, they say, knew they had to do it. If it could inspire such passion in the guys who do this for a living, imagine the fan reaction. But, also… why wouldn’t the company’s premiere superteam have its premiere characters on it? Not all the time of course, you want line-ups to change over the years… Justice League doesn’t always feature Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman… But why not? People acting like this was some kind of cop out, cash grab or gross betrayal were very strange. It’s common sense, and yet it still somehow took all this time to happen. Well, start happening. Wolverine hasn’t been offered a slot yet. But… he was on the cover to #1, so…