This issue opens in a way I don’t think anyone could’ve possibly predicted: Carol Danvers has started a blog, and she is writing about chaperoning a prisoner transfer of the villain Klaw that went awry over images of the events. A blog!
As always, Cho is concerned with drawing a sexy lady first, and making his fight scene dynamic a distant second. Look at that first panel. Carol almost looks cropped in from somewhere else, she’s so stiff and inappropriate for the panel. But her butt’s poking out and her back is arched, and that’s what matters. As Carol absorbing Klaw’s sound power forced him to sort of implode in on himself, we pause for an ad for a book called “You Can Draw Marvel Characters,” by… Dan Jurgens. A guy who, professionally, at least, has drawn very few Marvel characters. His name was and probably always will be synonymous with Superman. I mean, no disrespect, but he wrote a whole lot of Thor comics, he wrote & drew some Captain Americas, he wrote & laid out a 4-issue FF mini, he wrote and drew those 7-ish issues of Spider-Man, but then he went back to DC, where he’s still working today. He’s a DC guy. And he’ll tell you how to draw Marvel characters. I guess literally anyone more appropriate was busy. Well, anyway, one of the guards whose bacon Carol just saved tells her she must need to fly back to New York, because they’re gonna announce the new line-up of the Avengers, and he assumes she’s on it. She tells him she quit. But…
After telling her blog readers she can’t tell them everything, she tells Cap she’s here because she wanted to talk to him about what happened during the House of M thing. Now available in trade paperback! Every time someone says “House of M,” it’s struck through with a red line. I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, really. The word “house” should be in blue, while they’re at it. She says having lived the experience of being an A-list, beloved hero, she wants it for real, and is going to go out there and “re-earn her wings.” And maybe then she’ll rejoin the Avengers.
Apparently, Bendis & Co planned to make Carol inherit the title of Captain Marvel as part of this, but it wasn’t to be (Yet). Elsewhere, Wolverine is vehemently refusing to be part of the spectacle, not least because he’s a murderer and they don’t want that heat on them. Iron Man tells him it’s his choice. But if there’s one person in the room who could really make the prospect of being announced as an Avenger into a bad thing, well, we know who this blog is for…
Robbie only gets one line, but it’s a perfectly in-character line.
Well, there you go. Soon, Iron Man is giving everyone tips on what to do as some random lady with a comically huge butt helps him with… something… and Jessica tells Cap she shouldn’t do this. But Cap says it’s exactly what she should do, because everyone watching her will expect her to, and that the 2 of them will figure out how to solve her problem.
I have no idea who that lady crying is. Holy Hell, that’s Jessica Jones! Frank Cho sucks.
Clearly meant to mirror the last pages of Avengers Finale, which is nice. But…
Feels out of character for JJJ to lie to them. The editorial is right on the money for him, but it seems like he woulda said all that to their faces, too. But also:
Man, who knows what Jessica is up to? Not me, I don’t fully remember. Ok, that’s done. Next up, why not another random issue of Spider-Man Unlimited?