Well, now it’s unfortunately time for the first real clunker of a New Avengers story. Nothing’s perfect, after all. Steve McNiven, Dexter Vines and Morry Hollowell return as artists… for this issue… and Hollowell suffers the indignity of not even getting on the credits page. There’s no credited inker inside, but at least he got his name on the cover. Highly unusual for a colorist to get cover credit in this era, but these 3 guys are a team, so maybe they negotiated it that way. As color artists are starting to have a much more dramatic effect on the published product, a cover credit seems only fair, but it’s still years away from being routine. This issue begins with a ridiculous 4 splash pages showing the energy surge released after House of M crashing down out of space and into North Pole, Alaska, followed by a 2-page splash of the devastation it wrought. Then this…
For those playing along at home, that’s 7 panels in 8 pages to show us this guy getting zapped. Pretty self-indulgent. Meanwhile or later or something, Maria Hill, Director of SHIELD, takes a video call from Tony Stark. She seems mad he made the New Avengers public, but that’s not what she wants to talk about. She wants to talk about the House of M. Which she calls that, of course.
“Eileen Harsaw” was one I had to look up. She’s one of the parade of generic, lame mutants Rob Leifeld made up on X-Force called “Phantazia.” Apparently not anymore, though. The red alert is what happened i Alaska. Hill gets briefed on how the entire town was wiped out, and they get eyes on the flamin’ guy via some agents in the area, but he sees them from 22 miles away and the line goes dead. Hill is scrambling for someone to send out there, and remembers Canada’s premiere super team.
See, even they call themselves that. I didn’t even remember that was coming.
Bendis jobbing all of Alpha Flight out to this new threat caused quite a bit of uproar. On the one hand, it’s just Alpha Flight, but on the other hand, the guy who did Avengers Disassembled destroying a Claremont/Byrne creation from the golden era of X-Men didn’t go over well. But it’s comics, most if not all the characters on this spread are alive now. There follows a spread where the President of the United States tells Hill to get the Avengers on this, and she tries not to because she doesn’t like them, but she’s overruled.
This art team was meant to handle this whole story, but they got pulled to do the event we’re rapidly approaching that really will Change Everything. So next issue, a familiar name returns to the blog far sooner than I’d personally prefer…