This month, the Avengers all gather ‘round to see a cool bug Wolverine found. We’re going in a different direction. Has Deodato referenced the cover of Iron Man, Vol. 3 #80 for like the 6th time in 3 issues on this cover? You know it! This month, things get dicey.
Maria Hill, your priorities seem to be out of whack. Spider-Man falls to the ground, and Hill orders her psi-ops to go dig around in his head. Someone has also managed to shut Vision down, and she orders them to dig around in him in a more literal sense. Then she finally gets around to thinking about the seeming extinction level event headed for Earth. And then on the next page, Deodato uses that exact same Iron Man cover again. I swear, this is embarrassing. I and I want to stress, not the right helmet. This is the pre-Extremis suit. Not only is he constantly jocking Adi Granov, he’s not even using the right design. Iron Man is in space now, about to confront Michael, as the remaining Avengers confirm the working theory that Michael is empowered by everything taken from the depowered mutants when Wanda did her thing. Also Captain America is, indeed, very upset with Maria Hill now. Iron Man manages to briefly repel Michael using super science whatever, but only briefly. As he’s about to get clobbered…
A collective, you say? Like the name of this story! Two REALLY bad drawings of Luke on this page. Meanwhile, a panel of the Sinister Six running at him jolts the new unmasked Peter Parker awake, where Maria Hill tells him they needed to wake him up, then demands to know what “House of M” means.
There’s that superhuman registration act again.
Maria Hill in contrast to Nick Fury was interesting, for sure. Iron Man and Sentry are still duking it out with Michael in space as Tony gets updated on what Hill did by the rest of the team. Then he talks to Hill, and they snipe each other a bit until one of her goons yells that they should stop fighting Michael immediately. That every time he’s attacked, he figures out a power to deal with it, so they’re just making him stronger. This unnamed SHIELD guy also wonders out loud if Michael might be leading them to the still-missing Scarlet Witch, which prompts Iron Man to grab Sentry and run. Then a tense 2-page spread of everyone reacting as Michael zooms directly for a target location and smashes into it, and that location is Genosha, to be continued. I would post the cliffhanger, but it’s just a 2-page splash of wreckage in the Deodato style, meaning it just kinda looks like a bunch of melted cheese, it means nothing visually. Guy really needed to work on this. But he’ll solve that problem in the near future by beginning to trace 3D models instead of drawing anything… And lemme tell ya, the rubes are gonna love it. He will become a “superstar artist” by tracing his stiff, lifeless Poser models instead of drawing things, the energy bleeds right out of his pages and never comes back, and the crowd goes wild. I will never understand.