They admitted it was Annual #3! don’t get used to that. Guys, Mike Mayhew is here to thrill us with the most lifeless, awkward, boring comic book art this side of Mike Deodato, Jr. Mayhew may actually be worse. Has this man yet darkened my doorstep? Oh, look at that, he’s got credits on 4 of my posts. This is what taking all these long breaks does, I’m losing all my references. Well, anyway, as you can plainly see from this cover (Or at least, I can), Mayhew’s just tracin’ Poser models, like Deodato. To give credit where it’s due, he doesn’t just leave the faces as soulless automatons like Deo does, but somehow the more fully 3D rendered coloring style makes things look even less real. The inside is slightly less plastic looking, as colors are the province of Andy Troy, but only slightly. And of course, Bendis is at the helm. I feel like I’m writing differently tonight? Am I? What do you know, no one even reads these. Weeeeeeeell our old pal Clint Barton wakes up naked and restrained in a chair being taunted by Norman Osborn. It’s been 3 months since publication of the The List: Avengers, that’s like 10 minutes Marvel time, so he didn’t have to wait too long.
I just don’t get it, man. This looks so bad. I know this guy has fans. I mean, presumably Bendis is into it. But it looks so weird, close enough to real that it not looking real is deeply disturbing. Extremely uncanny valley territory.
And then things that simply aren’t real, like Venom come into play, and look one thousand times worse. Look at that big balloon hand! Is that the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade Venom float?? Well, they invoked Mockingbird and this is a 2000s comic, so time to see her in her underwear.
She looks like she’s been awake an awfully long time to not notice that note, but what do I know? I think comics should be drawn by people trying their best instead of lifelessly traced from models and photos, I clearly don’t know anything. Bobbi runs to check the armory (Odd choice, to my eye), then runs up on the roof of the building, still in her drawers, to have a breakdown because Clint is certainly dead. Ms. Marvel and Spider-Woman are inexplicably hovering in the air right above her, so they come down to ask what’s wrong, and then Carol zips off to Avengers Tower to, what, see if she can spot Clint? She just looks at the building.
Credit where it’s due, that sequence had more energy than it would have if Deodato was here. But that’s an outlier. I mean, look at this:
It’s like when people make comics out of pictures of action figures. Panel 3 Spider-Woman is particularly terrible. Real “default hand pose #2” hours. This type of stuff distracts me so bad I can barely read the comic. The gals bring Jessica up to speed before Carol zooms in and says Clint is “definitely” in the helicarrier and there’s no way she, Spider-Woman and Mockingbird could possibly get him out. So, Jessica calls her mom to watch Baby Danielle and buys in. Her first real, intentional return to superheroing since before her series began. Carol is convinced Clint is already dead despite not seeming that way on the previous page, but Spider-Woman is not. On the carrier, Clint wakes up, finds himself alone, finds his bow and arrows in the room with him, and makes a break for it. He blows up a door and suddenly finds himself reliving his death in Avengers 502, only now it looks way, way worse, you know.
Mentallo! Not seen him since Web 100. He makes Clint relive every terrible thing that ever happened to him, complete with a splash featuring art pulled from a buncha other comics, and then gets Norman the address of the Avengers’ base.
Man. It all looks so bad, but look at the Venoms! In Poser, there’s lil’ sliders you can use to make individual muscle groups bigger and smaller, to make an average looking body skinny or muscular. The Venoms just look like random slider pulls. Look at that forearm! Well, they bust into Bucky’s house, only to find it not just unoccupied, but cleaned out. The ladies of the Avengers managed to somehow remove all of the belongings in the house in anticipation of this happening in, what, 20 minutes? Bucky is gonna be so mad. But, while the Dork Avengers stare at the rubble of an empty safehouse…
…four copies of Default Female storm the helicarrier. Norman and the gang are packing up to go home, with Bullseye rubbing it in Norman’s face that he got outmaneuvered. Then…
Hey, always nice to justify one of these tangential issues being on a Spider-Man blog.
Hey, look, Steve Rogers! He’s back! He’s been back awhile, I think, by now, but he had a vision of the future that convinced him if he took back the Captain America gig, Bucky would die, so he didn’t. And yet here he is, in the suit, looking like the bully jock in an 80s high school comedy. Womp womp. How did that happen? Turns out I don’t care. Join us next time for another Annual.