As Steve McNiven and Co are called away to greener pastures, enter Mike Deodato, Jr. and his trusty inker, Joe Pimentel. With Dave Stewart on colors, they’ll complete this storyline. Sadly.
You think those kids were really meant to be that young? With dialogue like that?
Swipe Deodato, Jr. hits the ground running with a pretty widely distributed John Romita, Sr. Captain America. Over 2 pages, we see the Avengers just helping a community. Luke runs off some drug dealers, Spider-Man helps a lady get into her car, some school kids gawk at Captain America, a bunch of things. Then a news van shows up.
Deodato copying Finch’s wildly incorrect Iron Man mask is very funny to me. This sequence, I think, hasn’t aged well. The concept of Luke Cage wanting to clean up his community is nice and all, but I think a man like Cage would understand that improving your community is about more than scaring people. People don’t just rob each other and “prostitute themselves” and sell drugs and whatnot for fun. Cage, more than most superheroes, would be well acquainted with the underlying socio-economic conditions. In a way that, frankly, Bendis probably was not. But I think this book is a snapshot of the final years when “good people” could pretend crime was caused by “bad people” and not by low wages, lack of opportunity and urban decay. Also, unrelated, it’s weird how much more solid Deodato & Pimentel’s art looks here than it did just the month before in ASM. In addition to the swiping and the celebrity tracing, his work put me off due to how sketchy and unfinished it looked, but this feels more complete. Which seems really counterintuitive given he wasn’t even planning to draw this book and this must’ve been a rush job. Anyway! The heroes are briefed by Hill in their plane, and she shows them footage of Alpha Flight getting wrecked by the mystery villain. We see said villain has already reached a human population, and it’s too late to evacuate.
This notion of a superhero who can’t get out of bed some days could be interesting, but it doesn’t end up feeling terribly good. But, hey, Spider-Man gets to go do the Reed Richards part of the story. Iron Man lets us know we’re in Cleveland, Ohio, where Bendis is from, as he tells Hill he’s cross referenced the guy against all known energy signatures in he & Reed’s data, and got nothing. With people on the line, he decides to try to make peaceful contact alone. Tony actually gets the baddie to stop, which hasn’t happened since he touched down, and gets him to laboriously say his name is Michael. Tony asks why he’s hurting people and where he’s going.
Ain’t that always the way?
Carol is shot out of that big energy surge and into a warehouse somewheres, barely avoiding Iron Man. But…
Once upon a time, in X-Men, Carol went to space, developed a bunch of new powers and hung out with some space pirates with her head constantly on fire under the codename “Binary” for awhile. Kinda looks like that may be coming back…