Time for the most exciting thing ever about Dark Avengers: The end of the series! Didn’t like it the first time, didn’t like it the 2nd time. Bought every issue, tho, so that’s on me. Comics will make you stupid.
We then flashback to the Dark Avengers being arrested by Nick Fury with no authority to do so in Siege 4, up to the point Cap throws down Osborn. Then Moonstone and Bullseye try to make a run for it, but are handily dispatched by the New Avengers, just like last time they tangled, and basically every time they tangles, because the Dark Avengers were somehow never actually presented as a serious threat while also being pitched as a dangerous team.
God, some of the most hideous, obvious Poser models of the run. The book dies as it lived, ugly. One Dark Avenger wasn’t there to get hauled in, however: Daken. He’s on the run in Broxton, where martial law has been declared and the Army is rounding up members of HAMMER. In an X-Men comic, everyone but Wolverine getting captured was just the 2nd-to-last part of a story where he saves everyone. But this is the end of the series and the concept of Dark Avengers, so he shivs a solider, steals his uniform, throw some grenades to cause a distraction, steals a Jeep and leaves his team to their fate.
Speaking of, we turn to Victoria Hand in an interrogation room, into which walks Steve Rogers in that qasi-SHIELD uniform from earlier, to ask what she was doing with Osborn. He’s read her file and feels like she doesn’t belong with the gang of murderers and lunatics Osborn surrounded himself with.
Yes, in the #1 most insane piece of fallout from this asinine era, Steve Rogers, Captain America, looks at the lady who happily and proudly propped up a gang of lunatics and murderers as the Avengers, knowing they were lunatics and murderers, and says, “Kid, you got the goods.” Un. Fathom. Able. Absolutely, mindbogglingly crazy. Why must every big event involve Steve Rogers seeming like a complete moron??? Well, we’re almost out of pages, so a very badly rendered Iron Man and Thor deliver Norman Osborn to his cell, and an off-screen voice tells him that when he screws up, he really screws up. Osborn tells the unseen speaker what he knows to be true:
The… The Punisher? The only bullet point on your “List” where you actually achieved your objective and had him killed? What?
Ya know, when they brought Norman back from the dead and made him Lex Luthor, it frustrated me so much that it wasn’t the same character anymore. And then Warren Ellis made him yet another character, and Bendis made him a different version of that. Few Marvel characters of his stature have just totally ignored what came before like that, let alone repeatedly. It’s crazy to me.
I’ll tell you what maybe is less crazy, tho, to me, in this moment, having just read Bendis showering Deodato with praise in his farewell page in this back of this book: I somehow never put something together. Bendis, as nerds know, got into comics wanting to be an artist. All his major indie work before Powers was him writing and drawing. And his art… was frustrating. He traced photos, you see. He traced photos he took, composed to be used in his comics, like Alex Maleev and Michael Gaydos, which is a very different thing than what someone like Greg Land or Salvador LaRocca does, but he did trace photos, which gave his work a certain look. And, working in black & white, he absolutely drenched the world in shadow. Even a scene in broad daylight would see characters looking like they’re in a dark room with a spotlight on them. In his farewell, he says, “Mike is gravitas.” And it suddenly, belatedly occurred to me that seeing a Mike Deodato tracefest is about as close as Bendis came to seeing his own drawing on a major superhero property. It’s basically the same technique, except with dead-eyed Poser models instead of photos, and way more Tommy Lee Jones. The “realism,” the deep shadow, whether it’s necessary or not. I look at artists who’re just doing this lifeless tracing, and I think, “why does the writer like this? The audience, they’re rubes (Look, I don’t care, no one even reads this blog), and they don’t care about the art anymore. But why would meticulous planners and thinkers like Matt Fraction and Kieron Gillen work with an embarrassing hack like Greg Land? Why does Bendis love Deodato?” And the answers are surely different for each person (I hold out hope that Fraction was just pinching his nose and working with the artist he was assigned), but for Bendis… he sees his own work in Deodato’s. Deo does the things Bendis wanted to do, with a Bendis script. It makes so much sense, actually.
Well, anyway. That’s Dark Avengers. What was Dark Avengers? A comic where a crazy, evil murderer, given the chance to do anything he wanted, put together a team of other crazy, evil murderers and… tried to force them to be good guys. I mean, you hear the logline “Supervillains are in control,” you can see some fun things to do with that. You see Norman put together his Cabal of the worst of the worst (Except for the 2 actual good guys, which, you know, what?), you go “Ok, this is gonna get crazy.” And then… he makes his gaggle of supervillains fight other supervillains and does a terrible job with crazy ideas, but tries to do the right thing, at least in his mind. Why? Why is that the story? Why didn’t the Cabal try to take over the world? I will never understand. Early Norman Osborn wanted to be the Kingpin. Resurrected Norman Osborn ran a cult, among other things. Warren Ellis’ Norman Osborn was mostly a scary prison guard who enjoyed torturing people. Bad guy stuff! Bendis Norman Osborn… wants to be a hero. The one time he was doing something truly nefarious, it was Fraction writing that X-Men crossover. Bendis’ vision was just not that. Instead, we got a bunch of mediocre villains (Everyone was clamoring for Morgan Le Fey and Molecule Man!), a bunch of long monologues from Norman, and endless examples of Osborn failing, failing, failing. He never seemed like a credible threat. His only real win was getting the Punisher killed, and then he apparently forgot that even happened. And then he finally did something truly supervillain-y just as a way to end the era as quickly as possible. Just not a satisfying comic book at all. I’m so glad to be past it. I find it bitterly funny that the first-ever clear expression of Osborn’s worldview as head of HAMMER & the Avengers, what he thought he was trying to accomplish, is laid out here, 2 pages from the end. Woulda been nice to have him talk about this kind of thing sooner! A debacle, honestly. But, as Bendis notes in his farewell, it was Marvel’s top selling book the entire time it was on the shelves. As always, I may have strong opinions, but that doesn’t mean anyone agrees with me. What do I know?