There he is, Marvel’s Superman. Or as close as he’s ever gonna get to it, at least. Well, we open on the SHIELD helicarrier early the next morning. Cap and Iron Man are discussing what happened. Tony says they kept 45 inmates from escaping, but 42 got away. Not great, but could have been worse. Cap wants to talk about it in a more specific way, though. He wants to talk about “what they were witness to.” So we can flashback to getting out of the end of last issue. So no we’re back there, as Cap’s narration tells us Luke wasn’t even supposed to be there, he was only there with Matt Murdock, as the end of last issue repeats. Only this time, Luke tells Purple Man he’s too drugged for his powers to work. Bit of a cheat!
A lot of pages in a row, but this is both Steve’s sales pitch to Tony and Bendis’ sales pitch to the reader, so it seemed worth reproducing. Not only has he given them a “And there came a day unlike any other…” moment, he’s even given them the immediate mission of tracking down the escaped super-cons. Pretty clean, really, and all in 2 issues! So, we next find Steve going to see Peter Parker as he gets off work at school. He didn’t even take the day off despite the broken wrist and battered face. Steve is only more impressed by him, and reveals that he wants Spider-Man on the Avengers.
One down. Next, Steve goes to see Luke Cage, but he’s still sleeping it off, so he talks to Jessica Jones for awhile about her impending baby. Then Luke wanders out and Cap offers him the deal.
The “by the way” is “No way in Hell does Matt Murdock say yes to this.” And Luke is right. Steve finds him as Daredevil, who says his life is in way too much chaos to burden a team of Avengers with it right now, and even if Cap doesn’t care about that, he does. He also says he simply doesn’t have time, to lead into a joke about how he has no idea how Spider-Man does all the things he does in a month. Wokka wokka. Steve tells him to think about it. On the helicarrier, Steve finds Jessica Drew working out. Incredibly, she has, like, pants on instead of some leotard or something. Then we get a really infamous panel…
Nobody was letting Finch live Steve’s smile down. The cool headquarters is Stark Tower, a newly constructed skyscraper Tony’s working out of, which gets a whole page for establishing shots as we see a tiny Spider-Man swinging toward it. And guess who answers the door?
Gotta have Jarvis. Well, you did. At this point.
Gasp! Who is Jessica working for? Why was the Sentry on the cover if this one if he only appeared on one page? One of these mysteries will eventually be revealed… The letter pages in the first 2 issues were remarkably filled with vitriol, but this one has responses to #2 of this series, and the tide is turning. People hated Avengers Disassembled because it was bad. It just was. Even Bendis, further on down the road, conceded that just blowing everything up the second he got there was a mistake. But this series gets off to a really strong start, and if you’re being honest, you have to acknowledge that. They also run a congratulatory missive from Stan Lee on the new series. Who knows if he actually read it, or even wrote that letter, but it’s a nice thing to be able to run with so many people calling for their heads.