I seem to recall it causing a stir that the events on this cover don’t happen in the comic, for some reason, as if that hasn’t happened a jillion times in comics history. I seem to recall the explanation was the covers are done very early, and the story changed, which has also happened a jillion times. Doesn’t seem like something worth getting bent out of shape over, but that’s the internet for you. This month, Mike Deodato is joined by his studiomate Will Conrad on line art, and that should be interesting. We open on a very stiff looking Namor flying out of the ocean and entering Avengers Tower, demanding to know why he was summoned.
This kind of backroom, secret world government thing makes so much more sense with villains, except it doesn’t, because Namor, Emma Frost, and mostly Loki aren’t exactly villains. Emma in particular being there was met with heavy resistance online. And, again, Norman doing this and also trying to genuinely be a hero doesn’t square up at all. Anyway, Namor is very Namor about how no surface dweller can tell him what to do, and the surface ruins everything and is, in face, the reason Atlantis is no more, and won’t hear of it, and says if that means he has to fight Norman, they should do it now. It’s weird, for reasons I could never really comprehend, Bendis is so bad at characters with a very specific speech pattern… Thor, Beast, Ares, Dr. Doom, Emma Frost… but he always wrote a great Namor. Osborn says Namor is being short sighted and storms out. Meanwhile, at Dark Avengers Breakfast, Victoria Hand wants to know where Noh-Varr is, and no one knows. Bullseye implies Moonstone should know, having seen them together, but she days she doesn’t.
How… On Earth… do you arrive at the decision to show Sentry through someone’s legs at the table? Baffling. Well, we then see Norman telling Bob to let the Void out, to let him kill all the terrorists but one, and Bob protests that Norman said there is no Void, before his eyes turn black and he takes off. In an unfortunately very Bendis sequence, he spends 3 whole pages flying across the country, into the water, and zooming around down there before he finds the Atlanteans. Coulda just said “Later…” 3 pages of transit with no dialogue or internal monologue or anything is pretty self-indulgent. Anyway, he finds them, so…
Then we’re back at Avengers Tower, listening to the news report about how the Atlanteans set off a bomb and killed themselves when Sentry came for them, except for one survivor in HAMMER custody. 3 silent pages of Sentry flying/swimming and another page of him just looking at the Atlantean base, and then a splash page of fighting, and then we jump ahead to maybe the next day. Pacing not going too well. Osborn is talking to the president about how great it all went as his one prisoner he wanted so badly is led into a cell.
His plan was to use the one survivor as proof to the world he was on top of things, and then he’s immediately killed? Ok…
I mean, really, how and why would Tony have left all those armors? They’re not SHIELD property. Whatever. The “mutant problem” is a lead-in to the next arc, which is really going to stretch the limits of my mandate here. But first, it’s back to New Avengers, and then… other stuff.