Superhero Media: The New Avengers (#1-#47)

For the pedants, this covers the first eight trades of The New Avengers and wraps-up story-wise after the Secret Invasion, so this feels like a pretty good breaking point. Several (in-comic) months after the events of Avengers Disassembled, a confluence of events results in a breakout at the Raft super-prison being thwarted by Captain America, Spider-Man, Daredevil, Iron Man, Luke Cage, Spider-Woman (Jessica Drew) and The Sentry. Taking this as a sign, Cap begins to assemble a new team of Avengers, though the Sentry and Daredevil are unable to join, before long the rest of the heroes are traipsing across the Savage Land looking for Karl Lycos and battling rogue SHIELD Agents. The pace of The New Avengers is pretty fast, as, like with many Marvel comics, the writing assumes that the audience will also be reading all of the comics of each individual character and the event comics House of M, Civil War and Secret Invasion. Despite this issue however, The New Avengers is one of my favourite comic series and means a great deal to me. 

You see, The New Avengers was the first Avengers comic I read regularly. I picked up the first issue because the cover promised Cap, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Daredevil and Wolverine teaming up, and I fell in love with the comic from there. Yes, the "need" to be reading other comics to keep up is annoying, but the sharp writing and great characters are well worth sticking around for. The dynamic between Spidey and Luke Cage is brilliant and the constant banter rubs off on even Cap and Wolverine later on. Lines like "You ninjas smell like a garden of lilacs, it's actually quite lovely" and "You don't go to the Savage Land without crashing" are about all the rebuttal needed to the idea of Spider-Man being 'too silly' to be in the Avengers. It's the character dynamics as much as the story that keeps me going back to The New Avengers, first Cap, then Iron Man becoming surrogate father-figures to Spider-Man, a resurrected Clint Barton having to find a new identity and Luke Cage rising to lead the team are all compelling and I hope we get to see some of that in the MCU at some stage.

As well as the, above-mentioned, issues with tie-ins, The New Avengers has a couple of glaring imperfections that grate at times. The Spider-Woman/Skrull Queen story is unnecessarily convoluted and feels like a major retcon, especially layered on top of the Secret War conspiracy and the ongoing Hydra/SHIELD double agent stuff dogging Jessica Drew. Frank Cho gets to draw a number of issues, and can we please stop letting Frank Cho draw comics? I like sexily-drawn women in comics as much as the next guy, but Cho is just awful, he draws breasts individually bigger than a woman's head on every female character. Seriously? Can't stand his art. If Kevin Feige ever gets over his dislike of the Netflix Marvel series, it would be great to see Luke Cage and Jessica Jones take the kind of character journey that they do in The New Avengers. As a big Hawkeye fan, I like seeing how Clint took up the Ronin mantle and he's a good fit for the post-Civil War team. Great series, I will be reading this one again and again for years.