If anyone can explain in 500 words or less what is going on in
this comic, you're a better person than me. Even the normally reliable
Wikipedia made my head spin, but to summarise as best I can, this
issue of The Avengers occupies a place in a story arc known as The
Heroic Age. The Heroic Age is set in the aftermath of a prior story
arc known as The Siege, which itself followed on from a story arc
called The Secret Invasion, and that's how we end up here in Avengers
issue 4, with the bizarre sight of Thor, the Norse God of thunder,
knocking over Martian Tripods with his hammer. It's certainly one
of the weirdest crossovers you could ever hope to see, but unfortunately,
it's not very good.
I've read a lot of American comic books, thousands in fact, most from
the 1970s and 1980s, and while I'm occasionally drawn into a comic
shop to try and rekindle the love, I increasingly find the modern style
of comic book story telling incredibly off-putting. What I am about to
say may seem like an odd complaint about a comic book, a medium that
is after all visual, but as a fairly average example of a modern day
comic book, The Avengers feels as if the art is leading the story,
rather than the story leading the art. It's all presented in a very
linear and undemanding manner, and crucially there just doesn't seem
to be much of substance going on in the meat of the story.
Where I remember taking ages to read a comic book, savouring the
dialogue, noticing the way pages were artfully composed with panels
bleeding into each other, overlapping and just generally presenting
the reader with a challenge, here I just seemed to rocket through the
mundanely panelled story and big soulless splash pages, so a $4 cover
price comic is done in 5 minutes! That can't be right can it? Am I
just not getting it any more, am I too old to appreciate this stuff?
Have I lost my comic reading Mojo? I don't think so, I still dip into
old comic books and it takes me right back. I read them exactly as I
did the first time, so it can't be that I am looking through rose
tinted spectacles. Something has changed and I don't like it.
Of course I'm reading this comic because of the War of the Worlds
connection, and as mentioned at the beginning of this review, I am
dropping myself in the deep end. I had a similar issue getting to grips
with the story arc of the recently reviewed Guardians of the Galaxy,
but returning to my beef above, and taking the opportunity to re-examine
Guardians of the Galaxy, I find the same problem. It's unimaginative
in composition and you don't feel any need to invest any kind of effort
into reading the story. Guardians of the Galaxy was better for sure,
but I'm struggling to put my finger on the basic problem. I guess it
all feels very corporate, perhaps not helped by the adverts. There do
seem to be more of them compared to earlier decades, but these are
charmless compared to the kind you used to get, no Charles Atlas or
X-Ray specs here, just remorseless corporate exultations to buy Marvel
branded bed sheets and sneakers.
Anyway, I've not done much to review this comic in terms of story or
its connection to The War of the Worlds, but frankly there's not much
you can say in that regard. Killraven pops up, as do the Martian Tripods,
which do look great, but that's about it. The aforementioned scene with
Thor taking on the Martian War machines is fantastic, but really, for
all they contribute to the story, they could just as easily have been
the giant Sentinel robots from the Marvel universe or for that matter
the Pillsbury Doughboy. I think if I had to sum up this comic and my
feelings in a single word, that word would be indifferent.
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