The Begining of a Saga
The story starts right in the middle of the action with a nice spread of A-Next battling Loki's army. It's kinda cool to see Wolverine's plucky sidekick ordering around a team of heroes. There's a quick flashback introducing us to our first main character, Kevin Masterson. He doesn't seem like anything special at first. Just the son of a superhero. But that's where the questions that fuel the entire series start. Eric Masterson is dead. The Avengers have been disassembled. Thor hasn't been seen in years. Why? Why indeed.
The bad guys attack and our other heroes are called into play. Jubilee is all grown up and leading the (snigger) X-People which leads to another question. Who the heck are the X-People? Scott Lang's daughter Cassie is all grown up and is a superhero in her own right now. A couple more vets show up and we're introduced to J2 and Mainframe, both of which practically beg us to ask how they're related to the Juggernaut and Iron Man. An odd team but an interesting one to be sure.
The plot thickens, the heroes step up and overcome the bad guys. A pretty standard fare but it works. The old guard step aside and leave us entirely with our new heroes. They've each got different reasons for being there but in the end, they seem like a promising quartet of heroes. Jarvis seems to think so at any rate. What did happen to the Avengers that makes him so dang happy that there's a new team anyhow? We'll just have to wait and see.
True to the MC2 moto, A-Next #1 has a nice self contained story that is also part of a bigger whole. No cliffhanger but plenty of room to grow on and lots of mystery to be solved later. You don't feel like you have to buy the next issue to have made this one a worthy purchase. You want to buy the next one so you can see what happens next.
And that's a pretty good thing in a comic book.