Avengers #14

This series recently has become incredibly consistent always being a very solid read twice a month which is an improvement over how inconsistent the book was before. I love how Hickman has been developing the stories recently with issues 11-13 where he's put a lot of the plot points in place for Infinity and his overreaching story he's creating and I couldn't wait for Infinity to begin.

Plot

The Origin sites begin to activate and send out a signal to the others which is accepted by some, but rejected by others. The signal releases and EMP every six minutes that cuts electricity across the globe, and the Avengers attempt to stop it.

Review

This is a prelude to Infinity, which is the event I’m most looking forward to over the summer. Trinity War may look awesome and I look forward to that as well, but for me Infinity is the one that I want, I may be biased due to it being cosmic and of course Thanos, but Hickman has been building towards this and the payoff will be huge, but this issue was just so good. Hickman lets it all loose in this issue literally everything that’s been building so far in this series all goes in one direction in this issue.

The Good

• I’m not sure if this covers meant to be symbolic or something like that, but it’s still got a neat layout to it and Lenil Yu’s art style is always good.
• This issue features possibly some of the strangest characters I’ve seen in a while weird cubed headed people, and well they look utterly awesome in this issue and I like Hickman and Stefano Casseli’s creativeness with their characters and the origin sites creations.
• Bruce Banner himself has been severely underused himself in this series, Hulk has, Banner hasn’t, and Bruce’s discussion with Captain America about the events in this issue was interesting. I like how he was displayed as a clever person as I sometimes have issues with how he was treated in some comics, but it was good here.
• Basically the premise of this issue is that all the origin site have been activating and the Avengers go out and save the world like they normally do because every six minutes electricity across the planet goes off. The Avengers naturally have to fight different threats across the world from saving satellites falling to Earth and planes as well. It develops into a really dramatic scene with a lots of stuff going on all at once, the choices for an EMP aren’t the most original, but how the characters react to it is interesting, especially the reactor melt down parts were Thor lets it loose.
• When I say everything comes together in this series it really does. Almost all of the origin sites as far are seen in this issue in panels and Hickman looks to explore all of them, which should be really interesting.
• The action in this issue while not exactly a full blown battle in this issue the action was good, while still short.
• The cliffhanger with (Spoiler) A.I.M was interesting and I'm really excited for the next issue after it.
• I'm not familiar with Stefano Casseli's art, I know he's done arcs for Amazing Spider-man and Secret Warriors, but this is my first encounter with his art, and I'm truly blown away. Casseli is now my second favourite artist for this series (Dustin Weaver is still my favourite) but Casseli really does well with this issue with some very realistic looking art, let still not like Deodato's 3D looking figures from the last few issues. Casseli handled emotion in this issue very well, as well as the action scenes as well, but the cubed headed people look the best because of well their design and all shadows put on them.

The Bad

Not much really just a few minor nitpick.

• Captain Universe is weird the split personalities between the universe (the suit) and the human is slightly jarring as the dialogue changes so dramatically.
• SPOILER Superia didn't sound quite as brutal and nasty as she was in Bendis's run of Avengers, maybe it's because she only appears for two pages, but even those didn't sound quite as hard and brutal as she's sounded in the past.
• Some of the methods Hickman uses with the origin sites to show what is going on and what they are doing may seem a bit cryptic to some people.

The Verdict

I gave this a 5 star rating because after all of the setup the series is finally coming together into this story arc and towards Infinity, this is not a perfect book as I have said as it has a few minor flaws, but this really was a great read and one of the best of the series if not the best and the art and everything that happened in this issue was great and I really enjoyed it.

5 stars