Avengers Arena #10 Review
Avengers Arena #10 Review
Overview:
Nico fights Apex in this mess of an issue.
The Good:
Nothing. This might sound hard to believe but I enjoyed absolutely nothing about this issue.
The Bad:
***Spoilers Ahead***
The story starts off exactly where 9 left off, with the aftermath of Apex’s escape and goes downhill from there. Chase/Darkhawk and X-23 find her and get their beaten with zero effort at all; then Apex attacks the rest of the camp and fights Nico, who gets the crap kicked out of her, then dies. Character death is something, that when done right, is great and moves the story along and then there is this.
Up until now, I have kept an open mind to the series and been curious to see what happens; I have even forgiven some of the more glaring lapses in Dennis Hopeless’ characterization of certain characters to see where the story goes but this issue was an inexcusable butchering of not only characters but of the aspects of the mythos of the Marvel Universe itself.
If I listed all of the inconsistencies in this book based off of previous appearances, it would be horrendously long, so I will focus on a few major ones.
1. X-23. Over the course of this series, Laura has been the most inconsistently portrayed because, let’s be honest, she should win, she is a killing machine that can regenerate. The only thing stopping her from doing that is herself and she has been wavering lately but here it goes all out the window. She just runs off and finds Apex to fight her but instead of using the stealth skills everyone knows she has and has demonstrated at various points in her life; she just charges right in. That isn’t even the worst part, she lasts three panels before getting beaten. It isn’t even with a laser or something; the sentinel picks her up and slams her into the ground once.
2. Darkhawk. Chase has the Darkhawk armor now and that is fine but he gets taken over by Apex in all the greater of three seconds. Apex can manipulate technology with her mind, but the Darkhawk armor is alien and there is a person inside of it, one that is a friend to Nico, who he brutally attacked. The alien part was at least acknowledged but if Apex is as powerful as she seems, this series just got a whole lot shorter.
3. Nico and the Staff of One. This was the worst part of the issue and a complete disrespect to the character and her staff. The staff is one of the most powerful magical objects in the Marvel Universe, the fact that is can’t get everyone off the island is fine, whatever, but here it is broken You read that right broken. It happens after Nico breaks her leg in a fight, which is fine, but then Apex commands Darkhawk to attack Nico, who tries to get Chase to stop but it doesn’t work, again fine. But instead of fighting back, she gets her arm shot off with one laser blast from chase that also breaks the Staff of One and there are no magical repercussions at all, it just breaks like a cheap toy. This is nothing more than pure disrespect on the part of Hopeless to Nico, the staff, every story they have been in, and most importantly, the fans.
4. Another point with Nico is that when she is about to die, she casts a spell: help. Why wouldn’t she heal herself and then cast help? This is just lazy writing.
Dennis Hopeless has butchered characters here. Before it was mostly little things for the sake of the story but this is simply bad writing. It is like he wants the final show down to be between the characters he created for the series so everyone else has to die weak deaths. There is nothing fun about the issue nor even interesting unless you want to see a character be butchered by the writer and the other characters.
The art by Riccardo Burchielli wasn’t bad per say but it did not fit the issue very well.
Verdict:
It was like Dennis Hopeless heard some of the hate that the internet was saying about this book and then gave the readers the finger and did whatever the hell he wanted just to piss them off. This issue is full of nothing but bad characterization, bad writing and most importantly disrespect. Unless you like the artists, don’t buy it.
1 (because I have to, this is a 0) out of 5
