Secret Avengers 12.1

I’ve been scathing about and disappointed with some of these .1 ‘jumping-on point’ issues, and I’ve praised a couple highly. I think this is the first one that seems to lie somewhere in the middle.

It’s a single-issue story, where lots of secrets are released by some clearly nutso new version of the USAgent, putting hundreds of informants in mortal danger. I thought we’d then get each member of the team (a largely uninspired, second division team, bar leader Steve Rogers) off to rescue someone, but instead Cap sends them all to rescue one he considers particularly worthy. This means some of the team get no play at all – the Black Widow, War Machine and Ant-Man get their moments, Valkyrie gets a few panels of dreary fight scene, the Beast, Moon Knight and particularly Sharon Carter might as well not be there. I’d have thought you’d go to more trouble to introduce your cast in this kind of comic.

The story gives Cap an excuse to state why he thinks the secrecy, deals with clearly evil people and so on are justified; sadly, this is completely blown, as his only defence is that he doesn’t get people killed to make a point as the new-USAgent does. This is not a justification at all, of course, just highlighting the total hypocrisy and failure of logic of the one-off villain.

So we don’t get a good intro to the characters, we don’t get any sense of any ongoing themes or storylines (unless the apparently unnecessary scene with some villain called the Negative Man is significant), we don’t get a good statement of the team’s and therefore the title’s raison d’etre. We do get some decent dialogue along the way and one nice twist in the rescue plot, and I liked how easily Cap beat the villain, so it’s by no means all bad.

I didn’t care for the art. It often looks okay, glossy and a bit rubbery, pretty standard-issue modern Marvel style, but I wished he could offer some expressions beyond frowning or smiling – this is a particular drag on one scene with the Black Widow getting in with a potential information source in a bar. There’s also one panel that really bugged me, the first on the seventh story page, of Cap looking dramatic. His hair is blowing in the wind in a very Steranko way, but he’s indoors. There’s also a big dramatic shadow behind him, but his face is lit very much from the right rather than the front. There are also bizarre compositional and cropping decisions that make no sense to me at all – the one panel of Moon Knight fighting is a very bad example of this. This comic is not so badly drawn, but with such minimal facility with facial expression and screwing up of the few dramatic moments on offer, it lets down a fairly skillfully written script, even if I am puzzled by its sense of purpose.

This isn’t a bad comic, but it seems to me to be another .1 that fails in several ways to do what a jumping-on point should do: introduce the characters, define what kind of comic it is, tease us into wanting to read more. I won’t be back for more.