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Is It Good? Captain America and the Mighty Avengers #2 Review

Comic Books

Is It Good? Captain America and the Mighty Avengers #2 Review

I’ll admit, I wasn’t entirely sold on the first issue of this series. The forced tie-in to the Axis event and the relaunch did the book no favors in grabbing a new audience. However, we are past the first issue now and look past the expectations that come with a debut issue.

Captain America and the Mighty Avengers #2: Is it good?

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Captain America and the Mighty Avengers #2 (Marvel Comics)


captain-america-and-the-mighty-avengers-2-cover

While the CEO of Cortex, Jason Quantrell, is planning something sneaky in the background, the Mighty Avengers are dealing with this strange rollerblading crew called the Fast Five. Is these weird super-suit and rollerblade wearing street gang too much for our heroes? (How embarrassing would that be if the answer were “yes”?)

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… the dork levels are rising with each panel these guys are in.

In the last issue, one of the bigger complaints I had was the fact that the comic did not do a good job at introducing the audience to the characters. It was the first issue to a new series and it barely showed half of the characters on the cover and there wasn’t much in the way of backstory or context. Plus, with the fact that it was tying into an event and a bunch of characters’ personalities were topsy-turvy wasn’t helping. This issue… felt much better in certain regards and fixed a couple of problems.

Captain America and the Mighty Avengers #2 does a pretty solid job of introducing all of the characters. Everyone here gets a chance to appear and give their own little demonstration of who they are and what their powers are. Plus, the narrative picked up the pace and had a nice hook to it, while the comic felt fun to read with some good banter and an overall fun superhero vibe. Frankly, with a bit of reworking and rearranging, you could have almost made this the first issue, as long as you changed some scenes around. This was fun and shows some of the level of quality and entertainment that was previously seen with the previous Mighty Avengers book.

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Man, such wittiness and dialogue for our villains!

However, there is still one big looming problem with this book and that is the fact that it is tied directly into Axis. The whole situation with Axis is causing some bad continuity issues. Ignoring the whole situation with Captain America and Luke Cage being inverted (still not that good as an intro for new readers), there are parts that make absolutely no sense when you read the main event and this. First is She-Hulk: She-Hulk was on Genosha (didn’t have a speaking part, but the event clearly showed her there at some point fighting)… so why isn’t she inverted or acting differently? If Cage and Wilson are different, why not her? Then there is the whole timeline situation regarding when this issue takes place. You can assume it takes place before Axis #5, since these heroes are still running around and active instead of being shrunken, but that makes no sense because of a problem with the ending.

Which brings us to the ending. The ending, which has a nice hook, raises a lot more problems because of Axis. The issue ends with the inverted Avengers about to storm the Mighty Avengers’ base. First of all, why is the Wasp there? Wasn’t she hooked up to a machine to steal Pym Particles from or something? Speaking of which, how this fight supposed to work? Wasn’t Wilson going to simply just turn all of the heroes small? Why is he going to beat them up with the rest of the Avengers? Also, if they do go in and fight, win or lose… how do they eventually convince all of these characters to come to Avengers Tower in Axis #5 (if this comic takes place before then)? That would make no sense and make the characters look incredible stupid! This whole plot, while possibly being fun, utterly makes no sense when tying into Axis at all! Marvel Editors and Writes: Coordinate your events and tie-ins better!

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Seriously, none of this makes sense in this event.

The writing by Al Ewing is not problematic, however. The pacing is still pretty solid, the story flows very well from page to page, and the storytelling and structure aren’t bad at all. The characterization is solid and matches with where everyone would be at currently, except for She-Hulk. The dialogue and exchanges between the characters are enjoyable, featuring plenty of good lines and moments. The entire sequence between the Mighty Avengers and the Fast Five is hilarious and so much fun to read. The sense of humor the book has is still great, providing a lot of good laughs. The ending, while extremely problematic when you actually think about it, does have a good cliffhanger to it and gets you a bit excited to see what happens next.

The artwork is split between Luke Ross and Iban Coello, to varying success. Both styles of artwork are perfectly fine and look good, but they don’t mesh all that well. Ross goes for a more real look to his characters to a certain degree, while Iban’s style is more cartoonish and comic book-like. It’s just kind of odd to have both of them working on this at the same time. Otherwise, the book looks fine in most areas and does a good job with depicting the characters and action. The only other issue is there is some occasional problems with the coloring (Blue Marvel looked white in one panel while Spectrum’s costume was white and gray instead of white and black).

Is It Good?

Captain America and the Mighty Avengers #2 is getting better slowly and over time will hopefully show the same level of quality previously seen in the book before it was relaunched. The writing and story are definitely improving and getting more enjoyable, but the whole tie-in to Axis really does a ton of damage unfortunately. Here’s hoping the next issue continues with the improvements.

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