Warning: the comments below contain spoilers.
Let’s see, we’ve got a pair of mislaid panties, snide references to testicular cancer, clumsy romantic “banter”, a woman making out with someone dressed exactly like her father and cousin did, and an Avenger upset to the point of vomiting. Not content with incoherent plotting that shoves the title characters to the very margin of their own book, writer Chuck Austen has added a bracing dash of tastelessness to Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.
Some of the Avengers travel to the Middle East to intercede in the Invaders’ efforts to unseat a local dictator. The team has learned that the Invaders were the brainchild of the Red Skull, though the Avengers who first got that news – Ant-Man and Falcon – are mysteriously absent from this issue.
The highly volatile situation is made more so by internal tensions in the team. Hawkeye and the Wasp have embarked on an affair, causing significant intestinal distress for Wasp’s lover, Hank Pym. Despite Cap’s admonishments to set personal issues aside on missions, Clint and Jan flirt and pout in a manner rarely seen outside of a junior high cafeteria.
Perhaps to counterbalance all this levity, Austen scripts a good Cap/bad Cap smackdown punctuated with profound philosophical discussion of just what it means to be the Sentinel of Liberty. The exchange would be agonizing if it weren’t so laughable. It’s too overblown and one-sided to pass for gravitas.
While the Avengers demonstrate their usual level of incompetence – Hawkeye keeps misfiring, Wasp demands that an adversary rescue She-Hulk, etc. – it can’t be part of an authorial effort to make their opponents look any better. The Invaders don’t seem to have much of an attention span, abandoning what they’re doing (wholesale destruction of property, mostly) to chat with the Avengers or deriding their leader, U.S. Agent. And none of the heroes present can do anything to prevent a murder that happens right in front of them.
See? You don’t need to focus on contradictions to long-standing characterizations to think the book is crap. You need only look to the panties.
