Mighty Avengers #5
Writer: Brian Michael Bendis
Artist: Frank Cho
Is this book done yet? Please Mr. Cho, stop with your other projects and just crank out issue #6 so Mark Bagley can come on and we can forget your little stint on this book. Hopefully they will find an artist who can keep up with whatever super-fast yuppie is on New Avengers by the time Bagley's arc ends. Marvel, you were really smoking a whole lot of weed when you thought that Frank Cho could keep up with Lenil Yu on New Avengers and that the books could intertwine with each other, as Bendis intended. Instead New Avengers is midway through it's second arc post Civil War and Mighty Avengers isn't even done with it's first. In an ideal world, the Mighty Avengers would be fighting the symbiotes as that ultra-cool Wolverine cover appeared on the racks last week, and instead of asking "where are the heroes during all this?" we would know. Unfortunately for readers and for Marvel the world is never ideal and travesties happen.
The travesty here is that Mighty Avengers was de-railed for months on end because of the speed of the artist. Bendis's story wasn't much in the first two issues, but as issue 3 and 4 hit the stands months ago, it started to pick up and I anticipated the next issue until I remembered that Frank Cho was doing the art. Now, I'm only knocking Cho on his speed for this book, not the quality of his art. He delivers some good work here and his Ares is almost un-matched. In this issue Sentry fights the nude-female Ultron after she killed his wife in the last issue for no particular reason. While doing that the rest of the team fights Iron Man armors that Ultron has commandeered, while Black Widow is in the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier trying to stop Ultron from accessing the launch codes for all the nuclear missles in the world. Yeah, there is a lot going on, and that is what would've made this book fantastic if there weren't 3 months in between issues. Marvel sure knows how to kill momentum on their books. Here, they thought Cho could keep up with Lenil Yu, on Fallen Son, they promised it weekly when it ended up being monthly, and with One More Day it was originally advertised as semi-weekly with the Spidey titles coming throughout one month, where now it was almost a month between installments. This book had so much potential coming out of the gate and now it just feels squandered. Can't they pull a DC and move #6 back until after Bagley's arc is done? Or move it into an annual? I want me some symbiotes. C-
