This was going to be a capsule review, but sometimes you've just got to clear the space...

Avengers #81 ties up "Lionheart of Avalon", Chuck Austen's first storyline on the book.  I realise that reviewing Chuck Austen comics is like shooting fish in a barrel, and that in recent weeks he has scaled the giddy heights of "passable" on a couple of occasions.  But Austen can still be relied on to regularly produce some of the most inane, garbled crap in the medium today, and here we have another fantastic example - another story that starts impenetrable, resolves itself into a coherent plot with only the greatest of difficulty, and then falls apart the more you look at it.

The plot is... well, enormously fiddly.  Basically, it's all a device to create a new Captain Britain, a character whom I can only hope will swiftly receive a bullet through the throat when Bendis takes over.  Here's how it works - and believe me, you have to trudge through a lot of confusion even to extract this.

Morgan Le Fey wants to capture Captain Britain and kill him.  This will, in some undefined way, destroy England and unleash the power of Avalon, which she will be able to claim.  Since England is not Avalon, it is left refreshingly unexplained why destroying England would have this effect, and indeed what would happen to Avalon itself.

Incidentally, not content with confusing "England" and "Avalon" - he may perhaps be thinking of "Albion" - Austen repeatedly identifies Captain Britain with England rather than, say, Britain.  As a memo for the future, Austen might find the character's name to be a handy reminder.  Britain and England are not identical, in the same way that Texas is not the USA.

Anyway, Captain Britain knows what Morgan's up to, so before he's captured, rather than actually doing anything about it, he decides to make somebody else Captain Britain instead.  For reasons which are also left unexplained, this does not remove Brian's own powers, even though his link to "England" is supposed to be the source of Captain Britain's powers and that link is central to the plot.  But no, he apparently still has powers, drawing energy from somewhere else altogether.  There is little to suggest that anyone has actually thought this through.

Picking housewife Kelsey Leigh on the grounds of being quite heroic, Brian re-enacts his own origin story and decides to make her Captain Britain anyway, even though she chooses the sword, which has been the wrong choice in every single version of the story up until now.  As Captain Britain, Kelsey can never reveal her identity to her kids, who must continue to believe that she is dead.  If she does reveal herself, horrible things will happen to them.  Since it's hard to imagine Brian doing this deliberately, it is thoroughly unclear why it should be so.  But it's convenient to the plot, and Austen's writing it, so screw logic.  (For that matter, the whole sword/amulet thing was disregarded years ago in favour of Brian having magical heritage.  But whatever.)

Morgan captures Brian but needs a weapon with which to kill him.  Apparently feeling that the plot isn't complicated enough already, she has her sidekick impersonate one of the Wrecking Crew and lead the villains to England, correctly predicting (a) that the Avengers will follow in order to deal with it (rather than any of the numerous heroes already based in England, given that the Wrecking Crew are tenth-raters); (b) that Hawkeye will be on the team; and (c) that Hawkeye will bring with him some previously unmentioned magical arrows.  The arrows can then be stolen and used to kill Brian.

Injuring Captain Britain, we're told, ought to cause explosions around England.  Again, why this should be is left unclear.  Given the beating that the character has taken over the years, I'd have thought we might have noticed.  Does this mean that every time he stubs his toe in the shower, a pub explodes in Leighton Buzzard?

Naturally, the villains are vanquished, freeing Austen to embark on an epilogue which raises the story to towering new heights of incompetence and contrivance.  Captain Britain moves into the Avengers Mansion, because if your remit is to protect England, what better base of operations than Manhattan?  Presumably Austen will shortly be relocating Captain America to Ho Chi Minh City in the same spirit of rational common sense.  It's also been long established that Captain Britain's powers fade in a few days if he leaves the British Isles.  Since she's meant to have the same powers, presumably she'll be completely useless to the Avengers by next week.  Still, the book's set in America, so Captain Britain relocates to America, in defiance of all common sense and logic, so that she can be available for future stories.

However, Captain Britain doesn't come to Manhattan alone!  No, the Avengers are so distraught by the idea of her kids being left to the mercy of the British social security system (which is a damn sight more supportive than the American one, I'll have you know) that they bring the kids TO AMERICA so that they can LIVE AT THE MANSION.  Yes, on Earth-Austen, every time the Avengers meet some working class orphans, they invite them to emigrate to America and live with the superheroes.  They don't know that the kids are connected with Captain Britain, by the way.  But angst requires that Captain Britain be forced to share a mansion  with the kids she can never reveal her identity to, so that's where we go. 

Austen also seems to be under the impression that she can't hug them or talk to them, despite the fact that his own plot clearly set up the stipulation as being "don't reveal your identity."  But again, that wouldn't be angsty and melodramatic enough, so Austen just blithely ignores his own story.

Oh, and as if all this inanely contrived nonsense wasn't ridiculous enough, Austen also throws in an attempted rape flashback, even though it has nothing to do with the plot.  By the time Austen's finished with the character, she looks like something out of a Lars von Trier movie.  Individual bits of contrived angst might have got under the radar - but there's just so damn much of it that you can only gawp in astonishment at how ridiculously silly it all is.

In all fairness, the issue is not completely devoid of merit.  The art's often quite good.  Olivier Coipel makes the best of the visual possibilities in the story, and his giant Wasp looks great.  The visuals are good enough to raise the grade a couple of notches, in fact.  But the writing is a total mess from top to bottom, with Austen's trademark incompetent plotting in full effect.  The plot is barely decipherable to start with, and it would have been preferable had it stayed that way.

Once again, Chuck Austen provides a story that just leaves you shaking your head in astonishment, wondering how anyone in their right mind approved it for publication.  People talk about an anti-Austen bandwagon and kneejerk reactions, and there's a degree of truth to that.  But only a degree.  Austen produces awful clunking crap like this on a regular basis.  He's not just a writer who has the odd off day.  This is pretty much par for the course.  What do you expect readers to say about him?

Rating: D+

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