Somewhat overshadowed by the great patriotic shooting, this week also sees the launch of Mighty Avengers - the second of what will soon be three monthly Avengers titles. 

I have my reservations about making Avengers: The Initiative an ongoing book, but I'll revisit that when it comes out.  New Avengers and Mighty Avengers, however, do have a legitimate story reason to exist.  Following the Civil War crossover, some of the Avengers went underground, while the rest signed up with the authorities.  So we now have two teams wandering around, both insisting that they're the real Avengers.  Potentially, that's an interesting set-up, although obviously it can't last forever.

Traditionalists grumbled at the announcement of a second Avengers book by Brian Bendis, but the reality is that New Avengers was massively more popular than the previous version of the book.  It's hardly surprising that Marvel have chosen to explore Bendis' version of the Avengers more thoroughly, rather than go back to Avengers Classic.  Classic, after all, is just a polite way of saying "old."

But Bendis hasn't simply produced a second New Avengers.  These are the shiny, official Avengers, who spend their time fighting giant monsters and so forth.  By Bendis' standards, this is indeed a retro superhero book.  The line-up wouldn't look totally out of place in the old Avengers - Iron Man, Wasp, Ms Marvel and Wonder Man are definite Avengers characters, and even Black Widow had a major role in the 1990s team.

What Bendis seems to be aiming for is a cross between the big, goofy, old-fashioned fun of a Silver Age comic, and his more contemporary style.  In practice, this means we get a Silver Age comic with Bendis' infamous dialogue tics.  They long since stopped sounding naturalistic, and started to sound like somebody had run the issue through a computer program - the Bendisiser, perhaps.  In a concession to the retro mood, however, some of the interjections now take the form of thought balloons.  It comes off as gimmicky, but I can see what he's going for, and in principle I kind of like it.  It's a break from the misery.

To fit with the dayglo happiness, we have Frank Cho on art.  Cho does big, clean, happy, brightly coloured pictures, and if his women tend to be over-pneumatic to the point of parody, there's still something engagingly innocent about it all.

My concern is about whether you can really do this book with these characters just at the moment.  After all, this book stars the pro-registration superheroes.  And for all that Marvel protest, the reality is that most people interpreted Civil War with them as the bad guys.  Whatever the creators and editors may have had in mind, most people seem to think Iron Man's a villain these days.  Having him running the shiny happy team seems desperately out of place.  It's no use complaining that the readers have misunderstood the story.  The story means whatever the readers think it means.  If the readers all think Iron Man's a villain, and he wasn't meant to be... well, maybe the writers and editors misunderstood what they were putting out.

But it still means we've got a shiny happy superhero book based on the Iron Bastard and his sidekicks.  To be fair, Bendis plays Iron Man as a complete dick in this issue, with Ms Marvel as the more sympathetic lead.  It's a clear attempt to draw the heat onto Iron Man and away from the rest of the team, but I have a feeling that all these characters have been damaged by Civil War and need a spell of rehabilitation before they'll seem at home in a comic like this.  I... just don't buy them as the good guys, frankly.

There are points that need tweaking here, but overall it's a solid start.  It's certainly the closest Bendis has come so far to a good team book, and while I'm not sure all the schtick works, the idea is a pleasant change for today's Marvel.

Rating: B

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