The Good
Epic but still emotionally resonant. It’s a hard needle to thread but rather than trying to steer around it, or use it sparingly, Jonathan Hickman seems to have made it his speciality. NEW AVENGERS has had some bumpy stretches, but overall the book has been an incredible example of powerful people doing what’s necessary and lamenting bitterly both that they did it and that it was necessary. At the end of the day, the book is about doing whatever it takes to save the day, and the lengths that some people will go to to accomplish it. Now that it turns out we’re barreling toward one of Marvel’s most ambitious undertakings, a few more things have both been revealed and pieces are finally falling into place. The multiverse has reduced from hundreds of thousands to two dozen and no one quite seems to know why and Incursions CONTINUE, only now that the multiverse is less crowded, they’re becoming more and more rare since there are fewer and fewer universes, but the final one may be the worst one yet. And then we get the return of one major character followed immediately by another. Possibly the majorest of characters at this point.
Kev Walker returns to pencils and with things being as subdued as they are this issue, that feels like the right decision. Walker’s strength has often been, at its core, his ability to convey strong emotions without stepping fully into melodrama, and that’s precisely what this issue calls for. These are massive, nearly unfathomable concepts being thrown around and it would be easy, in fact it has happened in the past, for the emotional core of the book to be lost but Walker’s visual style helps ground it. He also works on the inks along with Scott Hanna and calcifies the already strong visual language into something with incredible weight and import. We also get Frank Martin’s dark, moody colors bringing the dread, both existential and mundane, to the forefront of this grim issue.
The Bad
There are still more things from the mythic lost eight months filled in here, mostly concerning other attempts to either stop incursions or make them irrelevant by evacuating Earth. This sounds like it would be impossible, but that’s not actually the problem here, the problem is that, once again, all of this looks like it could have been some absolutely stunning, fascinating content and we will almost certainly never see it. As a result, things feel railroaded and rushed in this issue, which also lends some problems to the character’s reactions to what is being talked about. While character moments toward other characters are great, their moments reacting to what’s going on in the larger context seem...dull. The news of hundreds of thousands of universes vanishing, presumably universes that some of the spiders from Spider-Verse occupied is greeted with a shrug and a “well NOW what?” It’s a rather pure example of one death being tragic and a million being a statistic.
The Verdict
That we can get satisfying emotional beats alongside some that are less so is a testament to how well both the characters work together and how deeply satsifying this storyline has been overall. There are still more gaps in the story to fill, but it’s actually begining to feel like we’re going to get some satisfaction on just about everything. We see the return of a long-absent character (along with some others, also long-absent from this specific title) and get a Doom check-in, with mandatory amazing quote, all while we head, inexorably, toward much, much larger things. This issue isn’t a perfect jumping on point, but in terms of its importance to Secret Wars, it shouldn’t be missed.