Avengers [2018] #2 - Marvel Comics

AVENGERS No. 2, July 2018

Shifting 66,646 copies in May 2018, “Still Avenging After All These Years” arguably doesn’t let its audience pause for breath until its final shell-shocker of a concluding cliff-hanger which reveals that Loki, “the greatest Avenger who ever lived”, has been aiding the Final Host of Dark Celestials in their bid to “correct the grievous mistake they made one million years ago.” True, Jason Aaron’s script does contain one quiet moment where a “surprised” Jennifer Walters encounters a tower-block sized dead giant which “fell from the sky”, but the lawyer is immediately forced to transform into the She-Hulk courtesy of an attack by a host of killer robotic arachnids, and subsequently sets about ‘squishing’ the extra-terrestrial life-forms with all the savage ferocity one would expect from Bruce Banner’s cousin; “Though I suppose the Avengers rainbow just wouldn’t look the same without the usual splash of green.”

Similarly as sense-shattering is the gamma-fuelled human mutate’s one-on-one with Ghost Rider, which entertainingly sees the former member of the Fantastic Four impressively wreck Roberto Reyes’ “demon-possessed car” with her bare hands and then battle the “skeletal superhuman wreathed in ethereal flame” in close combat. Sadly, the Alabama-born author’s rationale behind this titanic tussle is a little artificially penned, due to She-Hulk supposedly being momentarily mesmerised by one of the fallen Celestials. Yet debatably such a contrivance is easily forgivable, especially when such an exhilaratingly well story-boarded punch-up concludes with the “ghost of Eli Morrow” briefly encircling his enraged opponent with his sickle-ending chains and watching her being towed away by his fiery “black classic muscle car”.

Unfortunately however, this significant spotlight upon Stan Lee’s savage co-creation also means that the Black Panther and Doctor Strange’s struggle against a (second) wave of metallic spiders deep beneath the crust of the Earth is frustratingly relegated to just a single panel inside the twenty-page periodical, with an incredibly impotent attack upon the death-dealing Dark Celestials by “Marvel’s big three Avengers” occupying the vast majority of the publication’s remaining ‘screen time’. Such a disappointing visual disparity between the super-group’s myriad of members is then unhappily made all the more infuriating by Ed McGuinness’ disconcertingly poor pencilling of Captain America, Thor and Iron Man, as the perturbingly square-headed, angular-looking trio desperately attempt to teleport their opponents into the molten centre of the Solar System using “omega-level warp grenades attuned to the coordinates of the Sun.”

Writer: Jason Aaron, Penciller: Ed McGuinness, and Inker: Mark Morales with Jay Leisten