Avengers [2016] #3.1 - Marvel Comics

AVENGERS No. 3.1, March 2017

Selling a disappointing 29,833 copies in January 2017, a drop of almost eight thousand readers according to “Diamond Comic Distributors”, Issue Three Point One of “Avengers” must have caused quite a bit of consternation amongst its dwindling audience because of Mark Waid’s assertion that the super-group’s Silver Age line-up only managed to win over an unsupportive Manhattan public, by relying solely upon “Cressida’s dark secret” to “enhance the team’s powers.” Indeed, the book’s presumptuous plot, supposedly “never revealed… until now”, is arguably so disrespectful to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original vision of the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes that it’s hard to take any of the Eisner Award-winner’s preposterous twenty-page narrative seriously post Captain America’s early victory over both the Thinker and his Awesome Android; “Their power levels have increased by a factor of at least 10.7 -- Thanks to an x-factor I’d not accounted for!”

Admittedly, such a disconcerting enhancement to the foursome’s special abilities does provide British artist Barry Kitson the chance to pencil Quicksilver bedazzling Daredevil with a demonstration of the mutant’s “near-invisible super-speed” and Hawkeye astonishing the amazing Spider-Man by firing “nine arrows in four seconds.” Yet such sequences are seemingly far better suited to the stage of a Vaudeville act than a supposedly sincere re-imagining of the Avengers Mid-Sixties metamorphosis, and it’s certainly doubtful that any of this publication’s followers thought the sequences were the “impeccable paragon of perfection” which reader Jimmy Morton felt the title’s original publication contained way back in June 1965.

Equally as unnerving is the Alabama-born author’s handling of Cap’s Kooky Quartet and their latest addition, Avenger X. Cressida clearly has an incredible super-power which if used wisely can be of enormous benefit to the titular characters and their fight against "the foes no single superhero can withstand." However, rather than treat such a game-changing ability with the reservation and respect it deserves, or at the very least question how the Southeast Asian came to wield such a formidable force, Waid would instead have this comic’s bibliophiles believe that the likes of Steve Rogers would simply accept them as a mysterious blessing and just go about his daily business as if nothing out of the ordinary was taking place?

Writer: Mark Waid, Penciler: Barry Kitson, and Inker: Mark Farmer