Avengers [2016] #4.1 - Marvel Comics

AVENGERS No. 4.1, April 2017

Ordinarily this book’s 22,810 readers would probably have enjoyed a “Showdown With The Frightful Four” and Captain America’s “ragtag team” of Avengers. After all, Mark Waid’s twenty-page long narrative not only includes a wonderfully tense build-up which ultimately sees a rehabilitating Quicksilver petulantly turn his back upon his team-mates as ‘High Noon’ fast approaches, but also focuses upon the Wizard’s dastardly quartet in arguably their Silver Age prime, ruthlessly led by an always arrogant Bentley Wittman who cares little for the welfare of hapless civilians in his villainous ambition to destroy the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes; “Give in to it, Medusa, on this day, in this battle, the Frightful Four will take lives.”

Unfortunately however, this entire “frightful rematch” is utterly ruined by the Alabama-born author’s basic premise that (once again) the titular “group of untested [and] untried new recruits” have obtained a distinctly unfair advantage over their criminal opponents “by using the power-enhancing abilities of Cressida” to make the team “stronger -- and more popular -- than they ever could have imagined.” Indeed, apart from the potential break-up of the Avengers at the very start of this periodical, due entirely to the manipulative machinations of the group’s latest addition, the American writer’s narrative contains absolutely no suggestion of threat or physical menace to its leading characters until the book’s cliff-hanger, when Avenger X finally reveals her true traitorous colours and begins to leech the life out of Wanda and Hawkeye “in public!”

Up until this point, the most tense moment created by “Marvel’s Merry Living-End Lineup” is Steve Rogers wrongly accusing Clint Barton of robbing a jewellers and becoming unnecessarily irate when he feels the archer is lecturing him about the Flag whilst the former carnival showman ‘drags it through mud?!'. And even this flash of ‘family friction’ only lasts a single Barry Kitson-pencilled panel before the Sentinel of Liberty apologises to his seething colleague and gathers everyone in the Meeting Room to ‘save the World’ once again.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Waid’s script for Issue Four Point One of “Avengers” though is just how utterly illogical Cressida’s secret plan to “break the Avengers” actually appears. Considering that the Southeast Asian has already succeeded in manipulating the Ox to snap both of Pietro’s legs, and thereby reduced the super-team’s effectiveness by a quarter, why does she then almost immediately heal the mutant speedster’s useless limbs and permit him to potentially participate in “the most indescribably impossible battle in the history of the panelgraphic literature”? In addition, it would surely have made far more sense for Avenger X to just boost the Frightful Four’s powers and let them crush Captain America’s party, than her mystifyingly boost those of the heroes, and only then ‘work her power’ upon the Sandman once things were looking bad for Medusa, the Trapster and Wizard?

The regular cover art of "AVENGERS" No. 4.1 by Barry Kitson & Jordan Boyd