Avengers Academy #11 – Review

By: Christos Gage (writer), Tom Raney (pencils), Scott Hanna (inks), Jeromy Cox (colors), Joe Caramagna (letters), John Denning (assistant editor) & Bill Rosemann (editor)

The Story: Veil makes a mistake that brings the Academy students into conflict with a Grade A bad dude.

What’s Good: Gage uses a very clever writing trick to show the great things that the Academy students are capable of in this issue.  There are some real challenges to developing young superheroes within the Marvel or DC universes.  Namely, you just can’t have the “kids” going toe-to-toe with Dr. Doom or saving the Earth from Skrulls in issue #5.  They’re the kids and it just isn’t believable that the kids would save the day where the A-List heroes have failed.  So, the formula is to show a bunch of training, let them clobber a B-list villain and maybe help out against an A-lister after ~15 issues or so.  And, that is where a lot of these kids’ titles run out of steam because if they can take on A-list villains, we wonder why they aren’t on the Avengers or JLA, and if they aren’t ready yet, we wonder why we should read stories of B-list heroes beating up B-list villains.

The cool things in this issue all require a SPOILER WARNING…     What Gage does in this issue is to very cleverly bring Korvac into play.  This is a complete, “Oh shit!” moment because while issue #10 ended on a cliffhanger, it wasn’t anything that foretold THIS.  So, suddenly you think, “What are these kids going to do against Korvac.”  After a long and well done fight scene, just when the heroes are on the ropes, Korvac’s girlfriend uses her powers to give the Academy kids access to the future, fully-developed power sets and this should allow them to better tackle Korvac.

This is a great writing choice by Gage for a couple of reasons.  One, it’ll allow the kids to beat Korvac (next issue) without the reader having to completely suspend disbelief that somehow the deadly duo of Veil and Reptil beat an A-list villain.   Two, it gives us a glimpse of why we should care about these kids going forward by teasing what they can become.  This glimpse of the future isn’t a new technique in comics, but it opens all sorts of great storytelling possibilities where one of the kids can get stuck with some residual memory of their future self OR we readers can have fun watching a character mature differently than we expected (cue Comic Book Guy voice, “As we could clearly see in issue #11, Finesse had adopted a messy hairstyle in the future so when she grows her hair out in issue #62, we know it must be before the future Finesses obtains her full powers.”)

The art is largely fine.  It isn’t art that I’d gush about, but I don’t hate it either.  From a story telling standpoint there is nothing you can fault with any of the layouts.  On the other hand, some of the characters are a little stiff which is something I think happens when the inks around the perimeter of the character are heavy.  But, you know what?  This book comes out on time and keeps the story of these plucky kids moving forward and there are certainly no ugly panels in this book.