Uncanny Avengers Annual #1 – Review

By: Rick Remender (Writer), Paul Renaud (Artist), VC’s Clayton Cowles (Letterer), Arthur Adams (Cover Artist)

The Story:
Martian Transylvania Super Hero Mutant Monster Hunter High School, now filmed before a live Mojo audience. 8pm Eastern, 7 Central, or check local listings for showtimes. Only on Marvel.

The Review:
Well, this will be interesting to review. The last line of the comic reads: “Call in the critics … we’ll leave it to them to decipher.” Okay, then. Challenge… accepted?

What also makes this interesting is that the story essentially wears its themes on its sleeves, which is to be expected when the adversary is Mojo and other, thinly-veiled caricatures of the media executives the story is meant to comment on. Heck, there is no thin veil here at all. It’s pure caricature, as well as pure parody, allegory, pun, and any number of thematic figurative language. We get it! Media executives are as vile a creature as any spineless, extradimensional monster. Or lawyers.

So it’s difficult to critique something that the story itself critiques– Mojo uses the Avengers and some mystical heroes to create a TV show. The problem is that the story doesn’t quite flow like that. Mojo creates the Avengers of the Supernatural to… make a different show with the Avengers in a high school teen drama? Then they break out, but then they actually have to fight Ghost Rider’s Spirit of Vengeance before being returned to Earth without even confronting Mojo a second time? I’ll use the book’s own words “At least Mojo’s new show doesn’t feel unoriginal. … Not on the surface, perhaps.”