Avengers #3 – Review

By: Jonathan Hickman (writing), Jerome Opena (art), Dean White, Frank Martin, and Richard Isanove (colors), and Cory Petit (letters)

The Story:  Cap brings his new recruits to bear on the Garden, fighting the good fight on Mars to save both his friends and his planet.

The Review:  Usually when you think of a book like Avengers or Justice League, or what have you, there’s a bit of an expectation for good old fashioned superhero comics in a very specific mold.  Hickman’s Avengers is anything but.  It’s chock full of ambition and there really isn’t anything else like it on the stands.

A key reason for this is Hickman’s emphasis on scale.  Hickman makes it clear that the sheer scale of the stories and conflicts in his Avengers book are greater than they are in perhaps any other Marvel title.   As such, you could say that with ridiculous powerhouses like Hyperion and Captain Universe on the team to go along with Hulk and Thor, all of them battling entities which are, in essence, gods of a sort, Hickman’s book has taken the old line about the Avengers’ being focused on “foes no single superhero can withstand” to heart.  Here, they are battling gods and as the scale of the threat goes up, so must the size and power-level of the team.  That’s the core concept of Hickman’s run and it shines here, so while Hickman’s run feels very different, you could say that it also is perhaps truer to the core concept of the Avengers.