Avengers: The Children’s Crusade #7 – Review

By: Allan Heinberg (writer), Jim Cheung (pencils), Mark Morales, John Livesay, Dexter Vines & Cheung (inks), Justin Ponsor (colors), Cory Petit (letters), Lauren Sankovitch (associate editor) & Tom Brevoort (editor)

The Story: Now that the Scarlet Witch is back and can restore mutant powers, will she get the chance before someone tries to bring her to justice for M-Day.

What’s Good: Prior to the big events of issue #6, I’d honestly thought that this miniseries would be high quality since Heinberg is a wonderful writer and Jim Cheung can make grown men weep with his pencil work, but I really didn’t think it would “matter”.  How could Marvel have a bi-monthly 9-issue miniseries “matter”?  I just didn’t think they could plan ahead that well.  Well…issue #6 changed that and for that reason, readers picked up this issue with a big sense of anticipation.  That feeling is so rare in these days of internet spoilers that this comic scores some points before even being read.

And problems aside, this issue still left me with the feeling that important stuff is happening here.  Scarlet Witch is back and she can restore mutant powers.  And this story isn’t out-of-continuity either because X-Factor this week showed Rictor (who was repowered in issue #6) using his powers and there’s even an editor’s note in X-Factor referring to this series.  So there.  Now, there are still a lot of questions to be answered.  Will Scarlet Witch give all mutants their powers back?  What about the mutants who are happier to be “normal”?  Or will it just serve to restore a few mutants that some writer wants to play with?

There are moments of absolute artistic brilliance in this issue.  Unfortunately, the art is a little inconsistent, but it never gets into “bad” territory.  And the good pages are just glorious, but they do make you wish that all the pages could be so pretty.  I’d guess that this series is on more of a timeline that we originally thought since it seems to be syncing up with “present day” mutant events and that might be making some of it look rushed.