Avengers Assemble #14 – Review

By: Al Ewing (Writer), Butch Guice (Penciler), Tom Palmer (Inker), Frank D’Armata (Colorist), VC’s Clayton Cowles

Review: For better or worse I’ve reserved myself a copy of every tie-in issue allied to the Age of Ultron event. Not done that for a while, maybe not since Secret Invasion…and that was a buttload of (mostly interminable) comics. Still, AoU has a wallet-pleasingly small amount of titles attached, and most are done-in-ones which purport to shed light on interesting bits of backstory tied to the main book which I was keen to see addressed. This is especially true of Avengers Assemble #14 which deals solely with Black Widow.

Avengers Assemble is a title I’ve shied away from so far. It’s not had the worst of creative teams but its all-ages remit coupled with its perceived existence outside of regular Avengers continuity combined to make it an easy omission from my Pull List. However, this does make the series a prime candidate for the repository of stand-alone tales; I can’t see this issue fitting in anywhere near as well with any of Hickman’s Avengers titles, for instance.

Chaos War #1 – Review

By: Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente (writers), Khoi Pham (penciller), Tom Palmer (inker), Simon Bowland (letterer)

The Story: Hercules returns from a death that never really happened, gets made fun of by the heroes of the Marvel U, fights with them needlessly and then uses his apparent semi-omnipotence to bring them along to fight generic monsters.

What’s Good: Pham and Palmer put some pretty attractive art onto the page. Pham’s got the creativity to make the alien come alive and I’ve always thought that Palmer makes any artist’s work look more fluid. They both create some nice textured effects, especially in the opening scene with the weird backgrounds of Nightmare’s realm. King Chaos’s appearance is very dynamic and Nightmare’s emotive face is almost all we need to tell the story. I’ve never had strong feelings about letterers before, but I really feel this issue would have worked better if Bowland had used invisible ink for this issue; that would have kept the writing from sinking this battleship.