Avengers Academy #14 – Review

By: Christos Gage (writer), Sean Chen (penciller), Scott Hanna (inker), Jeromy Cox (colorist), John Denning (assistant editor), Bill Rosemann (editor)

The Story: Electro attacks France’s main science institute while most of the full-fledged Avengers are away. The kids need a chance to prove themselves and Electro isn’t the baddest guy in town. When they get there, though, it turns out he ain’t alone. The kids don’t do too bad, though, all things considered.

What’s Good: Gage did one thing every great writer must do. He made the heroes active. They wanted something. They wanted it bad, and we the reader can sympathize: they want to prove themselves. They’re not asking for a free lunch. Just put me in the game coach. I like them already. This situation also creates a lot of tension, because when has any battle plan survived contact with the enemy? I love how well the trainees do against the Sinister Six and I have to say, I really like the ending. For a while, when I saw how they got the bad press and all, I was thinking “Oh great. Another thin persecution story. Seen it.” But Gage tricked me. That wasn’t the end. The end was about stepping up to the plate morally that was the big climax of the book. The fight, for all that it was a great superhero donnybrook, was really just a plot device to get to the personal growth made by a surprising number of people at the end. What am I saying about the writing? Gage was right on target.

And, I have to say, after my first exposure to the Chen-Hanna-Cox team, I’m loving the art. The fine lines leave a lot of room to fill the panels with detail, which I love. The credit page is a pretty good example of this. From top to bottom, the big panel is brimming with the external accoutrements of the Avengers Mansion, the backgrounded and framing characters, the tight line of those arguing, with some intense Giant-Man action thrown in as background. That is visual storytelling! And Cox’ colors are beautiful and clear, with the bright spots attracting the eye to the important parts of the page. I also enjoyed Chen’s slanting camera angles and overlaid panels. His layouts and choices of borders (or not) kept the pages from ever feeling the same. Chen and team made it feel like there was so much action going on that it could only be layered. And a PS: I loved the texture of Reptile and Rhino when they slapped down.

Batman Annual #28 – Review

By: David Hine (first story writer), Agustin Padilla, Andres Guinaldo, Lorenzo Ruggiero, Walden Wong (first story artists), Tony Avina (first story colorist), Paul Tobin (second story writer), Ramon Bachs (second story penciller), Mick Gray (second story inker), Trish Mulvihill (second story colorist), Kyle Higgins (third story writer), Trevor McCarthy (third story artist), Andre Szymanowicz (third story colorist)

The Story: In the first feature, The Question works alongside both Batmen and Nightrunner to take down a Parisian cult from the inside.  In the second, Veil helps humanitarian clinician Leslie Thompson find regret and fulfillment in her work.  In the third, Nightrunner finds out how tough it is to wear a controversial icon amidst city riots.

The Review: Series annuals are usually a mixed bag.  On the one hand, the bigger page count offers an opportunity to tell big stories outside the continuity of the main ongoing.  Many times, however, you get a bunch of unrelated short stories from various writers and artists, all cobbled together.  This annual definitely falls under the cobbled category.

The editors could have taken a little more care at least in figuring out which story gets placed where.  The obvious connections between the first and third features make them shoo-ins to be companions, since they both involve the Parisian traceur Nightrunner, but they end up bookending the entirely unrelated second feature instead.  This by itself makes the annual a disjointed read.

The sense of disconnect invades the stories themselves.  The first feature jumps around without offering much in the way of what’s going on, or even who some of the characters are.  So much attention gets handed over to The Question (as played by Renee Montoya), it’s easy to forget the story supposedly ties into the Batman Incorporated banner.  Too bad Nightrunner, the candidate to be France’s Batman, doesn’t get more page-time or stuff to do than he does in this issue.  At least he fares better than Leni Urbana, the high-stakes intended victim of the story—at least, you assume so, because never once do you find out exactly who she is or what she does.

If writers want to sell the idea of other heroes taking on Batman’s symbol, then they have to work harder at selling those heroes in the first place.  What little Nightrunner gets to do in this issue is rendered moot by the American heroes.  Even as the focus of the third feature, Nightrunner’s background remains largely mysterious and his personality gets grossly overshadowed by Batman—either one of them.  Kyle Higgins introduces the interesting real-world element of Parisian racial conflicts, then spends too much time talking about them than showing their effects on Nightrunner.  Higgins really would have profited from having more pages to tell his story than he got.