Mighty Avengers #31 – Review

By Dan Slott & Christos Gage (writers), Sean Chen (artist), Yeung & Morales (inkers), John Rauch (colors)

Well, it’s now five months later and the best I can say for this story is that it’s finally over.  Thank. Freaking. God.  With “The Unspoken”, I feel that Mighty Avengers has hit something of a sophomore slump.  I finally gave up on this issue, and the overall storyline, about halfway through when, during a giant-sized fight with the Unspoken, Pym says “You’ve chosen to spend your time wallowing in past mistakes…not learning from them and moving on.”  I thought this was terribly apropos as it’s exactly what Slott and Gage have done.  These are both smart guys and good writers, and yet their sprawling story was exactly the kind of uninspired, MacGuffin-driven nonsense that was in style back in the 70s.  I’d like the think the bar in storytelling has risen considerably higher since those halcyon days, and yet this story utterly failed to become anything more than a less-than-average potboiler.

This story more or less seems to have been hatched for no other reason than to bring the various Avengers teams together for the upcoming ‘Siege’ storyline.  There is some value to this decision, as it was truly entertaining to see characters from the Initiative, New, and Mighty Avengers interacting with each other.  However, considering what a non-threat the Unspoken turned out to be, (which was a shame considering how much time the writers spent building him up to be a Serious Villain) and the disappointing way the Xerogen gas was finally resolved (really, Pym?  That was your great solution?  Kind of a buzzkill for the guy Eternity named Earth’s Scientist Supreme), I almost wish Pym would have called up the other teams and invited them over for beers and Xbox since it would have achieved the same goal, been just as entertaining, and taken up a fraction of the issues.

Despite an incredibly uninteresting, disappointing storyline, culminating in this issue that proved to be too little too late, I nonetheless feel like this book is headed in a direction that’s going to pay off in a big way down the road. Of the crop of Avengers books being published right now, this is the one that keeps me coming back month after month because I believe in its potential, even when the comic doesn’t live up to it.

Grade: D

-Tony Rakittke