sinister monday #14 (Mighty Avengers #5)

How's this for something out of the ordinary. One might even describe it as extraordinary. For this week's Sinister Monday column I am going to do what i haven't done in months. Give you, the reader, a full length single comic book review. The image used above should tip you off as to which title I will be reviewing. Also, I never secured any permission to use it so if anyone from Marvel reads this and it gets their panties in a bunch I'll happily remove it--but the way I see it I am providing free advertisement for both your products and website so... yeah, don't be a dick about it.

Mighty Avengers #5
"Storytellers": BENDIS! and Frank Cho (yeah, you read that right, storytellers)
Coloring: Jason Kieth

Well, this issue has been a long time coming. Feels like several months. Moving quickly to the point, and not to put all my cards on the table so soon or anything, but why is it that nearly every comic that is significantly delayed sucks balls? Seriously, this happened a few months back with Kirkman's Walking Dead too. An ocean of time between books and then some haphazard POS with dialogue severely in need of editing and art that looked at best rushed and at worst incomplete. You'd think with all that time they had you'd at least given it a couple of read-throughs. or something. What was truly frustrating about the WD was that a week later another issue followed that was stunning, and then a fortnight or so later yet another which was equally as good. Three issues in a month. It was almost as if the people in charge of creative control were struggling to fix the many problems on the delayed issue and just focused on the stories ahead to the point where Captain Delay finally had to be kicked out the door sucking and screaming before his brothers Above-Averagey and Pretty Damn Finey could be sent on their way too.

Before I go into the specifics of Mighty's many flaws this month, allow me to pick at some "political" douchebaggery that crops up before we even get panel number 1 (and yes I should probably be giving Jon Stewart royalties for using the term "political douchebaggery"). On the opening page featuring the back-story and the equivalent of the Mighty Avengers theme song there is something fishy going on with credits. Now I don't have the first few issues of Mighty to look at as a means of comparison, but here we find no writer or artist singular, merely "Storytellers": BENDIS! and Frank Cho. It's almost like BENDIS! is trying to protect his dear friend's rep, seeing as Cho has a notoriously slow hand and is almost certainly the primary reason behind the delay. When an artist and writer are listed separately then one can single a fella out and bludgeon them to death, if necessary. But when both artist and writer are "storytellers," well, then its much harder to lay the blame *cough cough CHO cough*. Because seriously, BENDIS! writes like a zillion things and meets deadlines with uncanny reliability (I'm looking at you, Ultimate Spider-Man). So it's not his fault. Perhaps part of the blame belongs on the rest of the Marvel U, seeing as New Avengers at one point felt like it was miles behind its Mighty brethren. And then there was the whole Secret Invasion reveal. Maybe Mighty just needed to have its alignment fixed, moving it back on track. But I just don't by it. Because now it feels as if it is the one miles behind that other Avengers title.

Of course, Cho might have been helped out of BENDIS! had actually written any dialogue for this issue. For long stretches of page, sometimes pages, writing takes a back-seat to art. All told there is very little verbiage, especially if you discount the oppressively frequent 'Password Override' warnings that infest the latter pages of the issue like so many of Pym's bees. Yet there is space enough for a few thought bubbles. I've commented favorably on them in the past, but there use here is pure excess. Sometimes the character simply repeats what they have just 'thought' in their dialogue bubble two centimeters away. It's almost like BENDIS! was aware of his extensive use in previous chapters and felt obliged to continue on here. It's needlessly distracting.

Now there are other problems with what might be described as the 'writing' of this issue (if such an individual task exists in this "storytelling" tag-team adventure), like schizophrenic pacing and unclear setting (it's very difficult to locate where specific actions are taking place in both time and space) but much of what is most irritating occurs in the artwork. And for that I'm going to need begin another paragraph. A very very large paragraph.

Cho is quite obviously a master among his peers. His attention to detail is commendable, especially when concerned with the human anatomy. I swear the dude rips out his Gray's Anatomy and thumbs over to the 'Muscle' chapter and painstakingly reproduces every last twitch on his heroes and heroines. I have no problem with this. Nor do i have a problem with his tendency to zoom in on T & A. My problem, initially, is with the inking. No individual inker is listed in the credits so by default I am going to have to level the blame, yet again, on Mr. Cho. There is far too much Chris Ware-ian Power-Puff Girls style thick outlining going on. Everything has a clunky black frame. And this only serves to make delineations on the interior of objects and people darker than they need to be. This all spirals down to the point where strands of hair, on Ares shoulders and back, say, or anywhere really, get much much to thick. I never thought I would say this but i would love to see this issue redrawn by Leinil Yu. Ares, for one, would be a great benefactor from Yu's raw frenzy. Instead Ares just looks like a really hairy suped up version of Jimmy Corrigan. And like Corrigan, I'm now very depressed.

Another huge batch of unpleasantness lay with the coloring. A single colorist is sited here, so Mr. Jason Kieth? It's time for a paddling. The colors are flat and most times too dark. Either one is a bad thing. Combined, each exacerbates the other. Add these defects to the cookie-cutter bold lines of Cho's ink the effect is multiplied further. As a result there is very little depth to anything (save rippling muscle shadows here and there, less here and mostly there on the Sentry's preposterously toned gluts.). The only character this combination of artistic choices seems to work for is Carol Danvers whose already vibrant mix of dark and electric colors isn't hindered any by this issue's failings. Her hair still looks like the additive plastic top a little girl would affix to her genderless lego being in order to designate 'Girl', but I'll let that slide in the face of so much terribleness elsewhere.

Quite simply, female mega-babe-supposed-to-be the-body-of-the-Wasp-but-quite-clearly-isn't Ultron exemplifies everything that is wrong about this comic's visual idiosyncrasies. Ultron is never drawn the same way twice. In the beginning she is fleshy looking, then when battle breaks out she is sheathed in a liquid platinum unitard which conveniently covers up the naughty bits. As the Sentry pounds away on her, Ultron's face is often misshapen, which would be fine, but again those thick black outlines make her look less malleable and more like some sort of zeppelin or amoeba. All surface and no interior (from Cho, go figure) you can practically hear Ultron hissing back to 'full' after being hit and deflated. She's also preposterously muscular and huge, two things that I'm fairly certain Wasp isn't. Janet is a lot of things, a glamour girl, a busty heiress, a victim of the most infamous case of domestic violence in the history of Marvel comics, but she ain't a body builder. If Ultron were truly trying to take the shape it's creator favors most (again, Janet, at least at one time) then why the Flo-Jo legs? Or is this some sort of unholy mix of both the Wasp and Iron Man? We know Tony is in there somewhere (allegedly deceased. riiiiight...) but we are never told anything physical of Tony remains, other than him being some sort of fleshy conduit for Ultron. Again, frustratingly unclear.

I'm going to leave off with some questions and a final verdict i was once sad to hear, and am now strangely happy. One, will this series ever be in sync with New Avengers? If Spider-Woman hauled off Skrullectra to Tony, when does this happen? Before or after he is gender bent? And that whole Symbiote plague... are we ever going to get to that? Okay, questions over. Happy/sad verdict? Cho's out. I wonder if this will be enough to salvage this series. In more ways than one, bring on the New.

Rating: Starscream