COMICS: Dave's Marvel Rant: AvengersRough,Alpha,IronMan

[Dave Van Domelen]

Dave's Marvel Rant:

Avengers Rough Cut #1 "Who Needs Ink?"
Alpha Flight v2 #12 "Vindication"
Iron Man v3 #6 "That's No Lady"

Spoilers....

Avengers: Process junkies will, of course, snap this up. Not only does
it have Perez's uninked pencils, it also has Busiek's plot pages. If you can
spare the three bucks, even non-process-junkies might wanna pick this up.
It's scary how tight and detailed George's pencils are, and the plot pages
have the eminent advantage of naming (and providing previous appearances of)
all the mythological horrors that assailed the Avengers in #1, as well as all
the pictures of Avengers not in attendance from the monitor screen.

Alpha Flight "H" spends a lot of time invoking deliberate parallels to
v1 #12, including the "and one shall die" type cover. Looking at the cover,
I immediatley thought, "Puck's gonna die...his mustache has already eaten
half his face!" Rouleau's art REALLY bites. Okay, it could be worse,
admittedly, but it's below the threshold of acceptability. It hurts the
storytelling. About the only good thing I can say about his art is that he
at least *tries* to draw a maple leaf on Guardian's and Vindicator's suits.
But his style is so sloppy that any time the colorist makes an error, it's
really hard to tell who a character is (especially Pisces versus Heather...
the cheekpieces appearing and vanishing on both at random). And what the
HELL is that supposed to be under Gemini's mask? It's not Madison Jeffries,
it's some kind of Asgardian troll or something.
Okay, enough Rouleau-bashing. The story is pretty much a running battle
between Dept. H and the new Zodiac in and around the labrynthine
headquarters, made more confusing by the art. The Zodiac are after a
macguffin in the Prometheus Division, which turns out to be the Nth Projector
(something I'm sure the Squadron Supreme would love to know the location of),
and they release a bunch of other nasties from Prometheus during the battle,
including The Blob, which eats Sasquatch.
Near the end, "General Clarke" (yeah, right, I'm betting on a modified
Master robot) gets Heather's help to shut down the HQ's reactor, which had a
bomb placed in it or something. "Clarke" dies, and Heather's suit overloads,
going into a countdown pastiche from the original #12. Right down to Mac
showing up in the doorway just as the countdown is about to hit zero.
Except, Heather manages to avert armageddon. The nightmare does not
repeat, and perhaps she'll finally stop having it. Despite all the other
problems with this issue (mainly the...you know), this one scene did work for
me, for all of its deliberate derivativeness.
Let's see...how many plot points did Seagle clarify this issue...one.
We know what happened to Madison. Everything else is either still up in the
air (like Lil) or even more complicated (Northstar finds Aurora and she seems
to have backslid). We have nearly a dozen new villains without personalities
worth mentioning (Libra has a one-word vocabulary, for instance). There's a
lot of nice parallels (like "Box" turning out to be a "traitor" again), but
none of the feeling of resolution that v1 #12 had (Mac may have died, but
Omega was also clearly beaten as well). If Seagle's going for the title of
the next Claremont, he's certainly got the danglers down.

Iron Man "In Deep": Black Widow has decided to go back to the secret
agent lifestyle, where instead of being near the bottom of the scale (as she
feels she was in the Avengers) she's at the top of her profession. And her
latest case dovetails neatly in with one of Tony's problems...the Arms
Merchant. Someone is kidnapping experts in microcircuit design and
construction, and Natasha wants to drag Tony as bait. Unfortunately, the
kidnappers are more clever than Tony gives them credit for, and they disable
his tracking beacon before they even get off the hotel grounds, leaving him
trapped in an installation deep in the Outback.
Fortunately, Tony is more clever than the kidnappers give him credit
for, and he manages to create another tracking device inside a component he's
being forced to build, without being detected. Natasha shows up and gives
him his armor, just in time for the head of security to reveal one of her
(presumably many) hidden talents...the ability to transform into a reptilian
behemoth capable of going a few rounds with the Hulk. Too bad she's got no
talent for picking names...Tuatara didn't work for the Global Guardian guy
either. }->
Tony engages in a little parallelism of his own here, as he seems to be
getting attracted to Tuatara, and not just as an interesting foe. He's got a
long record of getting romantically involved with The Enemy, as Natasha is
there as a reminder of (there's also Madame Masque that I recall off the top
of my head).
Either Pat Zircher has been practicing up a storm, or Holdredge is a
phenomenal inker. Okay, Zircher's stuff in Solar was better than most of his
previous work, but this is better still. He's either hit his stride or found
his ideal inker...either way, he should keep it up.

Dave Van Domelen, "Okay, that's sixteen Avengers, and if George isn't
rebelling yet (actually, he's probably saying, 'When do the others show
up?')...." - Kurt Busiek, in plot pages for Avengers v3 #1, in Rough Cut