HA Avengers #1

Putting John Romita, Jr. on pencils here totally fucking baffles me. I think I remember reading that Marvel was going for an artist with a sort of generational appeal, someone who's been around awhile but who still seems contemporary and new. That makes sense to me, since the Heroic Age promises to be a fresh take on Silver Age classics, the return of Cap, Thor, Iron Man, and the Avengers. I guess in theory Romita, Jr. fits that bill - he's a legacy artist, the son of a legend, and he's had his hand in Marvel classics old and new.

But this is ugly.

Lest I seem a complete asshole, I'll go for constructive criticism. And I'm not talking JRJR in general here, I'm talking JRJR on this Avengers book. His linework is blocky, angular, and generally unappealing. His faces appear universally mousy, and he has a distracting & overworked method for defining cheekbones. His character proportions are inconsistent from page to page and panel to panel, and his heroes all share peculiar and unsettling doll-like expressions, like they were hurriedly hewn from wood. I do love Kang's entrance splash page and the following spread of Thor pouring it on with Mjolnir, that's some dynamic work. But it's not enough to carry the book.

I mean by and large I don't have anything against Romita, Jr. And on paper, sure, this might make sense. But when you look at the finished product, it's just plain off. I don't think this is the kind of work that has any real mass appeal - and I feel awful writing that, because I shouldn't give a fuck about mass appeal - but these are the Avengers, and this is the Heroic Age, and while this line is being marketed as a new and more optimistic direction for the Marvel Universe, it also purports to be the return of our classic heroes. These heroes don't look heroic. And I don't think that all classic heroes should have to look the same all the time. I can't emphasize that enough, I'm not looking for derivative & manufactured art. I loves me some nuance, some personal style. But the Heroic Age merits something more pure than this. JRJR's work here is stylized to the point of distraction.

Such great distraction, in fact, that it overwhelms a pretty decent script by Bendis. Good pace, nice team-building and personal conflicts, cool cliffhanger. Bendis' Spidey is a little too quippy for me (here and elsewhere) - it'd be nice if he said something substantive once in a while. And, for a book that's supposed to be launching a new line, the new reader would have absolutely no fucking idea what's going on without several years of background story, or at least one of those nifty recap pages featured at the beginning of most Marvel books these days.

Check out the two pages penciled by Art Adams and Jack Kirby in the back. When I first read about the Heroic Age concept, that's kind of what I had in mind. They each showcase the distinct personal style of their pencillers, but they also look righteously heroic. The rest of this comic, not so much.