Hello friends and readers, it’s looking familiar as we have another week of Captain America and Avengers? Will our intrepid reviewers’ opinions change with these second issues? Zack and Vishal bring the heat yet again!
Empyre: Captain America #2
The last time I talked about this comic I got up on a soap box, shared some weird memories, and kinda breezed through the whole “review” concept. Now setting aside all the weird Army worship, which is still here and still gross, this is a bad comic book on a foundational level. Johnson takes a simple plot of Captain America plus US Army vs plant aliens and bogs it down with pacing and plotting issues that are pretty basic.
The last issue ended with two hooks, the Cotati have secretly infected a general in the Army and a member of Capt’s squad, and they have raised a big ol’ monster in Mexico City. This issue, however, opens with a big fight scene in San Antonio, Texas after some time has passed. All sense of emergency from the last issue gets extinguished by the first caption box. They have time for causal campfires and don’t seem to be in any rush, even when they get a spaceship that could easily get them the thousand miles they need to go.
This seems like a small thing until the other shoe drops, that poor squaddie with the Cotati in him pops, leading the sentinel of liberty to the realization that the general might be infected too. The logic is a stretch, sure, but it’s a plot relevant one so we’ll accept it. Where it falls apart is that Cap and friends show up immediately in Brussels, where the general is. It’s a Game of Thrones Season 7 level of care given to the geography, made all the wilder by the fact that they head right back over to Mexico City to wrap up the arc.
This is picking at details, it’s pedantic, I’ll accept that. What I won’t accept is an issue that makes itself irrelevant. No one grows, no one changes, nothing propels this story forward. It’s an issue you could skip and have all the information you need for the next chapter. If you’re going to publish propaganda, at least you could make it good.
Empyre: Avengers #2
The entire premise of this Avengers miniseries is that it follows a lot of b- and c-list marvel characters as they do their best to be involved in the Empyre conflict. This involves creating a bunch of smaller skirmishes around Earth so that these characters have things to do. The problem is, this isn’t done by making an anthology book centering around a specific conflict on Earth – it’s a miniseries that cuts between several small fights, which only serves to make them feel even less significant than they already are.
The first conflict of the issue features Luke Cage, Dr. Nemesis, and The Vision taking on the menace of… Plant-Man! No, I don’t know who he is either. His entire deal is that he thinks the Cotati have the right idea to eliminate all human life on Earth, because he’s Plant-Man and has a motivation that makes even a poorly written Poison Ivy look nuanced. This is all that happens in the 4 pages that this story takes up, which really doesn’t help make it memorable. I’ll probably forget what happened by the next issue.
The second conflict is more interesting but also even shorter than the first – Wonder Man, Mockingbird, and Quicksilver are trying to prevent the Kree and Skrull alliance from committing war crimes, and an offhand line from Mockingbird makes this unit of Kree and Skrull warriors turn on one another. That’s all that happened in the 2 pages of this scene, which is really frustrating because in all honesty I would have liked to see more of it. The pacing is just a mess.
The final and longest segment of this issue is also the worst – it’s about the Savage Land. I’m sure there’s someone out there who will try to pick a fight with me about this, but the Savage Land has never improved a Marvel story. Every time it is the setting for a story, the story feels like it’s not worth reading. And it’s not just the Savage Land that makes this as dull as it is. This focuses on Ka-Zar and Shanna’s relationship and on Black Knight existing – two things that even I, a seasoned Avengers veteran, do not care about in the slightest. I don’t know why this was chosen to be the focal conflict of the issue, because it’s just a dull mess. Scarlet Witch is in this and does nothing that’s anywhere near as interesting as her actions at the beginning of Empyre: X-Men, and Doctor Voodoo is… there? I guess? This issue ends on what should be a cliffhanger but I just can’t seem to muster up any emotion about a tease that Ka-Zar might die. He probably won’t even die, not that anything one does to Ka-Zar is something that would get me to read the next issue.
I’m bored of this book, and I’m reaching a point where I think I would rather read the main Avengers ongoing than this tie-in miniseries – it’s not good, but it’s at least doing something worth talking about. I don’t know who this book was supposed to appeal to, because modern Avengers fans will find it incredibly boring, and classic Avengers fans will also find it incredibly boring. Carlos Magno’s art can’t save what is ultimately a tiring book that, while not a slog to read through, just feels like a waste of one’s time.
Zachary Jenkins co-hosts the podcast Battle of the Atom and is the former editor-in-chief of ComicsXF. Shocking everyone, he has a full and vibrant life outside all this.
Vishal Gullapalli is highly opinionated and reads way too much.
