Today I'll do a brief breakdown of New Avengers #25 watch for the rest of the books to be broken down on here over the next couple of days. There's not any spoilers here that are going to ruin the story, in fact these books seem to be the deleted scenes of last weeks AvX #2. The covers of each book gave us something to look forward to but the insides are a bit of a disappointment.
The New Avengers #25 - written by Brian Michael Bendis, art by Mike Deodato and Will Conrad with color by Rain Beredo.
The New Avengers is one of my favorite monthly books, I love the team, the stories that have been a part of it and the art is always great as well. I know its a pure fan boy book compiling all the cool kids in one group, but a team of Spider-Man, Wolverine, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Daredevil Doc Strange, Thing, Ms. Marvel and Mockingbird is pretty sweet.
With this being the 25th issue I feel we should have gotten a much different story. What we have is a flashback story of Master Yu Ti of the K'un Lun. (just realized something K'un Lun...Kindelan, anyone else see that? Distant relative perhaps?) It tells of Master Yu Ti having visions of a red headed girl possessing the power of The Phoenix. The story is meant to tie the Iron Fist to the Phoenix force, in fact on one of the books many image only pages we see the dragon of the K'un Lun people battling the fiery phoenix and it would appear the mysterious red head girl merges the two creating the symbol we see that Iron Fist wears on his chest.
The back of this book shows a preview for next month where Iron Fist seems to be defending Hope Summers. While I understand that this issue is giving us some back story that leads us into that book, I think it could have been done in a spin off book and not here in The New Avengers.
Marvel could have easily put out a AvX The Iron Fist special three part book showing this story and then even building up some other factors that go along with the fact that K'un Lun has known about the Phoenix force coming for hundreds of years.
Which brings me to this point, if the K'un Lun knew about the Phoenix Force hundreds of years ago where was Iron Fist when it came around the first time and took over Jean Grey, or even when it inhabited Rachel Summers? Don't get me wrong, I like the concept of bringing Danny Rand(Iron Fist) into this more and have him playing more of a pivotal role. But like Cyclops said to Captain America on the beach in AvX issue 1, where were you guys before when we needed you last time?
The art in this book is not a let down, Deodato and Conrad really light up the page. You can see that the two have an excellent command of their pencils and clearly a good knowledge of anatomy. The way in which the characters are drawn is dynamic yet realistic. The perspective, foreshortening and layout really work well on each page. Its nice to see a great writer like Bendis work so many pages into his story that don't require words and even more impressive that the artists working on this book can tell that story in such a great sequential way.
Tune in tomorrow to The BOOM Page where I'll be going over Uncanny X-Men #11 where we see Colossus of the X-Men do battle with the Red Hulk.
