This is the second of Joe Casey’s miniseries. Like the first one, it’s a retelling of events (both major and minor) throughout The Avengers’ history, with a little spin, retconning, gap filling, and the like.
Where volume one looked at the first year-and-a-half of Avengers stories, this one picked up later–during “Even an Android Can Cry,” aka the first appearance of Vision, goes through Hank and Jan’s wedding, and takes us just past the second appearance of Super-Adaptoid. Super Adaptoid gets lots of screentime in this book, and that’s not a bad thing.
Read in one sitting, the book feels like a focus on the two androids Vision and Adaptoid, offering some interesting nuances to both characters.
There are some rewarding callbacks: The period when T’Challa was living in the U.S. with a secret identity as a High School teacher, for example. To their credit, Marvel recognized that this simply didn’t work for the character, but many readers don’t even know that Panther’s early appearances included attempts by Marvel to essentially “mainstream him” into a character who fit neatly into Earth 616’s New York City, so that he could be used the same ways that they use most of their characters. In this mini, a Wakandan assassin comes after him and we get an issue about a shooting at a school. It’s an interesting attempt to bring modern problems into classic issues and while it might not work as well as I would have liked, I admire the effort.
I would have loved to have them keep going, with more of these. I’m a fan of Joe Casey, I’m a fan of classic Marvel, and, I recognize, I’m a bit of a dinosaur in that way.
English (US) · 