By July of 2009, the main idea of the Dark Reign is clear. Norman Osborn takes existing teams and replaces the members with bad guys who often take on the code names and/or appearances of existing heroes and then pretend to be good guys. Or, more precisely, they are good guys because Norman Osborn is the head of National Security, which means he’s a default good guy regardless of how villainous he behaves.
In this case, he creates a new “Young Avengers” team that consists of six new characters who take the identities of existing villains rather than of the existing Young Avengers.
First, there’s Egghead. He’s a robot with similar abilities as Vision. He’s pictured there with Coat of Arms. She has a coat with arms that can also make her fly. She gets the least to do in the series.
Enchantress is a girl from Broxton (the small town where Asgard rests) who was given powers by Loki.
Melter is pretty self-explanatory. He’s a mutant who killed his own parents when his powers manifested. Melter and Enchantress are sleeping together.
The team “tech guy” is a gal…
…Who goes by Big Zero. Over the course of the series she keeps removing the safety guards on Egghead’s programming so that he can do more evil deeds. She also uses him as a sexbot.
The team’s version of Executioner is revealed to be Princess Python’s son.
He’s not very competent.
Storywise, it’s pretty interesting. When the actual Young Avengers track down the new Young Avengers there is a brief fight but then the two teams join forces.
Over the course of five issues, it becomes clear to the Young Avengers that the “new” YA team are not heroes, and then they divide once more.
It ends with the “real” Young Avengers facing off against Osborn’s Dark Avengers and making a heroic showing.
The YA version of Captain America–Iron Patriot–has a great role as team lead.
Iron Patriot gets to fight the Norm Osborn version, which is nice.
It’s a Paul Cornell script, which is nice, and I like that the relationships develop over time. It’s not, “You’re bad, we’re good, let’s fight.” There’s a lot more here than that.
This is definitely one of the better Dark Reign minis.
English (US) · 