Avengers: Standoff, Volumes 1 & 2

Avengers: Standoff, Volumes 1 & 2, Panini/Marvel Both £14.99

♦ Let’s start with the good news. £14.99 gets you a big chunk of reading these days. Each book is 200+ pages. Now the bad

news: the variability in quality of those pages is substantial. These are Panini books so are printed in Europe on very nice paper and a substantial amount of the art is very, very, good indeed by the likes of Mark Bagley and Jesus Saiz. Unfortunately due to the “event” nature of the books they crossover to other books, such as Agents of SHIELD, where the art is, let’s be polite and say not so good. This has a really odd effect on the reader, effectively pulling you out of the story you’re engaged with, to make you focus on the words and lines on the page in front of you. Unfortunately in Agents Of SHIELD most of those lines appear to have been traced from photographs of the “near-but-not-quite-there” type, and coloured in by someone competent who has not referenced the colour values in the series that Agents Of SHIELD is crossing over with. I don’t want to disrespect Marc Guggenheim’s writing, as it’s perfectly fine – it’s just that the art change is so jarring that that’s all you can think about why reading those elements.

In Volume 2, thankfully there are no Agents Of SHIELD segments, so it’s left to the last issue of Howling Commandos of SHIELD and Illuminati to provide the shocks, although of a more muted kind in this volume. The art is fine but on Howling Commandos Mike Allred seems to be the model, which is a weird shift from the super realistic tone of the majority of the work, and the colouring in Illuminati also draws your attention away from the story rather than to it.  I guess this is a feature of these crossover books, but it’s not one I enjoy.

So what of the story? Well, does brainwashed people segregated in a small village sound familiar to you? If it does, then I haven’t spoilt this for you. If you went “Whaaat!” when you read that, you’re really going to enjoy this. Essentially the plotline is a mixture of elements from The Prisoner, Stepford Wives, Wayward Pines and so on. Throw in a bit of (obviously ineffective or there’d be no plot) mind control, and Bob’s your uncle. The whole project seems a bit of an attempt to provide a platform for the re-youthing of Steve Rogers, so he can go on to – well, you know what he goes on to. We do get the origin of Kobic, the little girl who is a cosmic cube. I don’t know, she seems a little Fifty Sueish to me, but I guess this one will run and run.

In summary: lots of pretty typical superhero art of the super-real kind, some good writing by Al Ewing and others, some jarring art choices, and a lot of Avengers action. I’m not a big
fan in its current form(s), but if you are these are good value volumes that collect a pretty good storyline, and give you lots of extras in the sense of variant covers, and all the comic covers in each volume. You can pick these up quite cheaply online, In which price they’re quite a bargain.

Peter Mann