New Avengers #19

By Jonathan Hickman, Valerio Schiti, & Frank Martin

Worlds collide as New Avengers delves into a new adventure forcing the team to travel to another world in hopes of saving two universes, at the cost of their Earth or ours. This current story arc has been advertising a clash between the New Avengers and a team called The Great Society from the other world that closely resemble heroes of the JLA from Marvel’s biggest competitor. It’s Marvel’s way of creating that epic crossover brawl that isn’t really a crossover at all. The anticipation has been building for a while now, but this issue looked to live up to the hype, but it may have done it too late.

This issue unfortunately felt like a filler story only meant to setup for next month’s. There were a lot of scene changes, sometimes switching between past and present to give the reader more insight into the situation. It was often a nice change of scenery that prevented the book from feeling dull and one-dimensional. However, for the many scene changes to keep us interested, a lot of them feel redundant as most of them seem to be reiterating information we already know. While we were being given relatively familiar scenes the main story wasn’t progressing at all, so once the book is finished the plot has only been slightly advanced, and not enough to be exciting or enticing. Sometimes covers can be cool and captivating because it’s the very first thing we see when we purchase the book. New Avengers’ current cover was a little misleading as it promises more than what the inside actually delivers.

Whatever drawbacks the plot progression may currently have, the art certainly seems to be keeping this book in contention of being great as Schiti is a tremendous artist who knows the aesthetics of human anatomy and character design. Frank Martin’s work on light and dark, and color adds to the visual appeal. As Schiti’s art resembles realistic anatomy and figures, Martin’s colors add to the realism regarding the color work on faces, metals, and whenever a character produces light or energy. The creative art team are great at what they do, but with a lot of calm, still shots they had minimal room to express their creative talents, but perhaps in the issues to come we’ll see their skills come to light in more fast paced action scenes that demand more detail and more visually interesting images.

Jonathan Hickman has created an interesting story that has brought together arguably the most diverse group of Avengers ever assembled (except for the lack of female characters). The series is currently exploring a good premise that is worthy of an Avengers story, which seems as if it should be a story told in the flagship Avengers title, but Hickman has adapted it well to this current team. The overall quality of the issue was good but was a little slow and felt more like the story in between the story, but with a climactic conclusion next month’s issue should get a lot more exciting.