Avengers Academy #1 Permanent Record, Part 1
Writer: Christos Gage
Artist: Mike McKone
Colorist: Jeromy Cox
Rating: 
Christos Gage was the writer who ended up inheriting the bastard child of the Avengers franchise from a more popular writer. Avengers: The Initiative suffered from having C and D-List characters populate its cast, and also from trying to connect itself to every single Marvel crossover. This sounds like a disaster, and sometimes it was, but Gage found a way to make it work. He used this opportunity to flesh out fan favorite characters, introduce new heroes, and tell an epic soap opera that defined the Marvel Universe just as much as it was defined by it.
Avengers Academy is not that book.
In a basic way they are similar: Both are books about Avengers characters training ‘The heroes of tomorrow,’ but just as New Warriors and New Mutants were totally different beasts so are these. Whereas The Initiative focused on a large, ever-changing cast, Academy is pared down to a handful of new recruits full of hopes, conflicts and (presumably) secrets. As such, the strength of the title is entirely dependent on establishing a connection with these fresh faces early on, and quite frankly it doesn’t work.
In this opening chapter most of the attention is devoted to Veil, an insecure girl gifted with strange powers that might be as deadly to herself as they are to an opponent. This introduction is formulaic, but it hurts the title to have the only emotional beats in the book included in the first few pages. The rest of the issue is clean, sanitized, by-the-numbers team-building at its worst: Hank Pym talks a lot about why the team was formed, some new ciphers you don’t care about are introduced, a poorly choreographed action sequence happens, and there’s a ‘twist’ at the end that hardly counts as a twist at all.
Mike McKone’s art here is undoubtedly going to draw parallels to his work relaunching Teen Titans years ago, and thankfully this is the one place where this book really shines. The layouts are dynamic, and each panel is rendered beautifully. This goes double for Jeremy Cox, whose colors add weight and substance to McKone’s pencils. My only problem with McKone’s art is the generic training sequence, which was so chaotic that I had no idea who was supposed to be fighting who. I also fault him for the weak design of the characters. With the exception of maybe Hazmat, these costumes are uninspired and do little to separate them from the very worst Deviantart has to offer.
The past decade in comics was one that pushed young superhero books back to the forefront. Titles like Runaways, Young Avengers, New Warriors, Secret Warriors, New X-Men, The Loners, Young Allies and now Avengers Academy have populated the Marvel Universe with dozens of characters, each struggling to earn a place of the spotlight. The most successful of these titles treated the classic genre with a calculated mix of respect and irreverence, while the least gave us a poorly defined cast of characters whose personalities and struggles were indistinguishable from one another. Avengers Academy falls more into the latter, and perhaps the pages devoted to Veil and the instructors should have been used to give readers a better taste of the other characters.
Avengers Academy so far is the weakest of the Heroic Age titles, which is a shame given the strength of the book that preceded it. Despite the extra page count and price, this is a standard 22 page story that simply doesn’t have time to hook the reader because it’s too busy setting up a status quo the reader is all-too-familiar with. I have no doubt that Gage has a compelling story to tell with these characters (except for Reptil, who is likely there thanks to a mix of tokenism and editorial mandate) but I can’t say this premiere issue convinced me to stick along for the ride.
