Avengers #35 Review: Get Your Scorecards Ready

Because you can’t tell the players without a scorecard, especially since eight months of real life time are supposed to have passed between the last issue and this one!

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This can’t be an easy gig for Jonathan Hickman right now, despite his reputation as a long-range planner. Clearly, both Avengers and New Avengers have been building up to an Avengers/Illuminati confrontation with the fate of everything in the balance in Time Runs Out (or as I like to call it, Civil War, Part Deux). Unfortunately, there’s this not so little thing called AXIS in the way, so Hickman’s time-jumping stunt was almost mandatory.

Thus, Avengers #35 sees him tap dancing around for most of the story, as we check in on what various members of this large team have been doing in the interim. A bunch have gone their own ways, but everyone seems to realize the time is coming to get back and do something about … well, whatever it is that’s coming next spring. Hickman falls into the trap of making these the “Most Interesting Eight Months Ever!” for some of the Avengers, but if that wasn’t the case, this would be a boring read.

My scorecard crack at the beginning refers to the end of the issue, as the final scene more clearly lays out who is on whose side. And let’s just say that both the Avengers and Illuminati have some surprising but logical additions.

The visuals are by a group of artists, which can sometimes be a cluster, but Jim Cheung, Paco Medina, Nick Bradshaw and Dustin Weaver make for a pretty good ensemble. No complaints there.

So how are the battle lines drawn up? Venture on past the …

SPOILERS PAST THIS POINT!

Like I said, it’s been an eventful eight months for the Avengers. Cannonball and Smasher had a kid, raising the question about exactly when she got pregnant. Sunspot and Manifold drop by to get them to return to Earth. Oh, and Roberto has purchased A.I.M. and turned it good.

Hyperion grew a beard! Also, he and Thor Odinson, now wielding Jarnbjorn instead of Mjolnir because he’s unworthy. Not sure what they’re up to, but it sounds like a chance for purpose for Hyperion and redemption for the Odinson. And I don’t understand at all what Ex Nihilo and Abyss are doing.

All of this is really wandering around the edges anyway. What we want is the main event, and we get it when someone breaks into the former Avengers Tower. An Avengers team consisting of Hawkeye, Captain Marvel and multiple War Machines moves in, and the thief is revealed as kid genius Amadeus Cho. He gives them a merry chase but is eventually captured, because the Avengers side has someone who knows how geniuses think: Susan Storm, the Invisible Woman. Along the way, we find out that Captain Britain and Hank Pym (as Yellowjacket?) have also joined the Illuminati.

So there we go folks, it’s looking a lot like Civil War, but with the opposite side standing with S.H.I.E.L.D. this time. But I hope there’s more to it than that.

Favorite moment: Sunspot reveals that the foot soldiers of A.I.M. weren’t really all that bad:

Final thought: Made me want to read more, which is the point, but this just seems like a fancy way of stalling until we get to the actual story. Also, thought we were going to get the real first look at Sam Wilson as Captain America, but no dice …

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