New Avengers #24 Review: Dinner With Doom

Regrets. We’ve all had a few, but maybenone quite like the ones Namor has experienced since turning his back on the Illuminati and putting together the Cabal.

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As New Avengers #24 jumps us eight months ahead, we learn that Namor thinks that gathering some of the nastiest villains in the galaxy might not have been such a great idea. Shocking, I know.

Jonathan Hickman makes the Sub-Mariner’s dinner with Dr. Doom and Kristoff Vernard an interesting part of the tapestry of this overall story. It’s not ruining any surprises to say that Doom has his own plans for the Incursion-threatened world, because that’s what Doom does. But it’s quite entertaining to see this desperate Namor and contrast him with the one that has acted in such arrogant and self-assured fashion earlier in the series. There’s also a fun twist on the final page that is a treat for longtime Marvel fans.

The rest of this oversized issue is split into two parts. One is fairly uninteresting, because it focuses on most of the Cabal as it lays waste to another altertante world, one where Professor X is the last man standing. Turns out guys like Thanos and Terrax really enjoy mass slaughter. Who would have guessed? The other portion is about the fate of Wakanda and needs spoilers to discuss.

This didn’t really grab me in he same way that Hickman’s first post-time jump Avengers issue did, in the sense that it inspired intense curiosity about what happened over the missing eight months. Here, you pretty much get the gist of what happened in just a few pages, and it’s what you expected. Thankfully, the bits during and after the dinner with Doom are pretty good.

Let’s move on to details …

SPOILERS PAST THIS POINT!

Namor is at the end of his rope. Despite the fact that he might be the only one who’d be surprised by this, he’s grown disgusted with the way the Cabal is relishing in the slaughter of alternate Earths. He and Doom get into a philosophical debate about feasting while others don’t have enough to eat, and he asks the monarch of Latveria for help.

Problem: Doom doesn’t like the idea that Namor came to him as a last resort, so he refuses. And as he always does, he has a Plan B of his own, one that involves having the Mad Thinker study a piece of one of the dead Earths. Also, he’s got the Molecule Man waiting in the wings.

The most confusing part of the issue is whatever is going on in Wakanda, where both Black Panthers lead a strike team to try taking out the hidden base of the Cabal. It’s implied that the world leaders have given Wakanda to the Cabal to use as a staging area for fighting off Incursions, in which case Black Panther can’t possibly still be with the Illuminati … except as we learn later, he still is.

Anyway, Maximus and Promixa Midnight are able to fend off the attack, and T’Challa leaves Shuri to go down fighting. Or something. It’s also clear that the Illuminati are on the run, which meshes with what we saw in this month’s Avengers.

Everything else is “Bad People Doing Bad Things,” with Thanos getting the alternate world Professor X to beg for his own death. Fairly yawn-worthy, unless you thought Thanos was a nice guy for some reason.

I made it all the way down here without mentioning the art by Valerio Schiti. He draws a really cool looking Dr. Doom and an unusually skinny Thanos.

Favorite moment: From Doom naturally: “You should have though of that, Namor, and more carefully considered your position. You should have known better … Doom is no man’s second choice.”

Final thought: Are we to assume the same people who believe the Illuminati are doing unspeakable things in defense of our own world are okay with the Cabal doing even worse things? Because that makes zero sense to me.

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