Having spent (or misspent) some of my youth enjoying professional wrestling, I always found it interesting when two "bad guys" would face off. It was usually part of a set-up to give one of the guys a "face turn" - in other words, they were in the process of turning him into a good guy. But when the process first starts, the crowd often wasn't sure who to root for. In fact, sometimes they wouldn't root for anyone.
That's about the best description I can find for what's going on in Dark Avengers. You have nothing but bad guys on display here. The new Avengers team is made up of murderers and psychopaths, so you can't root for them.
They spend this issue trying to protect Dr. Doom, and he's the baddest villain Marvel has - so you can't root for him.
They're fighting against a powerful and vindictive Morgana Le Fey, who seems to be killed, only to show up again, none the worse for the wear. She accomplishes this by... well, I'm not sure how she does it. Anyway, you can't root for her, either.
And at this point we run out of characters, so you have a team of villains fighting to protect another villain from a powerful villainess. It's really hard to care about the outcome.
Give Brian Bendis credit - he's working hard to keep us interested by providing lots of sharp conversation and quite a bit of action. But despite that, this story just seems to be crawling.
They've been fighting Morgana for two issues now, and little has been resolved.
But the art is tremendous. Mike Deodato seems to be channeling Gene Colan here, and his art has rarely been more dynamic and fluid.
But with a price tag of $3.99, one expects more than endless fight scenes between demons and murderers. So far, I have to say that Dark Avengers has been largely disappointing. There are just too many "heel turns" for me.
Grade: B-
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