Avengers vs. X-Men #4

I freely admit that I'm a sucker for the old Marvel formula, "Heroes meet, heroes fight," even though I know the third part of that is always "heroes team up to fight the bad guy."

It's tried, it's true, and when done right, it's entertaining.

Look at The Avengers movie, which featured (at one point or another) almost every hero fighting with every other hero.

Thus we have the success of the Avengers vs. X-Men event, as one army of heroes fights another army of heroes.

And it works! The action is actually a bit thin in this series, because the fighting part of the program has been farmed out to other titles - Uncanny X-Men, Avengers, Versus, etc.

We get lots of glimpses of those fights, but the majority of this issue is given over to an actual discussion with Hope, the mutant at the heart of the threat.

The Phoenix Force is making its way to Earth, and the mutants are welcoming it as a possible cure for their race - while the Avengers are more concerned about the fact that the Phoenix tends to destroy worlds on a regular basis (we've seen three worlds destroyed in this series so far).

There's a lot to like here - a sharp script by Jonathan Hickman, and more excellent, cosmic-scale artwork by John Romita, Jr. and Scott Hanna.

I enjoyed this issue much more than the last chapter, because the characters actually are behaving... well, in character. They seem a little quicker to use their intelligence, rather than punching first and asking questions later.

But there is a lot of punching, too.

Grade: A

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