Secret Avengers #36

There’s a lot of events happening around the Secret Avengers, much of which revolves around what sounds like a strange dysfunctional family with Father, Mother and Brother at the helm of all their troubles.

Writer: Rick Remender | Artist: Matteo Scalera

Cover: Arthur Adams & Jason Keith| Publisher: Marvel

 The Secret Avengers has the most potential to be the coolest, most badass series, with some favourite characters like Hawkeye, Beast, and Venom to name a few. Plus with Rick Remender as its writer there’s so much that could be done to just make it a series just full of  ‘awesome’, and maybe that’s the problem. They had all this potential, all these ideas, and then they got carried away. Maybe I’m just a dense reader but when it comes to Secret Avengers it always takes a couple readings to get what’s going on and sometimes I’m still confused. Admittedly things are making more sense as we near the conclusion to this story but there’s still so much to follow.

The Secret Avengers isn’t a small team (then again there’s no team that’s remarkably small, where’s the fun in that), but what ends up happening is they try and follow all the characters in one issue and the pacing seems a little off.

That isn’t to say that it’s not worth a look through though, that is if you have any sort of affinity towards the characters. Each character is written wonderfully and spot on (Spider-Man remains as piquant as ever and Giant-Man’s total rage out in the name of science at the end of this issue makes the whole thing worth it to be honest), and the art! The art has no flaws; body expressions say everything as well as facial expressions and the art just serves to remind us how crazy Venom is (in all the best ways). It’s dark without being gritty and the action is dramatic without being campy. It’s gorgeous.

Now that everyone knows who the imposters are and Henry Pym seems to have his senses back, there’s hope that they’ll finally do something about this “Father”-foe of theirs. To be honest the whole Father, Mother, Brother, naming convention throws me off and seems creepy and not in a good way. There’s also that bit about Brother being Captain Britain’s father and I’ve just thrown everything into the wind at this point.

There’s about fifty things going on it feels like, and nothing feels like it’s been solved or at least close to concluding, and it’s a right mess at points trying to keep it all up. They’re all good plots, truly, but all together it’s cluttered and not the easiest to get through.