CREDIT: Marvel Comics
Rating: 3.5/5- The Avengers and X-Men Team Up to Prevent World War Hate.
by ComicSpectrum reviewer Gabe Bustamantez.
Rick Remender has been building to this big moment since the end of Avengers VS X-Men and the start of his Uncanny Avengers series. That’s 3 years worth of groundwork being laid down that have led us to Marvel’s latest event crossover, which is Professor X’s worst nightmare come to life. Mutants are being gathered and imprisoned in reeducation camps on Genosha by the Red Skull, now reborn as the Red Onslaught.
Rick Remender and Adam Kubert collaborate to put together a huge team of Marvel’s mightiest heroes. The cast of Axis is just about every active Avenger and X-Men brought together against Red Onslaught’s psychic attack that has crippled the entire world with hate. A hate that causes division within the X-Men and Avengers teams and also reveals a darker and more sinister time during Tony Stark’s tenure as the leader of SHIELD (which was way more interesting to me than Tony Stark’s big secret during Original Sin).
Adam Kubert is one of my favorite and longest working comic book artists that Marvel has on staff. He is back drawing Onslaught after drawing the original incarnation of the character back in 1996. Kubert can produce some great layouts and his body language and storytelling skills are excellent in this issue, every character is posed with perfection and ready for action, but there is little additional detail in his figure drawings. Almost everyone’s eyes were black dots or solid black circles and it was hard to determine exactly how Red Onslaught looks. Is Red Onslaught a disembodied head floating slightly above his shoulders? I couldn’t be sure with the lack of details. That “minimalistic finish” artistic choice didn’t provide enough elements for me to fully enjoy the set pieces, figure work, or action. Throughout the issue there was a “Axis” board running across the top and bottom of the pages that was very distracting and noticeable because the font still makes “Axis” read to me as “Sixis” and at one point it skips a few pages and then starts again. That kind of design features should not be noticeable or distracting.
This large scale story is peppered with lots of huge action pieces involving world-wide threats and high stakes for the Avengers and X-Men. Axis sets up a far-reaching story and looks like the start of an interesting event, but how self contained will the story of Axis be? Will it be understandable within the main Axis title or will the reader need to also jump aboard some of the other Axis related titles and mini-series in order to soak in all that’s going on? That unknown element mixed with the lower than expected art quality from Adam Kubert and slight event fatigue has made me decide to not come back for #2 and instead “trade wait” on this storyline.
Reviewed by: Gabe Bustamantez
(gabe@comicspectrum.com)
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Reblogged this on Rants, Raves & Random Things and commented:
This is shaping up to be an interesting series. Not great, but it’s still reads pretty well. I would up it to a 3.75 to 3.9 personally.
I respect your ability to have that degree of accuracy in rating a comic.
We only have granularity to the half point, so it’s 3.5 or it’s 4 here….
Would you round it up to a 4? Or down to a 3.5?