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What happens to a book trapped between two events?

The Mighty Avengers feels like it is supposed to be the "widescreen" version of The Avengers.  After Brian Michael Bendis has spent the last few years redefining the team in the pages of New Avengers, Mighty Avengers feels like it should be the big action, larger-than-life team that New Avengers really never was.  There's no Luke Cage or Spider-Man on Mighty Avengers and, therefore, no controversy about the lineup.  With Wonderman, the Wasp, Ms. Marvel and even Black Widow, it is a fairly conventional Avengers lineup and it is taking on the larger than life threats such as Ultron in the first volume and now Venoms and Doctor Doom in the second collection, Mighty Avengers: Venom Bomb.

There are a lot of things happening in Venom Bomb, starting with the apparent defection of Spider-Woman from the New Avengers to the Mighty Avengers, with a Skrull corpse in tow.  Before the Mighty Avenger can fully decide on accepting their new member, New York City is under attack as the population of the city turns into Venom creatures.  But that turns out to be a diversion from what appears to be the true threat and the cause behind the Venom bombs, Doctor Doom.  Venom Bomb has so many details crammed into it that it's difficult to figure out what the focus of the book is supposed to be.  Is it a Venom invasion story?  Is it a Skrull invasion story?  A time travel story or a Doctor Doom story?  Well, in fact it's all of those and it's nominally an Avengers story.

In the early days of New Avengers, Bendis usually balanced the action with character moments, giving such non-Avenger characters like Spider-Man and Spider-Woman time to define themselves within the larger team structure.  For some reason he's avoided that with Mighty Avengers, which could probably be called "Iron Man and the Establishment Avengers."  Sure, Wonderman and Ares get the occasional spotlight during a fight but neither is given much more than a superficial reason for being part of the team.  How do these characters reconcile the Registration with the fact that one of their own, Captain America, is dead after fighting the registration?  How do they feel actually working for SHIELD and the government when another group of people calling themselves Avengers is running around?  Bendis doesn't have the time or space to confront these questions because he's got bigger issues to deal with-- Skrulls.  Venom Bomb and actually the whole Mighty Avengers title suffers from being crammed in between Marvel's two big events, Civil War and Secret Invasion.  This book could serve as a nice look back at the ramifications of Civil War but it spends too much time having to set up Secret Invasion to do really do either properly.

The multiple aspects of Venom Bomb could easily have supported their own stories.  The idea of using the Venom symbiote as a biological weapon is fascinating and chilling, especially when the heroes themselves are vulnerable to the Venom virus.  The Skrull threat could fill up its own book (hey, it is-- Secret Invasion #4 on sale next week!) and anytime the Avengers take on Doctor Doom should be a huge battle.  Unfortunately the five issues that originally made up this storyline just weren't enough to give each story the room it needed.  The Venom invasion is over before it really begins and it's not until later in the book when Doctor Doom has to play Doctor Exposition and weakly explain what really happened  through the new-fangled Bendis thought balloon.  On top of that, the Skrull threat is reduced to Tony Stark looking at everyone and thinking "you may be a Skrull but I don't know."

Mark Bagley joins Bendis for this storyline, producing some old school, John Buscema-like artwork.  Unfortunately, Bagley's artwork doesn't flow as well as Buscema's ever did so the book ends up looking old school without any real style to back it up.  Bagley is a workman artist but is hardly known for any design sense or excitement on a page.  Battles between Iron Man and Doctor Doom that should feel powerful and threatening feel staged and easy.  The book also clumsily plays with the art styles, changing it up a bit in the second half when it changes up time periods.  When Doctor Doom travels back to medieval Europe, Marko Djurdjevic steps in to provide some lovely painted artwork.  But when the story jumps to a 1980-ish Marvel time period, the coloring changes to resemble the older, cruder coloring used before computers and printing advancements.  Unfortunately, those periods scream "look at us and how clever we are" and the stylistic change is only a surface change and doesn't really mean much.

Venom Bomb is stuck between two massive storylines and suffers greatly for it.  None of the different story aspects have the space to properly breath or develop in anyway other than on a purely surface level.

Mighty Avengers: Venom Bomb
Written by: Brian Michael Bendis
Penciled by: Mark Bagley
Inked by: Danny Miki & Crime Lab Studio's Allen Martinez & Victor Olazaba
Additional Art by: Marko Djurdjevic
Colored by: Justin Ponsor & Stephane Peru
Lettered by: Artmonkey's Dave Lanphear



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