Uncanny Avengers #9 Review

With most Avengers titles currently gearing up for Infinity, it's all the more refreshing to have a book like Uncanny Avengers that is allowed to do its own thing completely independent from the rest of the Marvel Universe. But that hardly means Rick Remender is quietly sitting in a corner and letting everyone else play with the big boy toys. The scope in Uncanny is as huge as anything you'll currently find in Marvel's lineup. It's event-worthy storytelling without the need for an event comic.

Issue #9 sees Remender tightening the noose around the necks of the Avengers Unity Squad. Apocalypse Twins Uriel and Eiman have just finished murdering thousands of Apocalypse acolytes and harvesting seeds from the corpse of a Celestial. What do they do for an encore? Nothing the Avengers are going to be happy about. Remender exploits the growing friction among the team members in a major way this month. Wolverine's X-Force sins come back to haunt him, the Rogue/Scarlet Witch tension boils over, and the continued survival of this fragile alliance seems to grow less likely by the minute.

It's fun to see the Avengers struck by the same sort of dysfunction that the X-Men deal with constantly, and Remender deserves credit for not merely drawing the line down the middle of the Avengers and X-Men characters. The disagreements and rifts are more complicated than home team loyalty.

The only area where this disunity doesn't quite work involves a training sequence where several characters squabble over Havok's controversial "Don't call me a mutant" speech from issue #5. On the plus side, the dialogue expands on the message Remender was trying to convey and should put to rest any further accusations of racism or cultural insensitivity (not that those accusations were ever justified). On the negative side, however, this sequence involves so much dialogue, some of it completely redundant, that the book begins to chug as a result. Issue #9 is generally well-paced, full of action and character drama in equal measure. That only makes those few pages stand out all the more.

I've had my fears about whether Daniel Acuna's art would maintain high levels of detail and consistency as the monthly grind sets in. While issue #7 offered cause for concern, Acuna has been in top form since then. Acuna is able to convey the scale of the Remender's conflict wonderfully. Meanwhile, his shadowy and moody characters do a great job of hearkening back to Jerome Opena's work on Uncanny X-Force while still maintaining a fresh look and feel. And that's important, as the series continues to dabble heavily in threads from UXF.

Jesse is a writer for various IGN channels. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter, or Kicksplode on MyIGN.

Source : ign[dot]com