We start this issue with Spidey telling young Nova that his predecessor's name involved a joke "in there if you think on it," a "joke" that Remender has probably been waiting to tell since he was 12 years old. But, "'Dick' Rider" winds up being one of the more subtle moments of this issue.
One of the more interesting parts of last issue was that it was hard to tell exactly what happened to the Avengers and the X-Men. They seemed...off, but it wasn't totally obvious. As I mentioned in that review, I only realized that everyone's "alignment" was inverted when I read an advertising blurb for "Captain America and the Mighty Avengers" #2. But, Remender jettisons all subtlety here. Sue Richards, Wanda, and Sam Wilson are reduced to raging assholes. Honestly, I kept waiting for Sam to drink from a goblet filled with the blood of a virgin. It's just so remarkably over the top. It's actually an interesting experiment, taking Sam from LG to CE or Wanda from CG to LE, but Remender doesn't do the hard work of wondering what the character truly would be like under those circumstances. He just seems to embrace stereotypes of evil and goes from there.
The only decent moment is Spidey grabbing Nova and throwing him from Avengers Tower to prevent him from getting swept into Sam's dragnet, but that moment doesn't really go anywhere. Magneto just eventually nabs them and smuggles them to Steve. Remender does manage to raise some excitement about the prospect of us witnessing the beginning of the Age of Apocalypse, as he and the X-Men demand that all humans leave Manhattan, but, honestly, it's too little, too late.
* (one of five stars)
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