Tuesday, March 22, 2016

New Avengers #4 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

Either I'm missing something or Ewing is being way too subtle when it comes to conclusions that we're supposed to be drawing here.

Last issue, M'Ryn the Magus -- the elder of the group of Kree/Skrull hybrids that selected Teddy as its king -- forbade his daughter, Mur-G'Nn and the group's champion, Lan-Zarr, from hunting down Teddy.  As such, I was somewhat confused when they did exactly that.  In this issue, Ewing makes it clear that M'Ryn did give those orders, but it wasn't him -- Moridun did, after he possess M'Ryn (as we also saw last issue).  However, unless I missed a page last issue, we never actually saw a Moridun-possessed M'Ryn issue those orders; I'm merely inferring them from Mur-G'Nn's comments here.  Needless to say, it feels like a fairly significant oversight, given how important that it is to the overall plot.

In terms of the rest of the developments, I can't say that they're necessarily any clearer.  M'Ryn uses a moment of distraction to inject himself into Billy, who's unaware that he did so.  However, his decision to rename himself Demiurge is supposed to show us that Moridun is already negatively affecting him.  (Billy renamed himself because he was apparently offending the Wiccan community, according to one of his teammates.)  Ewing weirdly chooses comedy to convey this (somewhat serious) situation, including an interaction between Teddy and Billy where Teddy says that he feels like he's being hit over the head by something obvious and Billy refers to an itch in the back of his brain.

To make matters odder, Lan-Zarr decides to allow Teddy to simply leave with Excelsior, the space version of Excalibur, even after all the trouble that he endured to recruit him.  He basically wishes him well and hopes that he'll realize his destiny to lead his people one day.  (Of course, we also learned in this issue that only seven of his people exist.  Actually, three of them, including M'Ryn, appear to die, so I guess we've got only four of them now.)  I get that Lan-Zarr can't exactly force Teddy to stay with him, but I'm not really sure what conclusions that we're supposed to draw about Teddy at this point.  He simply abandons his people (even if it's just four of them) and his purported destiny to live on Earth?  He doesn't even ask additional questions?  Also, Lann-Zarr and the other three hybrids can't just move to Earth to be with their king?  It just seems too easily resolved.

I've mentioned that I'm not really feeling this series, and I think I've had enough.  I'm going to hang in here until "Avengers Standoff" concludes, but, if it doesn't improve, even Billy and Teddy can't save this title for me, unfortunately.

** (two of five stars)

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