The Avengers: Four

Tight. I liked it.

Four is a retro-flavoured miniseries written by Mark Waid that has Captain America heading a new Avengers team after the OGs “decided to take some time off.” So they’re now down to four members: Cap, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, and Quicksilver. Since the newbies are all “reformed villains” and relatively underpowered Cap has his work cut out for him whipping them into a functional unit. A point that’s underlined by the way they get their butts kicked out of the gate by the Frightful Four, with all the bad press that follows. Egged on by the media, even the public start getting into it, mocking the “Mighty Pretenders.” Things are really not off to a good start for the not-so-fab four.

Things get much worse however when they rescue a young Thai lady named Cressida from the Stranger. Cressida has the power to drain the life force from others, leaving them dried-up husks. She can either absorb that life force or transfer it to someone else, making them “better, faster, stronger.” Which sounds a bit like being a coach for the Olympics.

The Avengers basically adopt Cressida and start calling her Avenger X. But she has nefarious plans of her own, apparently being motivated by revenge. I don’t know for what. Her character isn’t filled in very much, and she even mocks the suggestion made at one point of providing an origin story. The Stranger considers her to be not a mutant, even though she says she’s had her powers since she was a kid. I think we just have to take her as a given.

She’s a formidable enemy though, both in how she schemes to set the Avengers against one another and for her (borrowed) superpowers. Indeed, she’s basically too much for this new team and at the end the OGs have to come back and lend a mighty hand. Which I thought was a bit of a cop-out. The story arc seemed to be the familiar one of the team coming together and solving their own problems. The way they’re thrown a literal lifeline here undercut all that.

Still, I loved the throwback feel to the art and the way the story held together. It’s a nice, satisfying unit, with all the different sub-adventures contributing in different ways to the main Cressida storyline. In terms of character the good guys are conflicted and the bad guys wicked in their usual bickering, arrogant way. Good and evil are complementary and evenly matched, and Waid can bring both darkness and humour to the proceedings (Wizard’s epitaph for Avenger X was a bitchy twist I wasn’t expecting!). In sum, it’s nothing wildly out of the ordinary, but it does everything a superhero comic is supposed to do, which was a treat.

Graphicalex