I know, I know... not another negative review of a Chuck Austen comic book. To be fair, I have written positive reviews of some of his work, but it's scripts like this one for which Austen has become known in the industry as of late. Once again, Austen has some solid ideas at the heart of this story, but the strength of those ideas is lost to the execution. Implausibility seems to be the defining characteristic of this issue's story.
The Avengers set up a temporary headquarters in a Stark mansion on English soil in the wake of their battle with the Wrecking Crew. After locking up the quartet of villains in a special cell, the heroes focus their attention on the sad result of that conflict, and that's the civilian who died protecting two unconscious Avengers. They have to break the news to the dead woman's two children, one of whom comes to hate the man she saved and one who turns to him for comfort. Meanwhile, Hawkeye decides to have an angry little confab with the four brutes in lockup.
Well, I'll give Sean Chen credit... he and inker Tom Simmons certainly seem to strive to achieve a consistent visual tone with Olivier Coipel's distinct style, which graced the first two issues of this story arc. The fill-in artists fall short of that goal, though, and what we're left with is some fairly standard super-hero artwork. The emotional nature of the script here calls for something a bit darker, and some of the linework comes off as a little rushed here and there.
Easily the most frustrating aspect of the script is Austen's jarring shift in direction for the Wasp/Yellowjacket relationship. Things go from zero to dysfunction in about 1.4 seconds, and it's so sudden that it just doesn't work. Previous writers on this series have focused on how the relationship has grown healthier and how Hank Pym has come to deal with his problems. Austen apparently has some fondness for the times when things were their most volatile between the two heroes. That's fine, but the writer's failure to gradually lead the readers back down this familiar path doesn't serve the characters or the story well.
In order for this general plotline to work, the reader has to accept a couple of hard-to-swallow ideas. He has to accept that the Avengers are strangers to the notion of civilian casualties, and he has to accept the notion that Hawkeye is a complete moron. I didn't accept those notions, and it weakened what should have been a rather sad story that tries to explore the notion of permanent consequences to even super-hero violence.
Of course, that focus is thrown out of the window by the end of the issue. The reader is lead to believe that even for this average single mother, death isn't quite a sure thing. I was intrigued by this average person's role in this story arc, but now the character is apparently going to be transformed from average into extraordinary, and it detracts from the notion of sacrifice that was an important theme of this story.
