For those of us who lamented the loss of a neat book like Christos Gage’s Avengers Academy in favor of Dennis Hopeless’ “Let’s Watch All These Characters Die” series Avengers Arena (although rumor has it that the deaths might turn out to be fakeouts after all), we may do well to check into the Matt Kindt/Steven Sanders series The Hunt, which ties into Marvel’s big Infinity event pretty directly, although odds are you won’t need to read it to follow the main storyline. However, if you want to see the vast array of superheroic schools that the Marvel universe has to offer, The Hunt gives you more than you thought there were. Also, if you like the oppressive misery of Avengers Arena, chances are you’ll get some of that, because these kids suddenly have to go up against the Black Order of Thanos when all they expected to do was have little extracurricular tournaments between schools.
Infinity: The Hunt #1 starts off with our famous faculty members – Hank Pym of Avengers Academy, Logan of the Jean Grey School, She-Hulk of the Future Foundation and Meggan of the Braddock Academy, discussing what they’re calling a “Contest of Champions,” where the kids from all the schools will compete in various games, all hosted at the AA in Palo Alto, California. Most of this first issue reintroduces us to those schools – literally, it’s a big auditorium where the teachers are actually introducing each school – as well as a few new ones we hadn’t heard of, such as The Pan-Asian School for the Unusually Gifted, the Wakandan School for Alternative Studies and, believe it or not, the Latverian School of Science. Yes, Dr. Doom’s homeland has a school… as well it should (although Kid Omega Quentin Quire is far too excited about that revelation).
The events of Infinity begin to tie in when they make mention of an Atlantean school that was refusing to participate due to tensions between them and Wakanda, but suddenly, Namora transmits a distress call about Atlantis being mysteriously under attack, and it turns out that the AA’s town is as well. If you recall, Fear Itself threw Nazi war machines at the young students of AA and forced them to grow up in a hurry, and it looks like this might do the same for the rest of these schools.
Kindt makes liberal use of thought balloons in this issue to help us get into the heads of all these new student characters in the limited amount of time he has to get us to care about them – and you don’t really notice how rarely thought balloons are used anymore until you see them used a lot. Not a lot happens in this issue until the end, but it’s a deluge of new characters and slightly less new ones we haven’t seen in a while and, well, the ones we still get to see in FF and Wolverine and the X-Men, and that’s cool. I’m not a huge fan of the whole “legacy” thing in general – never been big on the Teen Titans or Robin or Kid Version of Adult Hero stuff – but Marvel’s really got a great way to introduce young new characters all the time with this proliferation of schools for supertypes. I’d buy a Wakandan School series on its own merits, and most definitely a Latverian School… although it’s a fine line to ride with Dr. Doom between making him awesome and making him goofy. He can go both ways, but he works better when he’s awesome, and kids giving wedgies to Doombots would be less cool. But I digress.
The only real problem I have is that Kindt occasionally errs a little on the side of exposition at the expense of dialogue, like Meggan chirping to the assembly about the Braddock Academy’s truancy problems – it’s a reference to how many of them are trapped in Avengers Arena, but you’d think an entire academy would mean more than a handful of students. But Kindt has an old school sensibility going on, so you can easily roll with it. Sanders’ artwork is adequate – I was amused at the height differential between Logan and She-Hulk, and the design for the Pan-Asian school is pretty snazzy, as is the complete layout of Avengers Academy, but his faces are a bit lackluster at times. They seem a bit sketchy here and there, but they’re good and expressive, so that’s a plus. Better than I could do, certainly.
Overall, the issue is pretty fun, with a dark swerve at the end that will likely shift the tone drastically. Still, some of us were worried that the Avengers Academy characters wouldn’t resurface again without a claustrophobic trauma forcing them to kill each other for quite some time. At least this time, if they get killed, it will be by bad guys.
