Warren Ellis writing a stand-alone graphic novel about the Avengers sounded like a fantastic proposition from the get-go. The notion that he wouldn’t have to really plug into any current Marvel continuity and could just take these characters and tell a story with them made Avengers: Endless Wartime something to anticipate hotly. Surprisingly enough, though, this is a story that could easily plug into Marvel NOW just about anywhere, and while there are some interesting ideas proffered about the nature of the Avengers and outsourced warfare, the end result is a story that is entertaining but maybe not quite as exciting as we might have hoped. That’s surprising, given that it’s a book about Earth’s Mightiest Heroes fighting Norse Nazi Maggot Robots of Death.
The mythical Marvel nation of Slorenia is currently a hotbed of political strife, where a democratically-elected government is holding off a rebellion from the regime it displaced, and in the midst of this war-torn region comes even more war-tearing in the form of drone strikes from America, the preferred method of impersonal murder in support of the current regime. When one of the hardened soldiers manages to shoot one of them down, they discover that this is no ordinary drone. It’s some kind of mechanized creature bearing the logo of the U.S. Air Force and a private military contractor named Hereward. Once the Avengers get wind of it, Captain America recognizes the hardware from his World War II days – a secret Norwegian island where Nazis made “wunderwaffe” aka “wonder weapons” – and Thor recognizes the monster part of it as the spawn of the Nidhogg, an evil beast he once shamed himself by getting drunk on battle while trying to kill. The two of them, driven by a need to settle scores in their pasts, drag the rest of the Avengers (Iron Man, Hawkeye, Captain Marvel, Black Widow and Wolverine) into the midst of this international incident and uncover some fresh secrets that throw them for a loop.
As usual, Ellis dialogue is fully engaging, making the team feel like real people who know each other and make an art out of razzing Tony Stark and Clint Barton, who give almost as much as they take. Hawkeye takes a lot of crap throughout the story, but he gets his moment at the very end, providing a cynical but morbidly inspiring summation of just what it means to be an Avenger. It’s also got a bit of sensibility invoking the Marvel Cinematic Universe as well, especially when Bruce Banner shows up about halfway through and constantly refers to “the other guy.” The commentary on mechanized, impersonal, privatized warfare and its depressingly inevitable nature are also food for thought.
Mike McKone is a solid artist, but if anything took some of the wind out of the sails of this project, it was the fact that a little too often, I found myself looking at his renderings of the monsters and action sequences and wondering what the hell I was looking at. The Captain America flashback fight when he’s jumping from airplane to airplane is amazingly done, but once the Norse Nazi Maggot Robots of Death show up, they’re kind of indecipherable and wind up looking a lot like amorphous blobs of silly-putty with random tech spattered throughout them. It eventually saps the fluidity from the action, and by the time the Hulk shows up, it seems all too stiff and stilted, which is the opposite of what should happen when the Hulk shows up.
Avengers: Endless Wartime is still very much worth the read, though. Getting into the head of Steve Rogers, with incredible insights like “The future is a foreign country. All the things he loved are buried a century past, and all the things he hated never died” are powerful, as is the notion that World War II keep springing back up in his life because it’s like some “tarry quicksand that never stopped trying to drag him under the ground where he belonged.” It really makes you feel for the guy, especially once Hawkeye tells him “It never, ever ends, Steve. Only old people think things end.”
It’s Warren Ellis. He always gets the benefit of the doubt.
