Avengers: Endless Wartime

Marvel doesn’t do a whole lot of original graphic novels.  Their last one was the (quite good) “Halo” one from several years back, and I imagine that was down to the licensing directives of Microsoft and Bungie more than anything else.  However, the company constantly gets its ass handed to it each year when the BookScan numbers come out and we see that not only is the bookstore audience not all that interested in the latest installments in their superhero stories, but that they can’t even get a boost through their enormously successful film franchise either.  Even DC has people beating down their door for more “Batman” collections whenever a new movie comes out.

So how does one rectify this problem?  “Avengers:  Endless Wartime” represents one such answer.  Get an A-list writer in Warren Ellis, and a solid superhero artist in Mike McKone to put out an original graphic novel that isn’t (too) directly tied to current continuity and put it out just in time to cash in on the success of Marvel’s latest TV venture, and the DVD release of “Iron Man 3.”  The idea is that the company finally has something to offer casual fans looking for an “Avengers” comic to read without the baggage of the ongoing narrative of the Marvel Universe.

Of course, it would also help if the book was good.  Speaking as a confessed “Ellis Completist” this was decidedly “meh.”

The book opens up in Marvel’s all-purpose middle-eastern country Slorenia with the deposed elements of its former government shooting down an unmanned drone.  This wouldn’t be a newsworthy event, except for the fact that it not only has U.S. Air Force markings on it, the drone has far more fleshy bits and weird tech than you’d expect from these things.  Things start getting interesting when Steve Rogers recognizes the name of the island where the private military contractor, Hereward, that fielded these things calls home.  He recalls that there was a secret Nazi superweapon facility there in WWII.  As if that wasn’t enough, Thor shows up and recognizes the squishy parts of the drone as coming from the legendary beast of the World Tree called Nidhogg.  In a remarkable coincidence, the beast broke out of Asgard right onto the island that housed the Nazi facility Captain America attacked in WWII.  Though they both thought their respective targets were destroyed, the appearance of this drone suggests something new is afoot.

So we’ve got a threat from the shared pasts of two “Avengers” threatening the world today.  Not the most original of starts, but surely Ellis has a way to put a fresh spin on it?  Though he ties it to the idea of fighting wars by proxy with outsourced armies, they’re really just big monsters that need to be beaten up by our heroes.  The bits that tie them to Cap and Thor’s history will also feel pretty generic to anyone who has read enough stories about these characters over the years.  Hell, it’s pretty rare to find a “Captain America” story that doesn’t involve his past coming back to haunt him in some way.

The action itself is pretty standard-issue and you won’t find many decent examples of the characters using their powers in new and interesting ways here.  In fact, there’s not a whole lot of action in the majority of this book.  Ellis has gotten a lot of flak over the years for advocating the trend of “decompressed” storytelling in comics which has led to a lot more talking and a lot less fighting for superheroes.  That may be true, but I’d still argue that superhero comics have gotten better since then as we’re no longer trying to cram in plot and story at the expense of everything else.  (Of course, I do nearly all of my reading through collected editions so readers of monthly pamphlets may have a different perspective here.)  Even though his characters do spend a whole lot of time talking, Ellis can usually be counted on to have them say something interesting to keep your attention.

Not here.  After the initial burst of action in Slorenia, we get three long scenes of conversation between the cast in Avengers Tower.  They feel much longer than they actually are because we also get flashbacks between them to Cap and Thor’s plot-critical actions in WWII.  Every action scene is followed by pages of characters dissecting the plot and telling us all of the information we need to know about it.  This would be less of a problem if Ellis’ gift for witty and snarky dialogue was in effect, but something went strangely wrong here.

The writer has given us lots of characters over the years like Spider Jerusalem and Elijah Snow who project an outwardly misanthropic view of humanity, yet actually have its best interests at heart.  They’re not warm and cuddly characters while their bitterness at the way the world has turned out around them only makes the moments where they do show that they actually care all the more affecting.  In “Endless Wartime,” Ellis has missed that mark.  Instead of a group of battle-tested comrades who joke amongst each other because they know the other person has their back, we get a bunch of quip machines who toss off casual insults like they were nothing.  Really, the snark factor of the dialogue reaches frustrating levels early on and leaves you wondering how these people stand to be in a room with one another let alone function as a team.  By the end of the book, I was feeling genuinely sorry for Tony Stark who is introduced here with Carol Danvers casually asking Steve if he thinks about killing the inventor, and things only spiraling downward from there.

It’d be nice if this project could be redeemed by the art.  Though McKone does a solid job with everything, there’s nothing here that has a real “Wow!” factor to it.  I will say that his monster designs are pretty good, and he makes the reveal behind the leaders of Hereward much creepier than I was expecting.  The man also does a nice illustration of Nidhogg in Yggdrasil’s roots and I wish we’d seen more stylistic detours like that in this volume.  Then again, he’s also hamstrung by the sheer amount of talking heads he has to draw here.  Some artists are really good at making that kind of thing visually appealing.  McKone, unfortunately, is not one of them.

The best outcome I can hope for this volume is that it sells a ton of copies and gets a whole new audience to check out Ellis’ other works.  I can then only imagine their surprise when they read them and go, “Hey!  All of these are so much better than that ‘Avengers’ graphic novel he did!”  Though it had such promise, I can’t imagine “Endless Wartime” satisfying any but the least demanding of readers.  Reading this makes me want to break out my copies of “Transmetropolitan” and relive the writer’s glory days.  Hopefully, Mark Waid and James Robinson will view this as a cautionary tale as they ready their “Spider-Man” graphic novel “Family Business” for next year.