Avengers: Unleashed vol. 1 — Kang War One

I’m not saying that Mark Waid should stop writing stories involving time travel, but it’d be nice if he could try to write one that didn’t thrive on creating as many paradoxes as possible.  Between that one volume of “Hulk” he did and now this first volume of “Avengers:  Unleashed” it doesn’t seem to be a viable approach for him as this approach usually results in narrative chaos than a good story.  At least this story is following up on the plot thread set up towards the end of Waid’s first run of “Avengers” where Vision kidnapped Kang as a baby and hid him somewhere in the timestream.  Instead of wiping the time-traveling conqueror from existence, this just pissed him off and led to multiple versions of him hunting down this current team of Avengers — with Spider-Man, the new Wasp, and Hercules joining holdovers Captain America, Thor, and Vision — for revenge.

If you’re looking for a good Kang story that doesn’t get tripped up in paradoxes, check out Rick Remender’s “Avenge the Earth” saga from vols. 2-4 of his run on “Uncanny Avengers.”  “Kang War One” spends its first half churning up as much chaos as it can with the multiple Kangs and the team having to deal with the problems that arise when they were murdered in their cribs as children.  Artist Mike Del Mundo is more than willing to play into all this craziness, with his unique painted style proving to be well-suited to it all.

Things do calm down in the back half with a single issue made up of full-page scenes recounting Kang’s origin and eventual downfall, with the two issues that follow showing us how the various teams of Avengers in different eras make it happen.  These are more conventionally well-crafted superhero stories that have their moments — to be fair, even the front half has some fun bits strewn throughout — but they’re not enough to overcome my antipathy towards the first half.  I’d say that this would be a good jumping-off point for people who have followed Waid’s “Avengers” run so far… if it wasn’t for the fact that they’ll be teaming up with “The Infamous Iron Man (A.K.A. the newly-reformed Doctor Doom) in the next volume.  Having Waid deal with the character drama that will result from it seems like a much better use of his skillset than what we got with this volume.