New Avengers: Secret Invasion, Books 1 & 2

Remember how I talked about on the podcast earlier this week about how reading the events in “Blackest Night” made me want to go check out the tie-in volume of “Green Lantern” to see how it filled in the gaps.  Then I went on to say that while it had some really good parts, the stories there really didn’t do much more than fill in these gaps in a very exposition-heavy way.  Well, these volumes of “New Avengers” are just like that, only worse. 

As it turns out, the nitty-gritty details behind the Skrulls plan to invade the Marvel Universe make for pretty dull stories the way that writer Brian Michael Bendis tells them.  Now there are some nice details, such as finding out that the events of “Annihilation” sparked their plan, and seeing how they tricked “Reed Richards” into finding a way past the humans’ skrull-detectors, but the vast majority of these stories just explain things that I really didn’t care about (despite nice art from Billy Tan and Jim Cheung).  The exceptions here are the two issues with art by Michael Gaydos which focus on Luke Cage and Jessica Jones’ relationship during key parts of the crossover.  Effectively, these are just two more issues of Bendis and Gaydos’ excellent “Alias” series and show that the man still hasn’t lost his touch for writing these characters even when he’s hip-deep in crossover nonsense.