Dark Reign

Anyone else digging on this storyline? I think it was sort of rushed into birth, and I'd have enjoyed more of the transition/buildup over to everybody being willing to hand Norman Osborn the deed to the ranch. But accepting his position as the premise, it seems like an incredibly promising springboard - I just love the old-school gimmickry of having a team of Evil Avengers. Seems like it has more hooks than Secret Invasion, where the heroes were replaced by non-characters and didn't know about the switcheroo. I've been burned by the last few big Marvel stories but I'm crossing my fingers on this one...

Suspect, incidentally, that its success is going to depend on how consistently Osborn is written; Civil War was wrecked by internal miscommunication about what Stark's motivations and deeds actually were. I hope they can stay on target with Osborn's "Thunderbolts" portrayal as an unrepentant supervillain just barely holding together the illusion of being a sane, competent hero - and beneath that, a complete lunatic just barely holding together the illusion of being a sane, competent supervillain...

I like it so far. I'm just confused about what's going on with the Avengers books. Are there now three? If Dark Avengers is the Osborne Avengers, and New Avengers is like Wolverine, Luke Cage, Ms. Marvel, Bucky, etc, then what exactly is Mighty Avengers?

Stark & company now discovering what it's like to be the scrappy outsiders, I think - I read the first issue of it and I already can't remember. Oh wait, um...it's got Herc and Cho, and Hank Pym and Jocasta, maybe more of a conventional Avengers Lineup?

It's the Mighty 70's Avengers (maybe we can get Wonder Man and Beast to complete the cast). Don't forget, we also have Avengers Initiative and the supposedly coming Secret Avengers (Nick Fury and the legacy children). The Marvel Universe is just Avengers, X-Men and the Guardians of the Galaxy. Except for Guardians they're all pretty bad.

I like the big idea of Dark Reign (fox in the henhouse) but I don't think Bendis is doing (or will do) any better with this than he did with the Skrulls. Maybe Thor will end up flying in and hitting Osborn with a lightning bolt and it will all be over, except for the magic pixie dust he's sprinkled on Wolverine's son which will kill all the mutants unless he's sent to another dimension. I like Bendis on Ultimate Spider-Man and on his Daredevil run, but his teams and/or events really fall flat. Too many personalities for his chat-tastic style to come to grips with, I guess.

I'd think it would be easier to keep things straight if the bad guys are in charge more so than someone is a secret skrull. At least you always have the crazy card to play off with Osborn to explain erratic behavior, which works better than some of the stuff that they had Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic doing during the Civil War beats. The villains also have way more personality than the Skrulls.

Knowing old school Avengers history, I'd think someone could do a really cool story in that Mighty Avengers:

You got Hank Pym back from Skrull captivity
+ You have the seeming death of The Wasp
+ You have this junior version of the Vision (get back to the original Ultron progammed version somehow, it is more cool!!!)
+ You have Jocasta showing up (another robot made by Ultron w/ brain patterns of Janet Van Dyne)
+ You could bring back the Scarlet Witch (which has all sorts of screwy things to the mix)
+ Add in the updated version of Ultron Vista Leopard and let it go.

Someone good should be able to make some Avengery comics out of that combination.

Or at least a kick-ass Operating System.

I griped about this already on the Secret Invasion thread -- it seems like a blatant ripoff of DC's "President Lex Luthor" bizniz. On the other hand, I like the Marvel U. better than the DCU, so I'm sort of enjoying it so far. It seems like a storyline that doesn't really have enough legs to give Dark Avengers an ongoing title -- a 3 issue D.A. mini and a couple of issues each in New, Mighty and Thunderbolts would cause less event fatigue. Is Dark Reign the 2009 Big Summer X-Over Event or is something else coming?

Five bucks* says Dr. Strange swoops in from nowhere late in 2009 to settle this hash.

*Hand-drawn bills, not legal tender, send SASE to pick up yr winnings.

I've read through some of the Secret Invasion stuff and found it pretty meh, it looked pretty good, but not much story.

I'm read up on Thunderbolts 122-128, which is the invasion up until the current issue and I have to say I kind of like it. I got the first trade by Warren Ellis and probably will read it up to 121. It looks like this series kind of has some pretty long story lines dealing with Zemo, what is the next good entry point in Thunderbolts before the Ellis run?

I also read the first Dark Avengers issue and thought it was a pretty good setup. I noticed on Marvel's site they are not taking subscriptions on the title, so I think it might be planned on being a close ended series, even though it is not being setup as a mini-series.

I think Osborn will do himself in as he cannot help but go after Spider-man and somehow in going after him it will bring him down. It is just too tempting for him.

Long term kind of thing that seems kind of unresolved is the items dealing with the Scarlet Witch, which kind of started this whole cycle in the Marvel Universe. She goes nuts and wastes the Avengers, goes crazy and wastes the mutants and all of this creates a vacuum for the Skrulls to get fresh and a schism in the classic hierarchy with the Civil War. I have to figure that it is more than an offhand comment by Janet Van Dyne to her that sets her off the deep end and in the end it will probably come down that Loki (or maybe Doom- but less likely) is behind her going crazy. Loki mistakenly created the Avengers, granting his half-brother some great and powerful allies that have helped to shame him over the years.

You kind of have the table set for a big show down of the really big villain guns minus Magneto, I could see whatever transpires to be the big storyline that redeems Iron Man for all the bad things he did and leads to some Avengers united kind of storyline.

http://i297.photobucket.com/albums/mm211/TotalWorldDomination/DarkReign-Namor.png

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FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH:

DARK REIGN: ZODIAC = surprisingly good, Casey's best stuff in, I dunno, years. It's jolly and amoral, kinda CASANOVA in both the (very) Paul Pope-ish art stylings and in the way the central character seems like a merging of Cass and Newman Xeno. ALSO HAS: odd DARK KNIGHT fixation.

I just finished reading Siege, and I gotta say this whole Dark Reign + Siege thing was much worse cordinated than the previous Marvel crossovers. Starting from Straczynski's Thor and all the way through DR we see that Loki is manipulating the events behind the scenes, and all this leads to the attack on Asgard. Loki is using Norman Osborn to instigate the siege, but then when it's actually happening he suddenly changes his mind and actually dies defending Asgard. The explanation Bendis gives for this is that Loki didn't realize how powerful Sentry was, and he didn't want Asgard to be completely destroyed. But there's still a couple of big questions left unanswered:

1) Loki has been observing the Dark Avengers for a quite some time, plus he's a freakin' god, so shouldn't he have known the extent of Sentry's power?

2) If Loki didn't plan the outcome the Siege had, then what was his plan? Why did he manipulate Osborn into attacking Asgard? This question was never properly answered, and considering Siege was the culmination of a huge crossover that lasted over a year, you'd think explaining the motive behind it would've been something Bendis & co wanted to do.

Also, in the Siege: Loki one-shot we see Loki manipulating Hela so that she promises Loki won't go to Hel when he dies. You'd think this was an important plot point (maybe Loki planned his heroic sacrifice in advance?), but AFAIK nothing comes out of it. And I have a hard time believing Loki died as easily as he did in the hands of Sentry. He's supposed to be a master magician, and during Simonson's Thor run we see him survive a decapitation by Balder (not to mention standing his ground against Surtur), so it was kinda anticlimactic to see him die with less of a fight than Ares.