Comic Book Review: Dark Avengers #7

Posted on July 20, 2009 by Amber Love
Tags: Cory Petit, Dark Avengers, Luke Ross, Mark Pennington, Marvel, Matt Fraction, Rain Beredo, Rick Magyar

Chapter 3 of the Utopia crossover event brings Cyclops face to face with Norman Osborn and Emma searching for the real X-Men.

DARK AVENGERS #7
Publisher: Marvel
Writer: Matt Fraction
Pencils: Luke Ross
Inked by: Rick Magyar, Mark Pennington, Luke Ross
Colorist: Rain Beredo
Letterer: VC’s Cory Petit

Summary: “UTOPIA: CHAPTER 3″ The DARK AVENGERS/UNCANNY X-MEN crossover continues! San Francisco teeters on the brink of absolute chaos and the X-Men keep getting in the way of Norman’s vision of law and order. So Norman takes his game to the next level: who are the DARK X-MEN? And will Norman’s Avengers play nice with Norman’s X-Men? Here’s a hint: no.

Review: Most comic book readers have a love/hate relationship with the editorial concept of the Crossover Event. They can be fun as readers see mismatched characters make cameo appearances in each other’s books. On the other hand, a crossover has plenty of down sides including adding an expense to one’s monthly comics budget and it opens the doors for some really bad storytelling in universe-altering plot lines.

This issue of DARK AVENGERS tries to address the one problem with crossovers - that a reader might not know who the characters are. Matt Fraction gets credit for giving each character a descriptive bubble with sarcastic narrator commentary. On the other hand, it jostled my attention span to have to read so many of these in one issue and be confronted by characters with which my familiarity is lacking. I have no care or attachment for them so it came through as just distracting noise interfering with an important story.

Without divulging too many spoilers, you might be interested in this issue and the crossover in general, to see the new dark characters (X-Men and Avengers who “answer to” Norman Osborn). The character designs themselves are classic with a modern feel. Luke Ross was wise to change Emma Frost from her signature skimpy white outfit to a fully covered shiny black ensemble with fur trimmed cape; sure she has plenty of sparkling cleavage but it’s nice to see Emma get a make over into another version of the Black Queen (not to be mistaken with the Black Queen/Goblin Queen). Emma just gets a gothic make over but Beast has a Mirror Time* doppleganger (You should know your Star Trek references). Dark Beast doesn’t get much focus in this issue but there’s enough to make me wonder why such an evolved X-sapien needs glasses. Sure, he’s a psychotic scientist who takes pleasure in performing experiments on live test subjects, but come on, glasses! It would have been less cliché to give the furball some laboratory goggles instead.

The real Beast is imprisoned in an adjacent cell to Professor Xavier by our fearless leader, Norman Osborn. Dark Beast was able to mask the prisoners from Emma’s sight with holograms but she and Xavier are Marvel’s royal couple of telepathy! She and Xavier communicate just fine through the holograms. One thing about Emma is that she’s got the maternal instinct within her in the same way as Mystique. Sure, they’re bad girls and it can be hard to tell what they’re up to, but Emma’s internal dialog has made it very clear that she doesn’t trust Osborn and that her loyalty is to mutantkind.

It’s also good to see Cyclops acting like the team leader he was always meant to be. His face-off with the Iron Patriot (Osborn) is disappointing in the sense that it’s just the verbal threats akin to dogs growling at each other through a securely locked fence. I feel a shadow looming overhead that sometime in the near future, these two alpha males will have their pissing contest by way of a mutant versus high-tech smackdown brawl.

Guide to Utopia: