New Avengers: The Collective (4)

What, another New Avengers review? I know, but I needed to get through it so that I could read the New Avengers: Civil War which I’ve been hanging onto for a while as I am thinking of collecting all the Civil War books even though I thought a few of them were horrible. I’m also really trying to force myself to review each TPB I read right before I read another one because otherwise I’ll put off the reviewing and it’ll never get done (like my DC & Darkhorse reviews). So yeah, another New Avengers review. 😛

Ok, now that all of that nonsense is out of the way, how about I talk about the book. Honestly I was a bit disappointed, not just in this book but in how the entire New Avengers series went after Vol 1 (Breakout). Secrets & Lies was much better than Sentry, but The Collective is nearly as frustrating as Sentry was.

The vague story, there’s some entity that comes from space and takes out a town in Alaska and Maria Hill, Director of Shield reluctantly asks for help from the Avengers. Relations between the team and Shield are at an all time low which effects the entire story.

What I liked best about the story was the first chapter in which Luke Cage took the Avengers to the streets of Detroit to actually try and make a change that would effect the every man. It had nothing to do with the story really, but it wasn’t inane like the rest of the book.

Spoiler

The story opens up with a discussion between Tony Stark and Maria Hill about the House of M. She wants to know what it was and he plays coy about the whole subject and then snubs her.

Ok, so an entity falls from space and destroys a city in Alaska. Ms. Hill sends a Shield team out to investigate and they die before they even get close. They call in Alpha Flight and this entity kicks their ass and actually kills a good part of the team. When it turns towards US soil, Maria Hill has no choice but to summon the Avengers, who in turn summon Ms Marvel.

As a team they face the entity and discover his power level is really too much for them to handle. Sentry makes an appearance and shoves the entity up into space where it can’t hurt anyone while the rest of the team tries to figure out what this entity is and how they can stop him.

With the help of Vision the team discovers that the entity’s power are those of the mutants who lost their powers following the House of M. Still in the dark about the whole thing, Ms Hill captures Spider-Man and has her team of psychics rip the info from his head, along with his secret identity. The Avengers come to bust Spider-Man out but by then he’s already been released by Shield.

In the meantime the entity returns to earth and heads straight for Genosha where a de-powered Magneto is writing his auto-biography/suicide note. The entity reveals itself to him as Xorn and repowers Magneto with everything it’s got so that he can crush the homo-sapiens once and for all. Wolverine says it best when Vision states that his files on Xorn are incomplete by responding, “Xorn’s files on Xorn are incomplete” and this book does nothing to make it any clearer.

So Cap brings in an ace called Quake to give Magneto something akin to a stroke and then Iron Man contains the energy of Xorn before Sentry throws the entity made up of raw mutant powers into the sun. Right…

Oh, and the mutant who had no idea he was a mutant and just happened to absorb all the missing mutant energy and get controlled by the Xorn entity regains his senses and that’s the beginning of Weapon Omega.

So what did we really learn in this book? Not all that much, but Maria Hill kept mentioning the registration act in her effort to foreshadow the events to come. In fact, even though it appeared like the emergence of this entity was important at the time, it really wasn’t. I almost get the feeling that this book acted merely as a placeholder before the whole Civil War storyline began and they really didn’t want to rock the boat right before whole Marvel universe was changed forever.

Where would I rate it? Above Sentry but below Secrets and Lies and again, I’m disappointed in the series as a whole because it had so much promise.

Story
Artwork
Value
Can It Stand Alone
Cool Factor
Average