Review by Frank Plowright

Marvel’s hardcover combination repackagings are being issued ever nearer the original material’s first release as trade paperback collections. Do they fear the end of print? This combines the first two volumes, or dozen issues if you’d prefer, of Jason Aaron’s 2018 Avengers reboot, and there are teething problems.

Every new Avengers writer is faced with the decision about how far to go in respecting traditions while still delivering something relatively original, and Aaron opts to begin with the all-out cosmic battle of Celestials arriving on Earth. It’s not a poor idea, not just not handled as well as it might have been. Ed McGuinness certainly delivers the power and energy you’d want from such a confrontation, and Aaron starting with the core Avengers trio of Captain America, Iron Man and Thor and working out from there hits the right notes. Loki’s part and dialogue is well considered, and while he might not at first seem ideal, the Robbie Reyes incarnation of Ghost Rider supplies a good visual, broadens the cultural diversification and adds the wonder any newcomer should feel about the Avengers and their world. Intriguingly, there’s also a team of Avengers a million years in the past.

For all that, the opening six chapters prove rather the damp squib, and Aaron mistakenly opts to cover events via dialogue in hindsight and take the ending for granted.

There’s more enjoyment to be had from the following six chapters in which Aaron delves more into the ideas he has for the Avengers, and establishes some of the threats they’ll face. A form of real world political division looks to make their lives more complicated, and this takes into account such matters as Dracula ruling the vampire community from his castle in Transylvania. Aaron also establishes a back-up team of support staff, spies and reservists for the Avengers, and most are fun. The technique of here not filling in details and letting readers imagine proves a successful device in the right circumstances.

After McGuinness drawing the first six chapters (sample spread) the art sprawls all over the place, with David Marquez the most frequent contributor. He uses a bright and open superhero style very different from that applied when the vampires return to the agenda in Vol. 2. The biggest surprise artistically is Andrea Sorrentino moving away from his excessively detailed and surely work-intensive style for something simpler, yet equally accomplished.

If preferable, paperbacks The Final Host and World Tour can be picked up splitting this content.