Review by Ian Keogh

This second slightly smaller than trade sized paperback is a puzzler. Instead of following on from Private Eye by concluding Kelly Thompson’s 2016 Hawkeye series, it instead reduces Kate Bishop to team player by repackaging West Coast Avengers: City of Evils and The War of the Realms: Journey Into Mystery. It’s not even the first volume of the Avengers series either, which at least explains how such a wildly divergent cast came together. It’s as if there was a plan for a middle volume that was never published.

As seen throughout her handling of Kate Bishop, Kelly Thompson is a fine writer of comedy superheroics. She forces incompatible characters together, makes that work through efficient plotting and bonding via some frankly ridiculous situations, and writes consistently funny dialogue. However, as with all comics, so much is dependent on the art, and over the first three stories here Daniele Di Nicuolo sucks any life from the scripts. His layouts are basic and without backgrounds, the characters have default facial expressions of frowning, smirking or scowling, and the lack of imagination generally reduces decent stories to ordinary.

Of the two other artists drawing Avengers chapters, Gang Hyuk Lim is the name to watch. He’s not yet great with panel to panel continuity, but there’s life and a wider range of expressions to the cast. Moy R’s cartooning lacks the same feeling, and they draw the cast as adults rather than teenagers.

How good Thompson’s scripts could look is proved by André Lima Araújo drawing the War of the Realms tie-in, except she’s not the writer. The plot and script are provided by the four McElroys, responsible for the podcast of that name, who also adopt a comedy tone. Don’t worry about the connection points with the main event, as this stands alone. Asgardian Balder has been among the dead for some while, but returns to the living here and undertakes a mission to protect a baby. He’s told of the heroes who’ll help him, but by designations rather than name, so ends up with Kate as an archer rather than Clint Barton, a new form of Deathlok and Wonder Man who’s now decided he’s a pacifist.

Araújo is far from a traditional superhero artist, yet can deliver action, and there’s a great appeal to the way he crams the assorted heroes, and a large talking dog, into the back of a campervan, and then often has them just wandering around chatting. There’s a delicacy to his cast, and he’ll frequently come up with viewpoints that work just fine, but wouldn’t occur to other artists.

Five chapters of Araújo’s art and decent writing pull Team Spirit to above average, but Kate is best seen as part of a team in West Coast Avengers: Best Coast.