2024 (another ) Avengers Annual 1

 

Let's be brief.

No. Thanos does NOT fight alongside the Avengers.  

The only Avengers in this book are Thor and Captain Marvel who are literally there for filling and making this an 'Avengers' title.  

The rest of the Avengers are all stuck on their "easier to get to world emergencies space city" because transporters are out.  Yes, the only Avengers in the entire Marvel Universe (in which every hero or anti hero is a standby or active roster Avengers) are stuck in space until they tell Thor in the last panel "We can beam down now". It is that lame.

This is, as it becomes very obvious and at warp speed, an Infinity Watch Preview. WTF are the Infinity Watch? I could not give a toss. Every single member of, no doubt, "Marvels latest sensation", were so badly characterised and acting like petty teenagers with dialogue that at times made the 1960s MLJ Mighty Crusaders comics look like Shakespeare writing at his best (no, William Shakespeare did not write for MLJ -Archie Comics- in the 1960s). 

 All I could think was that these were badly written throw-away characters for the plot and when they were being killed off I uttered the words "best move to date" but, of course, they all came back in the end.

I did use the word "plot" back there.  That made it seem that someone had sat down and written a good story.  They had not. No characterisation, no real action that was worthwhile and no Avengers (well, just two).  I even started asking myself whether the writer had ever seen or read anything with Thanos in before.

In recent years Avengers annuals have mostly all been number 1s (well of course they have because Marvel assumes that everyone buying comics is so dumb they cannot count beyond 1).

I have all the Avengers Silver and Bronze ages annuals as well as King Size and do you know what is in them?   Avengers (it sort of went with the title). Also, characterisation, plot and good dialogue. And they had fun and action in them.  Okay, modern writers (as we shall call them) get their literary education through TV, You Tube and movies. They obviously do not read books or anything that teaches them the basics.  The old writers got inspiration from movies but their major influences were literature. They read the classics, they read mythology and they were highly literate and good at what they did. Kirby was massively influenced by mythology and as he pointed out several times, Lee was a classics guy and the Thing joking about the words Reed Richards used was basically an in-joke (Lee being Richards and Kirby being Ben Grimm).

What we have with the 2024 Avengers annual is something with no merit or value. And this is what Marvel has done to its once proud flag ship title (with Fantastic Four fairing a little better).

The actual monthly Avengers title goes from fairly readable to piss poor and ....Marvel doesn't care. They are all getting pay cheques so can sit back and be lazy. This current book, as an annual, would never have even gotten through as a rough draft in the good days of creative Marvel.

Those days are gone.