A review by miguel
New Avengers Volume 2: Infinity by Jonathan Hickman

3.0

New Avengers has a terrible premise and a misleading title. The boring hand-behind-the-throne machinations of the Illuminati are altogether uninspired and unengaging. If not for containing crucial story elements (for understanding the Infinity event) and an uncharacteristically brisk pacing by New Avengers standards (as a consequence of the Infinity event), I would recommend steering clear of this volume at all costs. Worse, still, is that in relation to the otherwise well-attuned Infinity, New Avengers feels pretentious and disingenuous in its aspiration to engage with complex truths. Rather than providing insights into the nature of superheroic morality, it bungles the opportunity with ham-fisted cliches and needlessly complicated nonsense.

Beyond the fundamental problem of the premise, New Avengers is an opportunity to showcase everything Hickman's run of the Avengers isn't. These characters are poorly developed, and not for lack of trying. The crucial issue here is that the "willing to get one's hands dirty" mantra of the Illuminati is fundamentally at odds with the sort of universe that Marvel is. Because of the grandness of the fiction and the immensity of the powers wielded by the given characters, moral compromises lose their value when they can be corrected with ease. Compounding the lack of weight of the moral dilemmas present in the book, the characters themselves don't behave in a way that is consistent with the mandate of their organization. Reed glibly comments on his willingness to, if all good solutions fail, destroy various other worlds in the multiverse to save his own. However, little is done to characterize the mental toll this takes on Reed — if there is one at all. The rest of the cast behaves similarly, with Tony Stark's personality being the most incongruous and Dr. Strange's being the most bland. It's almost as if these characters know whatever great weight they take upon their shoulder in the form of unethical behavior, the consequences will be undone at the whim of a future writer.

New Avengers tries to showcase the ugly, uncompromising, and immoral truths of superhero-dom and the Marvel universe, but instead feels contrived and inconsequential.