Don’t worry, faithful readers. I haven’t changed sides. Yet. But after this week’s Avengers Academy, I started getting a little inkling of concern for our boys in red, white, and blue.
Avengers Academy is a book I picked up kind of on a whim a couple of months ago and it’s pretty good. I like the student characters of this book more than I like the students over at Wolverine & The X-Men’s Jean Grey School of Higher Learning. The group dynamic is nicer and none of the characters annoy me simply for existing, unlike Kid Gladiator and Idie.
Don’t worry, Broo. We’re still cool.
This month’s is tied directly to the big Marvel event that’s going on. I may have mentioned it before. It’s called Avengers vs. X-Men and it deals a lot with Hope Summers and Wanda Maximoff vying for the Phoenix Force. Or something. Issue 3 of AvX hasn’t really moved the plot along in such a fashion that we really know what’s going on yet. In Avengers Academy, Wolverine and some of the Avengers have brought the students from Cyclops’ Utopia (at least, I think that’s who they are. I don’t read any X-titles except Wolverine & The X-Men) to stay with Hank Pym, Tigra, and apparently nudist Hercules.
This image is so classy, the internet only has the artsy sketch of it.
Obviously, nobody is happy about this. So Hercules wisely decides that the kids should compete in Olympics-inspired events to see who is better? X-Kids vs. Avengers-Kids.
Ahhhhh, see what they did there? Now the kids are competing, but instead of fighting or warring (you know, the same thing that caused the Schism between Scott and Logan all those months ago) they’re playing competitive games. With superpowers. What could go wrong?
Actually, nothing really goes wrong. There is a race between Lightspeed (who may be this week’s Comic Crush This Week) and some X-Kid. Lightspeed wins, because she totally freaks out the competition by mentioning that she’s dating a girl. Then there’s some talk about surfing, for some reason, and Hazmat, the Avengers-Kid, declares the X-Kids the winners because they did something nice for her boyfriend.
Hazmat and Mettle, Avengers prom queen and king, respectively.
This declaration sparks some upset amongst the group as a whole, because the X-Kids still think they’re in prison and the Avengers-Kids feel bad for them. So they all go to watch TV.
Elsewhere, Sebastian Shaw hits himself in the head with books until he escapes actual Avengers prison. Good for him. Bad for us? To be continued!
Not a bad issue, but between that and AvX #3, not a whole lot is really going on with the big crossover event. However, the Avengers holding the X-Kids against their wills stinks a little like Iron Man locking up those who didn’t agree with in the Negative Zone waaaaaaaaaaaay back in the Civil War (Marvel Civil War, not the American Civil War). This makes me nervous, because it paints the Avengers to look more like bad guys than the X-Men. Once you start taking folks’ rights away, you start losing sympathy. C’mon, guys.
Prisoner–Occupant, Po-tay-to–Po-tah-to.
I’m still holding out that the Avengers are the right side. They might not be doing everything as heroically as they could/should, but I still hold that they’re the only ones who have a chance of doing anything about the oncoming Phoenix Force.
Besides, we still haven’t seen much of Wanda Maximoff, yet. We still don’t know what her angle is….
