Avengers Beyond #4 // Review
There were a few people who received the kind of power that could have made them heroes. They could have been much more than people with power. Instead, they got lost in it, and now they’re up against a very real group of heroes who don’t want to hurt them in Avengers Beyond #4. Writer Derek Landy attempts to take a novel look into the nature of power and heroism in an issue drawn by penciller Greg Land with embellishment by Jay Leisten. Color adds to the atmosphere courtesy of Frank D’Armata. What Landy and company are trying feels admirable, but it’s not carried to the page in a way that feels insightful.
Iron Man calls them the Bootleg Avengers. They were pawns of greater power. A cosmic squabble between entities of great power has created a shield around the planet. This has made the real Avengers’ work that much more difficult. To make matters worse, they are forced to deal with that team as they seek to maintain dominance. One of them wields a hammer like Thor’s. One of them wields Captain America’s shield. They were the neighbors of a powerful extraterrestrial. They asked that entity for power, and they got it.
There’s a common observation about superheroes. It states that most people given the kind of power they have would tend to be a lot more petty about what they do with the power. What makes a superhero a hero is not the power, but what they do with it. Some of the central conflict of the fourth issue of Landy’s Avengers series explores a little bit of that premise without actually providing a hell of a lot of insight into it. It’s not a bad sentiment, and it IS actually sort of fun to watch it play out in relation to beings of massive, cosmic-level power, but it feels like Landy’s trying to pad out the plot and add a bit more to the Avengers’ plate before they head off to deal with bigger problems.
Land and Leisten make it all look pretty solid. The Bootleg Avengers actually look kind of interesting. The idea of making perfectly normal people have power and then...hurling them at real superheroes could theoretically make everything work. And it’s intriguing to see how that plays out visually, but it doesn’t have the contrast that it would need to really develop into something big.
As had been the case with Landy’s All-Out Avengers, the writer is clearly planning things in a way that could really turn into something later on. There are clearly plans that involve bigger themes and a more extensive plot. The fourth issue in the current series doesn’t feel like it has the kind of momentum it would need to turn out as satisfying as All-Out Avengers. With Landy’s preceding Avengers mini-series, there was an intriguing plot construction that seemed to be leading somewhere. With Beyond, Landy seems to be a bit more directionless than he was with the previous series.
