So when I caught wind of a FCBD event here in Saigon, I was pretty excited. The Amazing Comics is just starting out as a dealer/distributor of American comics, toys, and gaming products, and they don't have a storefront yet, but they rented space for a day and pulled off an excellent Free Comic Book Day party a week after the official date in the US. We picked up three of this year's official freebies, and I also bought a couple of Marvel comics for the Kiddo, who the previous day went to see Avengers: Age of Ultron for the second time.
I have a small set of pictures from the event here.
And now, on to the first review!
Title: Free Comic Book Day 2015 (Avengers)
Issue:1
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Date: June, 2015
Writer: Mark Waid, Charles Soule, James Patterson, Marguerite Bennett
Artist: Mahmud Asrar, Brandon Peterson, Alex Sanchez, Stephanie Hans
Colorist: Frank Martin, Justin Ponsor
Letterer: VC's Joe Sabino, VC's Clayton Cowles
Cover: Jerome Opena, Frank Martin, Nick Bradshaw, Richard Isanove
Editor: Tom Brevoort, Will Moss, Jon Moisan, Charles Beacham, Nick Lowe
Not technically a flip-book, but it does have a fully-illustrated back cover featuring the Inhumans in addition to the Avengers front cover.
There are actually three stories. First up is the Avengers, which features the latest team lineup: Iron Man, (female) Thor, Vision, (Sam Wilson) Captain America, plus three younger members, Spider-Man, Nova, and Ms. Marvel, all depicted as teenagers.
This is something of a tryout for the new team members, and their first battle as Avengers against the Radioactive Man does not go well. Still, they pull together and learn a bit about the real meaning of what the Avengers are all about. Including a discussion of how "The Avengers" is actually not exactly a perfect name for the team.
This was goofy fun for the most part, although it had a couple of surprisingly grim moments considering the overall tone.
Second story was Inhumans, which features the creation of a couple of new Inhumans as a cloud of terrigen has apparently been wandering around the world, causing Inhumans to manifest their powers and abilities. There are also some Hydra agents, who are intent on collecting up and enslaving those new Inhumans in the hopes of using them as pawns in their usualy Hydra-ish schemes. Or something.
The beginning of this story features a lot of clunky dialogue as characters are forced to over-explain everything just to set the scenario up for the reader. It gets a lot better when Medusa and some of the Inhumans team (minus Black Bolt, but plus Human Torch, go figure). Medusa is great here, largely because of the thorough trouncing she lays down on the over-explainy Hydra leader. One of the new characters introduced, an engineer whose hands become weird energy-projecting coils, also shows a lot of potential, and there's some good dialogue between Medusa and Johnny Storm at the end.
The third story is a quicky: A four-page preview of Marvel's adaptation of James Patterson's Max Ride. It's effective and visually interesting. I haven't read the prose novel, but this was at least enough to pique my interest, which is about what Marvel was hoping for with four pages to work with.
Nothing here is stand-out great, but each of the three stories had their moments.
Rating: 6.5/10
