In the Fortress Yashida in Japan, members of the Hand attempt to persuade Kenuichio Harada to reassume his identity of the Silver Samurai and accept leadership of the organization. Madame Hydra appears and tells him that both SHIELD and HYDRA have fallen into chaos, and that the Hand may be the 21st century’s successor to both. A ninja approaches, explaining that a “battle is underway” with “American costumes heroes” whom the ninjas have “engaged” without apparent instruction to do so.
At Tony Stark’s Osaka penthouse apartment, the gathered Avengers, sans the Sentry, are attacked by dozens of ninjas as Ronin lies wounded at their feet. The ninjas, apparently receiving orders from Madame Hydra, retreat. Ronin rises, apparently unharmed.
Spider Woman glides across the city to the fortress, where she finds Madame Hydra standing alone in the courtyard. Madame Hydra states that whomever it is she works with have returned Spider Woman’s powers to her and thus “own” her. As a part of the “deal,” Spider Woman is also supposed to report the Avenger’s activities to an intermediary party. Realizing that the Avengers are following Spider Woman, Madame Hydra instructs Spider Woman to hit her “with a venom blast,” then later help her escape when commanded to. As the Avengers approach, Spider Woman blasts her to the ground. The team asks several times why Spider Woman went into action on her own, and asks what she and Madame Hydra were discussing. The Silver Samurai appears.
Avengers # 12 provides a blasé read. Again, as with several issues in the first New Avengers arc, ‘Breakout,’ this issue and its predecessor could easily have been condensed into one more effective issue.
Ten pages are filled with a canned battle between the Avengers and the ninjas; these pages are also heavily padded with Bendis’ glib, cheap, and smug attempts at humor. Here, even Captain America begins spouting gibberish while waging a presumably life-and-death battle. Readers may get the impression that Bendis is bored with his own story and simply has nothing at all to say about the team, the characters, or the situation he has written them into, especially since there’s little doubt that the Avengers will persevere. It’s difficult to imagine a more tepid and uninvolving battle scene than this.
The balance of the issue revolves around the rise of the Hand as the millennium’s new criminal superpower, which has ties to the earlier ‘Breakout,’ in which SHIELD was depicted as internally troubled and corrupt. As Madame Hydra, a. k. a. the Viper, and her cronies are revealed to be the parties to whom Spider Woman is secretly reporting, Bendis is obviously telling a larger story and working with a fairly broad canvas somewhat in the style of Chris Claremont’s Eighties Uncanny X-Men.
The difference is that Claremont’s stories worked independently as well as novelistically, while Bendis’ New Avengers tales, on an issue-by-issue basis, are rather sluggish, self-conscious, and calculated: the reader can sense Bendis mapping out his plot, and thus what little immersion the reader may find in the actual material evaporates. In this issue, there is no genuine drama or suspense whatsoever.
Potential new member Ronin gets very little panel time, and might just as well be absent altogether.
Finch’s art continues to be impressive and beautiful to look at, but is also rather static, especially in the battle scenes. Both ‘Chaos’ and ‘Breakout’ have suggested that battle scenes are not his forte. However, considering the book’s history and the state of the industry today, readers should probably be glad to have Finch onboard for as long as he remains.
The issue features the kind of discrepancies that are becoming one of the hallmark of Bendis’ Avengers work. For example, Captain America tells Daredevil that forty-two criminals recently escaped from the Raft, and yet Captain America’s main concern, strangely enough, is infiltrating the Japanese criminal underworld—in Tokyo no less—to prevent the Silver Samurai from seizing control of it.