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Credits

• Writer: Brian Michael Bendis
• Artist: Frank Cho

Quick Summary

Capt. America confronts Spider Woman alone, asking her, “Who are you working for?” A hesitant Jessica Drew explains that Hydra offered to help her regain her powers, if she would agree to reinstate her status as a SHIELD operative and act as a Hydra spy. Drew contacts Nick Fury, who encourages her to go through with the plan, asking her to become a counter-spy for SHIELD, a secret only the two of them will share. Jessica agrees. She tells Capt. America that the procedure to regain her powers took seventeen months; she can now fly, as opposed to simply gliding as she could in the past.

Unhappy in her role as a double agent, Drew recieves a mysterious call from Fury; he says he’s “going underground,” leaving her in a precarious position. She explains to Capt. America that some group or power is behind what is going on internally at Hydra; it is her feeling that the same power is also “eating SHIELD from the inside.” She denies knowing Fury’s current whereabouts. The rest of the team has been listening without Jessica’s knowledge. Capt. America asks them if they believe her story. Most believe her or state that their powers reveal that she is not lying. An angry Capt. America tells her she should have trusted the team from the beginning.

After Jessica’s cell phone rings, a hologram of Nick Fury appears above its speaker. Fury has been listening to the entire conversation with Jessica’s knowledge, and asks the team not to be too hard on her for mistakes that are essentially his own. He asks them to turn on their television. A newscaster is reporting on the new and brightly-lit architectural additions to Stark Tower, which have the city spellbound. Iron Man says, “It’s time for the world to meet the New Avengers.”

Commentary

This is only issue 14 of Bendis’ New Avengers, but it feels like the writer has already contributed 50 issues or more to the franchise, which is not the same thing as saying he’s put his stamp on the book in an entirely positive manner. Issue 14 is a perfect example of Bendis’ style, and the style of writing that has generally taken over Marvel under Joe Quesada’s auspices. Readers get 22 pages of explanation that would have been told in 6 concise, dramatic, and effective panels by several of the earlier writers on the book, including Roy Thomas, Roger Stern, and Kurt Busiek.

Few will be surprised to discover that Spider Woman has not genuinely betrayed the team at heart, and that Bendis relays her story with complete sympathy. Which is a far cry from the manner in which he’s portrayed the Scarlet Witch over the last two years; very little actual insight has been provided concerning Wanda’s motives, intentions, and actions; by comparison, Bendis has denied Wanda a voice altogether.

The story is coherent and makes rational sense, but in an predictable manner. One again, Bendis seems to have written the story with the belief that such a tale has rarely if ever been told in comics or film, when, in fact, readers have seen this kind of tale innumerable times with a wide variety of heroes playing the role that the victimized Spider Woman plays here.

The worst of it is that, as a specific character, Spider Woman still fails to come definitively alive in three dimensions: while clearly not the Black Widow, Mantis, or Moondragon, this Jessica Drew could easily be the Wasp, Mockingbird, Ms. Marvel, or even one of the weaker interpretations of the Scarlet Witch. Bendis’ Spider Woman certainly seems to have little in common with the strange, aloof, and somewhat alienated super hero of the Seventies.

For the purposes of New Avengers, Bendis has already normalized the Sentry. Now Spider Woman seems to be receiving a similar faux-humanizing treatment, but, historically speaking, the team already has several essentially ‘normal,’ balanced, clear-thinking, and disciplined female characters, including Janet Van Dyne, Monica Rambeau, and Susan Richards. With Wolverine rarely a threat in any current Marvel title in which he appears, what New Avengers badly needs is a unpredictable, wayward character on par with Moondragon, especially now that the Sentry has lost his teeth.

This issue once again proves that Bendis’ New Avengers has to be taken for what it is if readers want to enjoy it. A more admirable hero might have had the nerve to initially confront the Avengers concerning her predicament, and thus provide a more challenging and complex story. By here making Spider Woman utterly sympathetic, at least in theory, Bendis also reduces to mush what little tension her plight might have engendered.

Bendis’ New Avengers lacks energy, as it lacks traditional hero-comic thrills. If he can’t provide authentic drama, which probably few fans probably demand or expect, some old school hero-comic melodrama—an imaginative and colorful sense of immediate threat, risk, and conflict—would suffice nicely.

At present, for example, whomever or whatever is controlling Hydra and SHIELD has raised no suspense whatsoever. Bendis appears to be attempting the protracted style which Chris Claremont executed in Uncanny X-Men in the Eighties, but, if he is, he isn’t succeeding thus far. Claremont succeeded in creating a small mythology of mystery, complexity, and ostensible loose ends which reared their heads at the most unexpected moments, but Bendis’ ongoing tale of organizational corruption, ‘stockpiled’ super criminals, and internal treachery is strictly out-of-sight, out-of-mind. It doesn’t enter into the reader’s imagination, but rather remains stubbornly on the page.

While it thankfully lacks departing artist David Finch’s severity, Frank Cho’s perfunctory art goes too much in the opposite direction: the pages frequently look like cartoons, and Cho seems to have little interest in details or backgrounds.