In Manhattan’s Central Park, SHIELD agent Sharon Carter tells agent Daisy Johnson that “Captain America needs you.” Meanwhile, in the Stark Tower, the Vision is discussing Avengers history with the members of Young Avengers when Iron Man sends him a message that the Avenger’s emergency files are needed immediately.
Meanwhile, in Cleveland, the Collective, who has grown to enormous size, is destroying the city. Iron Man orders the rest of the team to leave just before the Collective causes Iron Man’s armor to fly from his body in pieces. A flaming Ms. Marvel, who has unexpectedly regained her Binary powers, saves him before retuning to attack the giant figure, who easily defeats her. The Sentry appears and attacks the Collective, carrying him off into outer space, but the Sentry is defeated too, and the Collective turns back towards the earth. Meanwhile, Ms. Marvel tells the others that she felt like she was fighting 50 different entities at once, while Captain America gives Iron Man’s armor a command to go in search of its owner.
On the SHIELD helicarrier, Spider Man, Agent Hill, and the Vision, in conjunction with an off-site Iron Man, review the information they have available. They learn that a man named Michael Pointer worked for a post office which was also ground zero for the Collective’s arrival on Earth. Checking the files, they see that there is a strong resemblance between the postal worker and the Collective. The Vision identifies the being’s energy signatures, which appear on an enormous screen as belonging to some or all of the mutants who were recently de-powered, including Polaris, Magneto, Mesmero, Quicksilver, the Blob, and many others. Spider Man is the first to realize what the Collective might be as it streaks back into the atmosphere.
New Avengers # 18 is a perfectly serviceable issue of the title. It moves quickly, and the appearances of the Ms. Marvel, the Vision, and the Young Avengers add enormously to the book’s tone and color, especially since Luke Cage, Wolverine, and Spider Woman, who Bendis has thus far failed to make interesting, play minimal roles in the story and receive little panel time.
Likewise, the Sentry, in his first major outing against a threat worthy of his apparently enormous powers, has no lines and gets at least temporarily sacked with relative ease.
Since the story revolves around Iron Man, Captain America, Ms. Marvel, and the Vision, the book actually feels like an issue of the historical Avengers book, and, thankfully, Spider Man fits into it quite nicely. Perhaps Bendis is realizing that his core New Avengers team is the second dullest on record; only Walt Simonson’s Avengers team of the Captain, Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, and the Forgotten One was worse.
Though it’s unclear whether Ms. Marvel’s Binary powers have returned permanently—the later part of the story suggests that they have not—allowing her to access them again at will would be a great addition to the character, who has lost some of her sheen since Kurt Busiek revived her drinking troubles years ago.
The Collective itself remains nebulous and fairly unexciting so far; it stamps around Cleveland looking amazingly like a facsimile of old Avengers foe Nuklo, who Bendis may have unconsciously recreated in this new threat. Iron Man’s words to the team that “we’ve never faced anything as undefinable as this before” seem premature at best and simply wrong at worst, especially after the events of ‘Chaos’ and ‘House of M.’
Perhaps the best feature of this issue is that it doesn’t rely on any of Bendis’ murky, protracted, and unsuspenseful New Avengers subplots, which have thus far only dragged the title down.
Mike Deadoto, Jr.’s art is less perfect on a panel-by-panel basis than David Finch’s, but Deadato knows how to tell a story and how to make one move, though not even he can make the Sentry’s skirmish in space with the Collective very interesting. Deadato’s art raises the tone of the book considerably, and here recalls some of his work on The Crossing from the mid-Nineties.