While watching the fallout of the Superhuman Registration Act in her NYC apartment, Jessica Drew is visited by Nick Fury. Suspecting that Fury is really a SHIELD automaton, Jessica blasts the figure in the back, and SHIELD agents storm her apartment. Jessica awakes on the SHIELD helicarrier, where she is aggressively interrogated by Agent Hill and Iron Man; both infer that Jessica is still an agent of HYDRA, and Iron Man implies he has never trusted her.
HYDRA attacks the helicarrier, freeing Jessica, and immobilizing Agent Hill and Iron Man in the process. HYDRA attempts to crash the helicarrier into Rhode Island, but the disaster is narrowly averted.
Jessica awakes on HYDRA Island, where Agent Connelly offers her the position of Madame Hydra, replacing the Viper. Jessica attacks Connelly, blows up the island by destroying its generators and fuel reserves, and flees in a speed boat. She approached Captain America and his team of renegade heroes, asking to be taken in.
Brian Bendis claims to love the Avengers, but you wouldn't know it from most of his work on the Avengers and New Avengers; in fact, New Avengers doesn't seem to be about the Avengers or their history at all, but purely about Brian Michael Bendis. Most of his issues have an offhand "Ah, I can get away with it" feel, and issue 23 is no exception. While better than issue 22, which might have been the worst single issue in the entire history of the Avengers, that's about all that can be said in its defense; sketchy and seemingly patched together, it reads as if Bendis and Coipel spent the absolute minimum time required working on it. Like issue 22, it's reductive, predictable, and unimaginative.
Bendis has unconvincingly portrayed Jessica Drew, the once-formidable Spider Woman, as aimless, indecisive, and mercurial since his reintroduction of the character, and this issue, despite her off-panel take-charge destruction of HYDRA Island, continues that trend. Her "woe-is-me" attitude on the last page weak is almost laughably ineffective. Hilariously, the listless Jessica rests on an unmade bed which is littered with crushed cans, presumably beer cans, as she watches the news on television.
The one potentially dramatic moment, the near-crash of the helicarrier into Rhode Island, is over so quickly that any sense of impending disaster is lost. Bendis would have been wiser to actually allow the helicarrier to crash, and thus give the issue some kind of focus; Jessica's off-panel destruction of HYDRA Island carries no actual bang at all.
Readers might expect that Bendis would get better at executing New Avengers, but the book is currently rolling backward so fast that it's about to go over the proverbial falls.
Like issue # 22, New Avengers # 23 represents almost a complete waste of time and money.