Avengers #5

Written by Mark Waid

Penciled by Mike Del Mundo
Cover by Mike Del Mundo
Published Mar 1, 2017

   Desperate to stop Kang, Vision shows the team his new device: a time tether. Part of Captain America's plan, it could help them win the battle for good. When Captain Falcon...America tells them he doesn't have a plan, Vision from the future steps out of thin air to explain. Though it's been millennia, Cap's plan revolved around making surgical strikes through time on Kang's supply line. Showing them the end of time and the time relative to where they are now, they can go into the past and future creating bombs simultaneously, destroying his fortress and giving him nowhere to run.
   Realizing he'll have to divide the team and running out of Avengers, Cap conveniently remembers the time machine in the basement of the former Baxter Building. He goes back in time to get the first Avengers, joining forces with Giant Man, original Thor, Hulk, She-Hulk, Namor, original Captain Marvel, original pre-evil Captain America, and the original Wasp. Also giving a proud "Avengers Assemble", Vision informs him he also just taught the original Avengers their battle cry. Half of them go back to ancient Egypt, disrupting Kang's slaves from making their high tech weaponry. Spider-Man places the time bomb in the fusion reactor. The other half of the team goes to a future alien planet, and after some awkward exchanges between the Thors, discover a team of miners. They mine time, stealing the future from primates and keeping them from evolving. The Avengers fight back until getting caught in the time stealing rays themselves. Beginning to erase the original Avengers, the current team also begins to disappear from existence.
   The issue wraps when we see the third team split off roughly 2000 years into the future. Being dropped pretty much right into Kang's lair, he doesn't recognize them but is systematically interrogating each Avenger. Will they crack under pressure? Will they stop the miners? Will they blow up the fusion reactor? We'll have to wait until next issue to find out.
   I've always been a fan of abstract comic art but getting into this is a stretch. If this is gonna be the flagship Avengers book, they have to do better than this. It literally looks like watercolors meets half-assed penciling and then they turned the contrast up to like a thousand percent. To be perfectly honest, it distracts from the story and if there isn't a change somewhere on the horizon, I could see myself not being able to stick with this title. The story is ok but after so much time travel in the X-Books, this shtick is getting about as watered down as Mike Del Mundo's artwork. I give it a 5/10.

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