Avengers: No Road Home #8 // Review
One group of Avengers faces the Goddess of Misery in the City of Wickedness as another faces the Mother of Night on the planet of Euphoria. The latest weekly installment of the Avengers: No Road Home miniseries sounds a lot more poetic than it is. What it lacks in poetry, it more than makes up for in action as writers Jim Zub, Mark Waid and Al Ewing boldly march the heroes into brutal adventure dawn by Carlo Barberi with color by Jesus Aburtov. The story has reached a level of cosmic conflict that makes the action begin to feel a bit repetitious by the eighth issue in the mini-series, but the overall momentum continues to feel compelling nonetheless .
Shadizar: The City of Wickedness. The capital city of Zamora. It’s a city with an evil reputation in the tales of Conan. And it’s a fitting place for a few Avengers to encounter Dizys--Goddess of Misery. Hercules, Scarlet Witch, Vision, and Spectrum are aided by Conan himself in combat that starts with a sword in Conan’s chest and gets pretty ugly from there. Elsewhere Hulk has convinced Nightmare to send Rocket Raccoon, Hawkeye and himself to the planet of Euphoria. It might have been a vacation, but only Hulk knew that they would encounter the Goddess of Night there. He has a plan to defeat her. It’s simple...almost too simple.
The writing team continues to do a good job of directing the flow of traffic between WAY too many heroes caught between the covers of a single issue. The script chooses a single hero to focus-in on in each of the two locations. On Euphoria, the first-person narration comes courtesy of the Hulk...who might just be the one guy who knows what’s going on. In Shadizar the reader is let inside the head of Hercules, who actually manages to come across as something of a badass under fire. The demigod eclipses Conan in heroism, which feels a bit disingenuous given the character’s stature. A meeting between legends of Silver Age comics and early pulp-era heroism lies flat on the page when it could have been very, very cool. Once again, the Conan/Avengers crossover isn’t living up to its potential.
Barberi delivers action and drama to the page with a vividly dynamic page composition. Action ricochets around the page with an impressive sense of motion. The flow of action from one page to the next gives this issue a great sense of sweeping adventure, but it’s all action. There isn’t nearly enough of a sense of place to deliver the full intensity of the fantasy to the page. The issue features battles taking place on the City of Wickedness and the planet of Euphoria...really potent battlefields which really SHOULD feel different. Instead, the action in the foreground so totally overpowers the setting that action from one location kind of blurs into action in the other. There’s no sense of scope to the combat. It’s all just action. Aburtov lends SOME depth to the action. The musculature of Hulk and Hercules are given the right kind of heroic proportions and energy arcs are crackling with luminosity. It’s just too bad he wasn’t able to provide depth to the sweeping landscape of two fantastic alien settings.
The series enters its penultimate chapter next issue. It’s been kind of a hit-or-miss proposition with every issue in the series so far. Fusing Conan with the Avengers in a huge dual-setting mini-series has been a very ambitious exercise. With any luck, the final two issues can close the story with a well-balanced finale.
