The Four Color Media Monitor

The next mindless event story Marvel plans to foist upon the world:

Norman Osborn is back, and he's starting a war that will be up there with the biggest fights the Avengers have ever had.

Oh, do tell is about it. I think it'll be, more accurately, down in the cellar with the likes of Civil War, one of the worst crossovers they ever published.

After being incarcerated following the events of Siege, Osborn returns to his supervillain perch in "The H.A.M.M.E.R. War," a story line that begins in Marvel Comics' New Avengers 16.1 next month.

Going into next year, a new team of Dark Avengers will rise, Osborn will team with some of the world's worst bad guys and superheroes will have their hands full in the pages of Avengers and New Avengers, both written by Brian Michael Bendis.

"It sets up a pretty large-scale, mutitiered-front war Avengers have to deal with. It's more than what the Avengers have ever had to handle," Bendis says. "But it's being fought by smart people who have been in the Avengers before and have come together to really let them have it."

And it's being written by truly shameless people like Bendis, and edited by terrible editors like Axel Alonso. Just what will this have that older battles they fought with villains like Ronan the Accuser and Kang the Conqueror don't? There's already been enough to tell there's nothing much to expect from this either.

The villainous organizations Hydra, A.I.M. and The Hand have decided to pull together under the banner of Osborn's H.A.M.M.E.R. organization — run in his absence by Superia — and Osborn finds there's been a plan put together to attack the Avengers, although without his knowledge.

"They see the world in a similar way and they want it taken care of," Bendis says. "He's the leader of something much bigger than he probably imagined."

No, Osborn is merely being stuffed into something contrived, and a role that's more than he was meant to be. He was conceived as a villain in Spider-Man, and wasn't meant to be anything more than an insane, quixotic criminal who dressed in a Goblin outfit. All they've done is prove they're incapable of creating a new villain who could fill the role more plausibly than Osborn could.

Like Wonder Man's new anti-Avengers Revengers team — who appear next month in New Avengers Annual 1 — the Dark Avengers are not villainous in that they rob banks, Bendis says. "They have a very specific worldview like Magneto or Doctor Doom. The Avengers are an abomination to that idea or standing in the way of that idea."

So Simon Williams is being tarnished. And maybe Bendis doesn't realize it, but he's hinted at one of the problems with today's comic book storytelling: there's little or no villains who rob banks and hijack freighters, either for cash to spend, or to finance further criminal activities and crooked scientific experiments, or even just for the sport of it. Once, there were plenty of those, even if they were just side-story elements, now, they're almost scarce.

Bendis drones on with the following description of Norman Osborn:

"He's surrounded by those who don't care about his mental state. They see it as a plus," Bendis adds. "I've met in my life people who were (really) crazy, and it made them very successful because they're too crazy not to be. And that crazy kicked them out the door. It's fascinating to write."

Instead of freaking out and hopping on a Goblin Glider, this focused Osborn with a support system is the perfect Green Goblin, Bendis says. "Not-crazy Norman? The one not flipping out? That's the one you've gotta be scared of."

Osborn leaves prison to find he has many loyalists who consider him a martyr and that his movement has grown, with hordes of people adorned with Green Goblin tattoos. At the same time, America as a whole isn't all "Yay Avengers!" following Fear Itself, according to Bendis.

"Avengers are there when something bloody and destructive happens, and some people are sick of it. The media turns pretty quickly," he says. "We'll see more of how the public views the Avengers. Steve Rogers came in on a white horse — is it really any better now?

Is this signaling that there'll be a whole display of villain worship abound? That's another problem that was probably bound to happen sooner or later. This also suggests they're going to depict the public turning against the Earth's Mightiest Heroes, and reminds me of how their whole "Heroic Age" promotion has been quickly forgotten as they move back to more darkness and depression. Did it ever occur to Bendis that some people are sick of that too?

Labels: Avengers, dreadful writers, marvel comics, msm propaganda