Avengers 1: The Final Host

Comic Info

Avengers (6) #2

Reprints Avengers Free Comic Book Day 2018 #1 and Avengers (6) #1-6 (May 2018-October 2018).  The world is ending.  The Final Host has come to Earth to purge the Earth, and the Avengers no longer exist.  A new team of Avengers could be the world’s only hope and a secret history of the Earth’s first team of Avengers could be the only clue for survival.  The Final Host has arrived, and the Earth and cosmos will tremble!

Written by Jason Aaron, Avengers Volume 1:  The Final Host is a Marvel Comics superhero comic book collection.  Featuring art by Sara Pichelli, Ed McGuinness, and Paco Medina, the issues in the collection were also collected as part of Avengers by Jason Aaron—Volume 1.

I couldn’t get excited that the Avengers were facing another relaunch.  I did have some hope since I’ve like what Jason Aaron was doing on Thor, but after a Hickman run that took on the appearance of the Authority with the Avengers seeking out to stop problems before they start, returning to a core Avengers team seems unlikely.  While there are some decent aspects to this opening storyline, I find it rather dull.

The story borrows from aspects of the giant opus Earth X which dove into the origin of Earth and the Marvel Universe.  It tied to the Celestials, the Eternals, and everything in between.  It stretched issues and issues…but here Aaron tries to do a similar thing in a short collection.  It starts out fine, but then becomes a garbled big fight with the Earth’s heroes fighting off the infection that threatens to kill it.  It is epic, but it lacks the heart that I enjoy in Avengers from earlier styles of writing.

Avengers (6) #5 Variant

The Avengers team make-up is always the key to a decent Avengers run and I do like some of Aaron’s choices.  While there are the obvious (aka currently popular) team members taken largely from the MCU movies, the series adds comic regular She-Hulk (in her overly Hulked form) and the newest incarnation of the Ghost Rider.  These are meant to parallel the “First Avengers” of the past, but I wish there were more daring choices in their team.

The art is pretty good, but I’ve never been a “tech” fan.  This volume relies heavily on robots in both the Celestials and of course Iron Man.  You can draw them cool (and they do a good job doing that), but then it just becomes a bunch of robots fighting which isn’t as compelling to me as a bunch of fun costumed heroes.

Aaron seems to write with big plans in mind, and I hope that he has a plan for these Avengers.  This first outing doesn’t do a lot for me, but maybe the book can turn around.  I feel in general Avengers needs a revamp and a reimagining, but this so far doesn’t feel like the right choice.  Comic books and comic book teams are malleable, so I can’t write it off yet.  Avengers 1:  The Final Host is followed by Avengers 2:  World Tour.