Comic Info
Comic Name: New Avengers (Volume 1)/Giant-Size Spider-Woman
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Writer: Brian Michael Bendis
Artist: David Finch/Rick Mays/Frank Cho
# of Issues: 6
Release Date: 2006
New Avengers (1) #11
Reprints New Avengers (1) #11-15 and Giant-Size Spider-Woman #1 (November 2005-March 2006). The Avengers are headed to Japan to investigate the escape of the Silver Samurai and questions surrounding his detention on the Raft. Recruiting a new mysterious member named Ronin, the Avengers find themselves in battle with the Hand and HYDRA…and they are about to discover that one of their members isn’t telling them the truth about their purpose on the team.
Written by Brian Michael Bendis, New Avengers Volume 3: Secrets & Lies is a Marvel Comics superhero comic book collection. Following New Avengers Volume 2: Sentry, the collection features art by David Finch, Rick Mays, and Frank Cho. The collection is broken up into the three part story “Ronin” and the two part story “Secrets & Lies”. The volume has a short story from Giant-Size Spider-Woman #1 (July 2005), and issues in this collection were also collected as part of New Avengers by Brian Michael Bendis: The Complete Collection—Volume 2.
New Avengers had a good start, and one of the things that I was most excited about was the return of Spider-Woman as a major player in Marvel Comics. This return quickly turned to dread as Bendis took a character I really liked and slowly warped her into a character that wasn’t enjoyable or in line with character of the past. This volume is really the start of Spider-Woman’s fall from grace.
New Avengers (1) #15
The “Ronin” story serves as a mean to introduce the Ronin character. When the comic was originally released, Ronin was a mystery. It was implied to be a lot of different characters, and later the guise was used by other superheroes (much like Captain America’s Nomad identity). The Avengers head to Japan and this story later is too close to the “Revolution” storyline…which had the Avengers fighting a whole bunch of ninjas (again).
The second half of the collection involves Jessica Drew’s backstory. It has her being a double (or triple) agent for S.H.I.E.L.D., the Avengers, and HYDRA. Along with the Spider-Woman: Origin series, it really started to ruin the Jessica Drew character who had a nice, rich history with ties to lots of aspects of Marvel from the High Evolutionary, to the X-Men, and to even some of the supernatural Marvel characters. Bendis manages to make the character less interesting in his attempt to make her interesting. It is too bad…and then it almost gets completely tossed with Secret Invasion stuff.
New Avengers is a rocky road, and in only three volumes, Bendis’s run is starting to sour. It is a really bad for the future of the book if you know how long he stuck with it, but if you read it issue to issue (where very little happened), you kept hoping something would happen or that he’d leave the book and stop doing event series for Marvel. New Avengers 3: Secrets & Lies is followed by New Avengers 4: The Collective.
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