The New Avengers is one of my favorite comics on the market today and when this story started I fully admit I was not a fan. They pulled away from the great characters that are normally in this book, Luke Cage, Spider-Man, The Thing, Wolverine, Daredevil and several others, this book is like the Oceans 11 of comics, every cool character from any book was on this team. To have a story that only focused on the legend of The Iron Fist, not even Danny Rand, it left me wanting more, but they were building me up to this issue. (Read on if you don't mind spoilers)
As legend has it a previous time when The Phoenix came to Earth a young red head girl named Fongji, whom looks exactly like Hope Summers, was the intended Phoenix then as well. The city of Kun Lun's master, Master Yu Ti, had a vision that she would be trained to be The Iron Fist and then confront The Phoenix and merge them together. This would either bring about peace and save the world for destruction, or create an even more powerful force of nature that would lay waste to everything.
In this issue we see Danny Rand, Iron Fist, finishing telling the story to Hope, but with her personality and background of being raised in the future as a soldier by Cable, her abruptness isn't meshing well in Kun Lun. After some coaxing and getting her to be quiet for more than three minutes the Master gets her to sit at mystical pond that can bring about visions.
In the vision we see The Phoenix coming, but instead of seeing the dragon of the Iron Fist we see something else, a spider. From this vision Hope takes from it that she indeed is to be The Phoenix and Mast Yu Ti lets her know she does need to be trained, by the spider. This of course means being trained by the most powerful spider in the Marvel Universe, Spider-Man.
However even he seems shocked to this latest news, when he's told to train her, he tries to get Master Yu Ti or Iron Fist to train her. My favorite panel of the book has Spider-Man standing with hope -
Spider-Man: Hasn't she already been trained by Cyclops and Wolverine and...and...and...
Hope:Cable.
Spider-Man: Cable.
Master Yu Ti: Yes, Now...its your turn.
Master Yu Ti also makes a comment: I wonder if you are to teach her self loathing
Spider-Man: Well, it is what i have my doctorate in.
When Hope and Spidey are left together the first thing he comes up with to ask her is, So, uh, what's Magneto like?
Hope goes off on him, saying how she has all this power coming her way and she didn't ask for it and she has no idea what to do and its all been dropped on her head and she's worry she'll fail and everyone will blame her.
Spidey responds with of course, With great power comes great responsibility. He then goes over that mantra like he never does before, its really something quiet powerful and Bendis really hits a home run with just these few couple of pages.
Deodato's art is great, as always, the man has excellent command over anatomy and perspective and space. Not space as in outer space, I mean the layout of a page and the depth within a panel to make it have great perspective.
You suckered me in Marvel, I read the issues leading up to it and wasn't that excited but you got me and this issue was great, can't wait to see where this leads to.
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