Assemble!
I wanted to get this down while it's still all fresh in my mind. A while ago I borrowed Avengers Forever from heehaw_tng after seeing it on his shelf. I've read some Avengers stories, but not that many, so I seized upon the chance to bone up a bit.

Avengers Forever was probably not the place to start. It leans heavily on past adventures, heavily referencing the entirety of their run. To Kurt Busiek's credit, he's entirely aware of that, so each issue does it best to recap both previous issues and the older tidbits, and every two issues there's a whole page of endnotes to explain where everything came from. (I don't think I've seen a serious endnotes page since Marvels... which was also Busiek, wasn't it? Also, has DC ever printed endnotes on anything?)

It's a decent-enough adventure, though maybe I wonder if they didn't go far enough with the prancing about in 40 years of Avengers history. You've already gone this far, why not just go all the way?

Feeling out-of-sorts because of my general unfamiliarity with Avengers history (which is what led to the recent spring of comic-cataloging) I ended up ordering two more Avengers titles, which I finished over the weekend.

Avengers: Kree-Skrull War was generally a nice quintessential Avengers story. I was familiar with the characters, even though it was my first experience with some of them (Mar-Vell), so that wasn't a problem at all. Of course, the introduction to the book had already ruined the big twist for me, but it's such an old story, I suppose maybe I have no right to complain?

For an intergalactic war, though, it didn't seem like that big of a deal. Rather underwhelming. I also found it confusing - what happened to the Skrull emperor? Toward the end they say his daughter will take over the throne, but I went over the pages between that panel and the last time I remember seeing him in the book, and nowhere did I find anything showing him dying, surrendering, or being captured. I have no idea what happened to him. Trust me, I looked several times.

My biggest problem was the disconnect between issues - I don't feel like they really flowed into each other, really belonged to the same epic. One issue they're in Antarctica, then next issue they're back at the mansion with no mention of the previous adventure, then they're in space, and so on. I suppose I'm used to storylines being designed to be collected into trades someday, while this series was written at a time when the main venue for comics distribution was newsstands, meaning that the typical reader might not be there for every installment. So the issues were designed to stand-alone somewhat.

The other thing I didn't like was the coloring. I think I might have preferred this in the "Essential" format, in black-and-white, because some of Neal Adams' artwork is absolutely beautiful, but the muddy coloring ruins the effect.

Avengers Disassembled: From one extreme to the other, hmm? I wanted to read this since I've read House of M, which was supposed to follow up on both Avengers Disassembled and Planet X and I'd only read the latter.

I thought it was really good, and a quick read, though I wonder how much build-up the storyline got, because if all this came out of nowhere I understand why old-time Avengers fans might have been upset. It's hard to believe that this happened in the normal Avengers series, and not in some mini-series or special.

I actually liked the different artists in the Avengers Finale. Normally switching artists is a disaster, but here it worked, especially for the two-page spreads of "favorite Avengers memories." I really, really liked the David Mack painting.

That's... about it. I just spent more time re-reading it on-the-spot than I did writing about it. Sign of something that really left an impact on me.

I think I will pick up some more trades at some point. But first, shower!