Art: John Romita Jr
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Boom! There we go. That was some pretty epic stuff, more along the lines of what I was expecting from this event. The Phoenix finally arrives, and what happens next isn’t quite what I expected, but it is rather interesting, which makes Avengers vs. X-Men #5 a fun read.
So the whole thing with the Phoenix has been looming over AvX from the beginning, and while the event is ostensibly about getting the Avengers to fight the X-Men, of which there has been plenty, the Phoenix has remained looming in the back ground. The X-Men see it as a savior, the Avengers see it as a threat, Hope Summers is somehow at the center of it all, but when the Phoenix finally shows up, suddenly things are not quite so black and white. By the end of this issue, I had high hopes that things were finally going to roll in a much more interesting direction beyond just “heroes fight because it’s cool”.
Tony Stark may have made things worse. Hope Summers may not play the role with the Phoenix’s arrival that we thought. There may be more going on here than just whether or not the mutant race survives or goes extinct. Finally, this event is starting to feel big for reason beyond the fact that just about everyone in the Marvel U belongs to either the Avengers or the X-men and they’re all fighting. Things got off to shaky start, but now it’s all moving in some interesting directions. Will this event finish with a bang? Hope so. Guess we’ll find out in the next few issues, but it’s looking rather promising… I need to keep my expectations in check, though.
Score: 5 of 7
A BIG thanks to Astro-Zombies for providing the material for this review. Learn more about them at astrozombies.com.
