By Jim Beard
When a threat to the Earth's so mighty one can barely speak its name, it's Avengers you'll be needing-lots of them!
MIGHTY AVENGERS #30, hitting shelves October 21, assembles one of the greatest groupings of Earth's Mightiest Heroes ever. It's Mighty, New, Young and Initiative leaping into the furious fray to face the Unspoken.
Who's the Unspoken and why so many Avengers to battle him? Christos Gage, co-writer of MIGHTY AVENGERS alongside Dan Slott, steps in with the short and sweet explanation:
"The Unspoken can literally do anything," he says. "He is the living embodiment of Terrigenesis, the process that alters each Inhuman's genes, giving them their powers; but whereas each Inhuman usually undergoes Terrigenesis once, the Unspoken can do it at will. He can give himself pretty much any power he can think of. So bringing together an army of Avengers to fight him is really the only sensible response!"
And come together they do, under the leadership of original Avenger Hank Pym, aka the Wasp. Hank's struggled mightily of late to hold his team of Mighty Avengers together, so the mind boggles at thoughts of the harried hero corralling this many costumed crusaders.
"I think everyone respects Hank's genius and his status as a founding Avenger," Gage offers. "They don't follow him as unquestioningly as they would, say, Captain America- Stature and the Vision often wonder if they belong here or in the Young Avengers, and Quicksilver doesn't defer to
anyone, ever-and they definitely consider him eccentric in many ways, not the least of which is his relationship with [android]
Jocasta. But I don't think anybody else on the team could hold it together the way he does, which is basically by doing what he thinks is right and leading by example, putting himself on the line for what he believes. His days of agonized introspection are behind him; he's always first charging into battle."
The Unspoken's already faced off against other of Earth's heroes in his quest for the senses-shattering device known as the Slave Engine. The champions of China fell before his deadly march to mastery over humans, and as an ancient, deposed king of the Inhumans he's got nothing to lose. Good thing the Earth's backed up by plenty of Avengers, even if some of them seem to be, well, you know, registered.
"It's actually members of the Avengers Resistance, who are battling the current Norman Osborn-led Initiative in the pages of AVENGERS: THE INITIATIVE," corrects Gage, who also writes the title in question. "But our heroes are, in fact, going to reach out to the Dark Avengers, which could get interesting."
This sort of jam-packed spectacle of super heroic proportions requires a capable and competent artist, one that knows a thing or two about blowing out pages packed with powers. That would be the superlative Sean Chen, of course.
"Sean is wonderful; I worked with him on a War Machine [story in IRON MAN: DIRECTOR OF
S.H.I.E.L.D. during] Secret Invasion, and we couldn't be happier with his work here," Gage notes. "He captured each character's personality, and his storytelling is perfect, which is so important in a story like this. If you're confused, it won't be because of the art!
"While recognizing that not everyone could be the star of the story, we tried to give [each character] a moment. We'll let the readers decide if we succeeded. Both Dan and I are old school in the sense that we don't really do decompression; we like to pack a lot of story into our comics. But a throwdown like this requires space! Beyond that, we let Sean work his magic!"
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