Avengers: The Initiative #26 (Marvel – Gage / Sandoval / Bonet / Delgado)
A shocking new era begins for the Initiative! Where Camp Hammond once trained future Avengers, Camp H.A.M.M.E.R. now trains tomorrow’s Dark Avengers! Under orders from Norman Osborn, your new Principals are Taskmaster and the criminal kingpin, the Hood. They’re registering villains as heroes and spreading Norman’s empire across the nation with such specialized classes as How to Fake Being Champions While Fleecing the Citizens You’re Supposed to Protect! But the heroes who once made up the Initiative aren’t about to let this happen. Hunted by the law, hidden from sight, a resistance movement has formed…and they’re out to stop a Dark Reign from falling over the Fifty State Initiative…by any means necessary!
Still one of the best (and maybe only surviving) book ot spin out of Civil War, The Initiative continues to reinvent itself keeping it fresh and worth buying!
A great deal can be said for this book, Dan Slott and the current writer Cristos Gage in the action of taking a lesser known character and being able to create something really worth reading out of it. The Initiative series has done this with Taskmaster, Baron Von Blitzschlag, Gauntlet, Justice… and now they are moving forward with Constrictor and Tigra as more central characters. Constrictor becomes the poster boy for The New Initiative and he has really mixed feelings of being a villain in hero’s clothing. And with Tigra, she moved beyonf the one dimensional sexpot mold and we get see just how defensive of her own she can get. Phenominal Writing!
This and the triumphant return of my favorite Hulk baddies, The U-Foes!
issue grade: A-
