Avengers Beyond #2 // Review
There are moments when teams have the opportunity to separate. A group of the most powerful heroes on Earth are all slightly apart from each other. Everyone has a project of some sort as danger lurks in the shadows in Avengers Beyond #2. Writer Derek Landy and artist Greg Land weave together an interesting interstitial chapter between beats in a larger, more ominous story. Frank D’Armata lends color to the page in a disparate series of beats in a bigger story that flits rather quickly from hero to hero. It may not amount to much as a whole, but there are intriguing moments in and within the issue.
Earth’s mightiest heroes are all a little bit busy. They were under the influence of powers beyond their control. All immediate danger has passed. And now they're all working on different things. Tony and T’Challa are in the same room working on different tech. Blade is visiting someone from out of town. Janet’s involved in some kind of altercation with an old friend. There’s a hell of a lot of conflict on quite a few levels, and everyone is dealing with well more than they could possibly understand as another threat is looming ominously on a horizon they’re not able to see just yet.
Landy gets pretty heavy with the narration in the second issue of the current series. There are moments in the issue in which Land’s art feels like illustrations for all the narration. The script doesn't engage with the art all that deeply throughout the entire issue. However, as a moment between moments, Landy’s script actually kind of works. The collection of scenes may not add up to much of a cohesive issue, but there’s more than enough going into the series to make it work as a whole.
Land isn't giving a whole lot of room in which to assert the substance of all of the different scenes that he's given to illustrate. To his credit, he hits all of the right marks and all of the right beats in nearly every scene that he is given to render for the page. D’Armata further delineates each scene with a deeply atmospheric fingerprint for every single location that the issue presents to the page, whether it be a high-tech prison cell or a gleaming Avengers lab or one of quite a few different locations in and around Marvel Manhattan.
The larger story that is being presented has yet to completely resolve into anything that would be terribly compelling. That doesn't mean that a bigger payoff isn't coming. It just seems like Landy hasn’t quite found a way to frame this part of the larger serial in a way that is terribly interesting. In the larger run of things, Landy set himself up with kind of a challenge for this particular issue. It DOES deliver information important to the story, but it's difficult to bring it to the page in a way that feels like it's catapulting the action forward.
