West Coast Avengers #9: Endgame

One of these days I’ll draw a line graph charting my opinion of an issue page by page, this would be a good one to start on. It starts out with one of my bugbears, exposition in dialogue. Quentin is naturalistic and gets away with it but Johnny’s “we have to get out of this pit they threw us in and find the others” was pretty blatant. On the other hand the vertical panelling on that page effectively draws attention to their predicament.

I do enjoy Kelly Thompson’s trolling of certain comicbook fans.

And while we’re on that, everybody loves Batman because he has no powers and everybody hates the Hawkeyes because they have no powers, what’s up with that?

I’ll withhold judgement on the damseling of America Chavez, but what I will say is that being self-aware about it and using the word damsel doesn’t make it OK.

In the page above it’s nice that the lettering is behind the spear which is the focus of the panel #details. Ramone’s dialogue is pretty on the nose in the third frame but the last panel is pure badass.

Ramone’s backstory is succinct and effective but as I mentioned in the review of issue 3 Johnny never turned into vibranium in the first two instalments #retconwithinaretcon. While they were at it they really should have changed his superhero name to Fastball given the amount of airmiles he racks up.

All of that being said for all of the ups and downs in this issue my main takeaway was that Thompson succeeded in making Ramone’s transition into super-heroism convincing and affecting, I loved it to be honest.