Avengers: No Surrender is off to an awesome start

​Avengers #675 - No Surrender Part 1

Written by: Mark Waid, Al Ewing, and Jim Zub
Art by: Pepe Larraz
Colored by: David Curiel
Lettered by: VC’s Cory Petiit

Published by: Marvel
Cover Price: $4.99

Warning! This review contains quite a few spoilers!

Summary: No Surrender is a weekly 16 part story that pulls together all of the Avengers teams (Avengers, Occupy Avengers, Uncanny Avengers, and US Avengers) into one big adventure.  The skies above Earth all turn red all of a sudden, and the heroes realize that Earth has been taken elsewhere.  Natural disasters seem to be breaking out all over the world. Jarvis is severely injured trying to save a child from getting hit by some fallen rubble.

The crisis is made worse when several of the heroes turn into frozen statues, including Captain America, Spider-Man, Black Panther, the entire Champions team, all the X-Men, Vision, Wasp (Janet), Squirrel Girl, and Enigma.  We are told off hand that several villains have been frozen as well.  Someone calls all the remaining Avengers (active and inactive) together in New York.  Wasp (Nadia) is trying to get Jarvis some medical care, and gets pretty upset that no one else is prioritizing this, so she storms off with Beast in pursuit.  We find out that the call was made by Voyager.

For those who didn’t read Legacy #1, during that issue, Jarvis felt something weird had happened to time.  And a “new” Avenger named Voyager seemed to forcefully retcon herself into the original Avengers team.  

Review: I thought it was kind of funny that just like Secret Empire, Captain Marvel is off Earth so she is not involved in the main story.  Has Marvel decided that Captain Marvel is too powerful these days so could solve any problem that happens to go down on the Earth?

I liked that Lightning (FKA Living Lightning) was featured so heavily in the opening of this story.  He had basically just become a West Coast Avenger when I started reading comics, so I’ve always liked the character.  He seems to pop up every now and then.  I think he’s a great character to use for perspective when big stuff is going down.

One thing this issue did really well was juggled all the characters and made sure that the reader understood the level of the threat they were dealing with.  All of the characters and their relationships and conflicts were portrayed real well from Quicksilver and Rogue to Wasp’s concern about Jarvis overriding everything else. It can be tricky dealing with this many characters and three writers, but I thought this issue did a great job with that.

I did think it was a little odd that they took several of the major characters off the board, like Captain Marvel being off the Earth and freezing so many other main characters like Spider-Man, Black Panther, and Captain America. But, we still have plenty of big names here, and to be honest, I often prefer stories that deal with lesser known character anyway.  You are able to do a lot more with them and up the danger level...it’s far more likely that Lightning could be killed in this series than Spider-Man.  

Before No Surrender, Pepe Larraz was best known for doing art on different Star Wars series.  I was actually kind of surprised to see Marvel tap him for such a major project.  I am not saying he is not talented, but he wasn’t all that big a name.   But when you see this issue you immediately see he was the perfect choice.  There was a lot going on here, and a lot of characters, and Larraz managed to feature everyone brilliantly.  This was up there with George Perez in terms of handling so many characters.

And the preview for 676 shows how Voyager has rewritten history.  In that issue, Pepe Larraz does panels in the style of some of the classic Avengers artists like Jack Kirby and John Buscema.  If Larraz wasn’t a household name before No Surrender, he is damn sure going to be one now.

Speaking of Voyager, I wrote an accompanying piece to this review speculating on who Voyager is.  The link was retconned into this review like it was always there in the first place.  Just seems appropriate for the character.

We still have a long way to go with No Surrender, but I really enjoyed this first issue.  Great art, exciting story, compelling character moments, and a lot of mysteries left to be answered.  I do have some concerns about paying $5 or $4 for the sixteen weeks for one story, but if it all stays self-contained that is far better than many events and crossovers Marvel has done.