Avengers: Standoff! Assault on Pleasant Hill

Avengers: Standoff! Assault on Pleasant Hill

I tend to start these reviews with a little burb about the characters, or my experiences with the story. For this one I think I need to paint with a broader brush to try and encompass my point.

Back in the early days of Marvel, Stan Lee and his bullpen coined the term “The Marvel Method”. The process itself was simple: The “Writer” would roughly outline where they wanted the story to go to the “Artists”. They would vaguely describe the stories’ starting point, end point, a couple of cool key beats, and the main players (Hence the quotation marks). Then the “Artists” would panel and plot the actual coming and goings and rise and fall of the action and interactions within the story. After the labour-intensive artwork was complete, the “Writer” would then add dialogue and script to match the art… This made everything enormously collaborative, but also very difficult to pin down what ideas came from who or where. It also made tracking continuity a bit of a nightmare. Characters appear across different titles, with different motivations or actions, at seemingly the same point in time in the overall story.

This wasn’t a problem in the early days, with the smaller scope and fewer things to consider, but as the Marvel story expanded, people asked questions. In his book All The Marvels (2021), Douglas Wolk compares the Marvel story to a mountain: You can stand on its surface and admire the view, or the more adventurous can dive into its caves to sate their curiosity for treasure. It’s a good analogy for the biggest work of fiction humans have ever put to page. However, I feel most of the time Marvel feels like that shambolic kitchen drawer. You know the one: The one with all the lost cables and bits of string, useful but infrequently needed gadgets, batteries and matches with spurious function. Nothing is every forgotten in Marvel, its just put to one side. The trick is knowing where to look or knowing where you left it last.

 In an attempt to organise this unruly collection of half a million pages; The Marvel Method was largely abandoned, and three concepts were invented. Retroactive continuity changes, establishing the constant status quo and the ever rolling now. That way the view from the mountain side would stay consistent. Or if it did change, it may not stay that way for long. It was a sensible thing to do. It makes the messy kitchen draw more approachable.

However, it does mean at some point aligning all the puzzle pieces is rather laboured, and that some killer concepts simply don’t stick. It infuriates the few who lose themselves in Marvel’s caverns, over pleasing the majority that are simply sightseeing. It’s a tricky line to walk.

What am I reading? Avengers: Standoff! Assault on Pleasant Hill, collecting; Avengers Standoff: Welcome to Pleasant Hill (Nick Spencer, Mark Bagley), Avengers Standoff: Assault on Pleasant Hill Alpha (Nick Spencer, Jesús Saiz), Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D #3-4 (Marc Guggenheim, Germán Peralta), Uncanny Avengers #7-8 (Gerry Duggan, Ryan Stegman), All-New, All-Different Avengers #7-8 (Mark Waid, Adam Kubert), New Avengers #8-10 (Al Ewing, Marcus To), Howling Commandos of S.H.I.E.L.D #6 (Frank J. Barbiere, Brent Schoonover), Captain America: Sam Wilson #7-8 (Nick Spencer, Daniel Acuña), Illuminati #6 (Joshua Williamson, Mike Henderson) and…finally… Avengers Standoff: Assault on Pleasant Hill Omega (Nick Spencer, Daniel Acuña & Angel Unzueta)

What’s it about? Anonymous Hacker, The Whisperer, blew the whistle on a secret S.H.I.E.L.D criminal rehabilitation program. This program would house the world’s most dangerous individuals in a bubble of warped reality (thanks to the unstable, unpredictable, unknowable fragments of the Cosmic Cube), where they can live their lives as upstanding small-town Americans. What could possibly wrong…

What’s good about it? As you can tell by the contents of this collection, this was a big event. It’s a ballet of superheroes and espionage teams. The structure of the collection shows how different parties reach the titular Pleasant Hill. There’s a lot of retrodden ground but it does demonstrate how the chess pieces move across the board. Its ultimately a clash of S.H.I.E.L.D VS A.I.M VS New Avengers VS Old Avengers VS X-Force VS most of Marvel’s earth-based rogues gallery.

If the premise sounds familiar, it’s a reframing of House of M (2005) by Brian Michael Bendis. Instead of the iconic “No more mutants”, its essentially “No more super criminals”. It also resembles the crux of the Disney+ series WandaVision (2020). The MCU has Wanda Maximoff bending reality in an incredibly similar manner to this story.

For me there are a few really standout moments in this event. I love the fight between the aged Steve Rogers and Crossbones. I think Deadpool teaching a child to be more than what they made you brings a fantastic level of heart to the climax. Marvel having their own Kaiju Vs Enormous Mech fight is always good.

But the winner for me is Illuminati #6; This issue follows the fallout of the government’s reality reprogramming of the super criminal, The Absorbing Man, Carl “Crusher” Creel. Creel’s experience in Pleasant Hill was… well… pleasant. In Creel’s new reality, he was Harold, the owner of the local ice cream parlour. Harold was happy and respected. He had a blossoming romance with a beautiful police officer. Harold was living the American Dream, loving his life in this Connecticut small town. Smash cut to the curtain falling. Creel is thrown back into violence immediately, in the wreckage of his burning business. He is confronted by Elektra (who was his budding romance in the fake reality) but she never gets the chance to explain her feelings when Creel’s wife, the villainous Titania, appears to free him. The Absorbing Man is thrust back into the criminal underworld he knew before, with the bittersweet sting of knowing what might have been if he towed the line.

What did I struggle with? There is too much back and forth in this collection. I would say the first two-thirds of this book take place simultaneously from the multiple team’s perspectives, all leading to the same point. That leads to feeling that you’ve already read this. By the nature of the framing, it feels repetitive. I would also say that there isn’t significant enough differences between the separate teams’ character make up for them to feel unique. I got a bit lost as to who was a New Avenger, who was an All-New, All-Different Avenger, who was an Old Avenger or who was an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D… but ultimately does it matter if they are all going to the same place for the same purpose? Probably not.

For me, this also undoes some interesting changes back to the Status-Quo. At the start of this book, Steve Rogers was in the body of a hundred-and-twenty-year-old man, a grizzled grey veteran who can no longer swing the shield like he used to. At the end, he’s a bouncing beautiful boy, as if he was fresh out of Dr Erskine’s experiment. Bit dull. I could have done with more Commander Rogers over Captain America. It also ends in the formation of a new Avengers team, consisting of old familiar Avengers. Its like asking me to be excited about repairing my socks…

Also it sets up the return of a long absent cosmic Marvel hero: Quasar, in the new legacy character, Avril Kincaid. This goes absolutely nowhere. Total dead end. She never received her own series or joined any team of note. From my research she only appears again in Secret Empire (2017).

Would I recommend? I bet this was thrilling to read when it was coming out. But the collection leads something to be desired. It’s not the worst event in recent years, but no, I wouldn’t say this is a good jumping on point.