Valhallahan on 
Julian Hazeldine on 
Casey on 
Chris Striker on New Avengers #37
by James Hunt ~ December 17th, 2007
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Following a good few months of barely comprehensible stories containing tie-ins with comics that still have yet to see print over in Mighty Avengers, this issue finally regains some sense of coherance. The New Avengers track down the up-and-coming crime boss, the Hood, and decide to ambush him and his super-villain army, using only their fists and a little magical trickery.
It’s a good issue for the character of the Hood. Dr. Strange asks him some pertinent questions about the nature of his powers, more concerned with which demon he might be incarnating than what he’s trying to do to the New York underworld. Meanwhile, once his crew gets put behind bars, he begins making good on his word to spring them, a storyline that’s coming to a head in New Avengers annual #2. It’s interesting to see a crimelord who’s this hands-on and if nothing else, the last few issues have managed to turn the Hood into someone I’d want to read more about.
The title is still suffering a little from crossover-itis. Spider-Man is still in his black costume, cracking wise like at no point during the Back in Black story that ran through his own titles (though that does lead to a funny line - “This ain’t just Spider-Man you’re getting spanked by, this is Black-Costumed Spidey. It’s going to be so much more a cooler story to tell. You know, in jail.”) That said, it seems pretty pointless to start worrying about Spider-Man continuity now, given the way things are about to go down over there. Yeesh.
It’s a decent issue in its own right, but as the concluding chapter of the current arc, “The Trust”, it just feels utterly irrelevant. Six issues ago They were fighting Ninjas in Japan and hauling dead skrulls around, in-between they’ve been dealing with symbiote-infected Mighty Avengers in half of a crossover that hasn’t happened yet, and now they’re taking down the Hood. Unless some of these people turn out to be Skrulls and give it some wider context, it’s going to read like a pretty disjointed story when it comes to be collected.
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December 17th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
Re : the Spidey line - it occurred to me a while ago that the only place to get old-school wisecracking Spidey antics in 616 was in New Avengers.
In other words, Bendis (and for further proof of this, see USM) is the only person currently writing the character who can actually come up with the goods as far as banter (and, indeed, his whole characterisation) goes. SORT IT OUT MARVEL.