Ahhh, this is more like it. For the past few issues, Secret Avengers has left us hanging on a big cliffhanger while new writers had to shoehorn in an Infinity tie-in that had nothing to do with the ongoing intrigue surrounding the resurgent Advanded Idea Mechanics. Now, in Secret Avengers #12, Nick Spencer is back with co-writer Ales Kot (doing great work with Zero), and they’ve brought stellar Winter Soldier artist Butch Guice along to show us at long last how the mindwiped and stuck-undercover Mockingbird handled being thrown in front of the scary-powerful A.I.M. ruling council and told to wow them about a massive science project that she knows absolutely nothing about.
The answer is that she bullshits like a champ to buy herself time to escape. Unfortunately, that’s not enough, because A.I.M. Scientist Supreme Andrew Forson is onto her. The rest of the issue plays out on two sides, A.I.M. and S.H.I.E.L.D., and we’re never quite sure who’s got the upper hand. On A.I.M.’s side, we see that they haven’t glommed onto the fact that one of their Ruling Council is a S.H.I.E.L.D. operative. On S.H.I.E.L.D.’s side, A.I.M. guys are making a play to work with them, claiming to be selling out Forson as an unstable element, and they are giving up secret laboratories as good faith gestures – although one of them has someone who looks a lot like Shang-Chi silently kicking the snot out of Hawkeye, and Nick Fury Jr. is also taken captive by Yelena Belova, a former Black Widow and current Adaptoid. It’s a lot of cool, layered, secret agent jousting, and it’s right back to the kind of awesome sauce we expect out of Spencer, and I know also expect out of Kot.
Plus, the splashy appearance by KMD’s Zeb Love X… er, I mean, a particular sort of organism whose design specs have conflicting objectives depending on who you ask – they could be for processing or possibly for lethality – is always, always welcome, and somewhat inevitable when it comes to A.I.M. It has nothing to do with 3rd Bass.
Guice is exactly the guy you want handling the art for a full-on espionage fest like Secret Avengers, because his work really nails the proper tone for Spencer & Kot’s writing. It’s a heapin’ helpin’ of intrigue, betrayal, skullduggery, cover-ups and shenanigans, all with a dark, ominous feel that none of this is going to end well for our heroes. He also nails some cool beats where we see what’s actually going on within the Ruling Council – Mentallo’s disenchantment and malaise in his conversation with Jude The Entropic Man is a particularly interesting moment, and it’s quite possible Guice has made Mentallo look the coolest he as ever looked in his entire existence.
Secret Avengers is back on track. It makes me look forward to how this is going to spin into Spencer & Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers World.
