Great Lake Avengers #1
Writer: Zac Gorman
Artists: Will Robson
Colorists: Tamra Bonvillain
Letterer: VC’s Joe Caramagna
Editors: Tom Brevoort
Publisher: Marvel
A review by Robert Coffil
Entertainment that is kitsch, off brand, weird or different usually appeals to me and finds a place near and dear to my heart. However, when I read The Great Lake Avengers #1 I realize this statement might not be as true as it once was. I know The Great Lake Avengers spun out of the West Coast Avengers and it’s where the very popular Squirrel Girl character comes from. Its meant to be a funny, goofy book, but this book wasn’t only goofy it was just uninteresting.
The book begins with Dr. Val Ventura A.K.A. Flatman, playing a video game. Unexpectedly, he gets a knock at the door from lawyers. Because of some rather spoilery deaths, thanks to the much delayed Civil War, he is the beneficiary to the legal trade mark Avengers. After a few hours of deliberation and haggling, he trades the rights back to the lawyers for the right to use The Great Lake Avengers. And this makes his day. From there he is off to gather the team. And it was here the book lost me. The rest of the book is standard tongue in cheek jokes and introduction to the team.
The introductions to the other characters are very standard. For a book that is going for different, it felt like regular B-Movie intros. For characters who are below “D” grade you would think that there would have been some spicing up of our introductions to the principal characters. Instead, Flatman just calls/texts everyone but two members. And from there he convinces them to “get the band back together”. This didn’t blow me away.
I will say the art in this book is a delight. Will Robson does some nice cartooning throughout. His line work is clean. The colors of Tamra Bonvillain pop off the page and bring life to an otherwise dull book. Robson’s storytelling keeps the page turning at a brisk pace, even when you’d really rather not want to.
Verdict:
Skip it. In an era of 3.99 books and the plethora of high quality books coming out from almost every publisher, books have to be of a higher caliber to compete in this marketplace. This book is by no means terrible. Rather it is perfunctory and it suffers because of it. I was looking for Nextwave and this unfortunately isn’t that.
