In the last issue, it was revealed that Nick Fury has now got his work cut out for him after The World Security Council has reassigned all of his and S.H.I.E.L.D.’s every day duties to reigniting the Tesseract, a mysterious cube with an untapped amount of energy. However, Director Fury has some other plans that he needs to finish up on the side first.
Also in the last issue, we were reminded what happened in ‘Iron Man 2’, just in case we didn’t remember from when we saw the film. In this issue, we’re reminded of what happened during the rest of ‘Iron Man 2’ and ‘Thor’, but not to the same, almost insulting degree as the first issue. Here, we’re shown what Agent Coulson, Agent Barton, and Agent Romanoff were up to in between the events of ‘Iron Man 2’, ‘Thor’, and ‘The Incredible Hulk’. It even ties into one of the Marvel One Shots, ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Thor’s Hammer’, which was an extra on the ‘Captain America: The First Avenger’ DVD. That is exactly what I was expecting from this series.
First, we were shown what sent Coulson from ‘Iron Man 2’ to ‘Thor’. That prompted a small encounter with the Black Widow before she went to HAMMER to do some damage. Then, we are better introduced to Agent Clint Barton AKA Hawkeye, who was on day one of his first vacation that he’s taken since joining up with S.H.I.E.L.D. when he received a call from Nick Fury about joining Coulson in New Mexico. In the film, we only got that one scene of Hawkeye, but here, we see him interact with Agent Coulson a bit more, and I liked what I saw. Hopefully, Jeremy Renner manages to capture the essence of Hawkeye on the screen.
The book ends with The Black Widow checking in with Nick Fury back at headquarters. She gets reassigned to keep an eye on Bruce Banner because Agent Sitwell needed to relocate to New Mexico to aid Agent Coulson. Now with her new assignment, Natasha is walking the campus of Culver University. Right before she was about to clobber some guy hitting on her, The Hulk makes an appearance bursting out of a building, as seen in ‘The Incredible Hulk’.
That’s what I’m talking about. Like I said earlier, this is exactly what I was expecting from this prelude to ‘The Avengers.’ It gave us a glimpse of what we didn’t see on screen, and that made me pretty happy, especially the bit with Hawkeye. We were better introduced to the character and got a better look of how he is as a character, as opposed to that one short scene he was a part of in ‘Thor’.
Judging by the last page of the book, we’re in line to get some Hulk in the next issue. Hopefully it will stay in the same vein as this issue and strays away from basically being a comic book version of the movie, like issue 1 basically was.
Verdict: Buy
THE AVENGERS PRELUDE: FURY’S BIG WEEK #2
Written by CHRISTOPHER YOST & ERIC PEARSON
Art by LUKE ROSS, DANIEL HDR, MARK PENNINGTON, & CHRIS SOTOMAYOR
