When we last left the battlefield of ‘Avengers Vs. X-Men’, Hope Summers obliterated Wolverine with a blast of fire before running away from him, Spider-Man, and the island of Utopia. Issue three opens with a really disturbing image of Logan after an hour of regenerating his flesh. Like Spider-Man says, “Yuck!”

There were some really interesting parts to this issue. They started drawing parallels between Captain America’s behavior now with Iron Man’s behavior in ‘Civil War’. Even though I ended up hating Iron Man by the end of that story, and I definitely don’t want to hate Cap, I am interested to see where and how far they take this. Then, just as the cover indicates so I’m not considering it a spoiler, we see Wolverine and Cap go at it, even though they started out on the same side at the beginning of all this.

Really all the interesting things that happen revolve around Cap and his actions. In the first few issues, we saw that Cyclops was the one who wasn’t himself because of the whole Phoenix ordeal, but now we’re starting to see how it’s affecting Steve Rogers.  It’s a whole other side to Steve that we never see. Then, after I finished reading the issue and started to write this, I noticed why we started to see a different side of Cap. Ed Brubaker scripted this issue. No one writes a more compelling Captain America today than that man.

Switching gears a bit, I want to recommend something to you guys before reading this book: Study up on Rachel Summers. If you’ve been following my coverage of AvX, you’ll know that I haven’t read an X-Men title in a really long time until this event. If you’re like me and aren’t really up to date, then I highly suggest looking at the Wiki page for Rachel. She makes an appearance in this issue, but I was really confused as to who she was and her history with Wolverine, Cyclops, and all that. If there were anything that could have enhanced my reading experience, it would have been a working knowledge of that character.

Now that the hunt for Hope is on, things seem like they’re starting to build to something big, I’m impatiently waiting for the next issue in two weeks because I can’t get enough of AvX!

Verdict: Buy

AVENGERS VS. X-MEN #3
Written By ED BRUBAKER
Art By JOHN ROMITA JR., SCOTT HANNA, & LAURA MARTIN
Cover By JIM CHEUNG & LAURA MARTIN