Avengers Academy #26

First review of the new week would be this week's Pick of the Litter, and my favorite ongoing comic series, Avengers Academy. Before saying anything else, if you haven't read JT's post on why Avengers Academy is so great, you should definitely give that post a read(you can find it here). Before I even open this comic, a quick note... I haven't handed out a single perfect score thus far in 2012... In 2011 I gave out 27 perfect scores, so about two a month... This year? Zip... Here's hoping I'm looking at the first perfect comic of 2012!

Avengers Academy #26:

Summary: So Jocasta and Veil have returned to the Avengers Academy and(surprise, surprise) are working with Jeremy Briggs(that presumably evil kid from a few issues back). Jocasta feels that the Avengers are an outdated idea, and the Academy would only lead to children dying, so she wants all of her work taken from the Academy, as well as the Academy's students joining with herself, Veil and Jeremy. Pym suspects that Jocasta's programing had been tampered with and Pym and Jocasta reach a compromise where they'd allow the Sentinel to scan Jocasta for any virus's or outside influences. While Pym and Jocasta are fixing the Sentinel, Jeremy arrives on campus with several of the Initiative cadets(including Hardball, thus instituting the Hardball Rule to this issue!) and makes his pitch as to why the students should join with him... He'd pay them and they'd be doing humanitarian work. After being repaired, the Sentinel scans Jocasta and reveals her free of outside influences, at which time Pym gives an impassioned speech about what the Avengers mean to him, as well as what they've done for him personally. Reptil makes a speech of his own, basically stating the obvious, that both sides wanted to make the world a better place, meaning there was no need for hostility and that they should be working together. Pym and Jocasta agree to keep in touch and try to work together, and the students pick sides(only Rocket Racer and Machine Teen leave the Academy). Hazmat is about to leave since she wanted Jeremy to try to cure Mettle of his powers, but Jeremy instead takes the pieces of Mettle Hazmat had acquired last issue(that's actually kind of creepy...) and promises to do something “good” with them, before telling Hazmat she should stay with Mettle. From there we jump to the future and find the future Academy members wondering if sending Reptil back in time had accomplished anything, at which time their leader, an old and probably crazy Pym says that future Reptil's actions will help their future(which seems to be a technological madhouse) come into being.

Thoughts: Oh well, the streak of non-perfect scores continues... This was an okay issue of this series, but sadly, that's all it was... Okay. I'm so used to getting great from this book that only getting okay is almost a disappointment! This issue seemed to simply be putting pieces into place, moving characters around and showing that Jeremy Briggs was still out there in the background. There were some really good moments, like Pym's speech, Ricochet's comments to Prodigy(that was SO awesome for the 8 or 9 of us that read the old Slingers series!), and of course Hardball(oh, and just so you all know, the Hardball Rule means that I add an extra 1/2 to the score of a comic where Hardball appears in, no questions asked)! So while I'm sure this comic will end up being better than like 80% of the books I'll read this week, it was still slightly disappointing...

Score: 8 out of 10.

Pym really would be insane or dead without the Avengers... Probably in that order...