As someone who yearns for the old, traditional days of the Avengers, I was very excited to hear about Dan Slott’s new plans for Mighty Avengers. Also, as a fan of the Wasp, I knew that I had to pick up Secret Invasion: Requiem. You would think that one of the founding members of the Avengers would get a more proper send-off. But in all actuality, this comic, like Mighty Avengers #20, boils down a highly complex character into a few things: Hank Pym’s wife, a 60’s glamor girl, and the woman who got slapped by an unstable husband. That isn’t even the thing that is best about the character. What was best was how she went from being someone so seemingly trivial to being the greatest leader of the Avengers, aside perhaps from Captain America himself.
But that is relegated to the gallery of her old costumes (which doesn’t even include her appearance in the comics before Heroes Reborn), where it briefly shows some of her greatest moments, including her sad surrender of Earth to Kang the Conqueror in the Kang Dynasty, one of my favorite storylines in comic books. That’s it. I do like how the character of Jocasta is being used in a new and interesting way, despite the fact that we still don’t know how she got from being stuck in Antigone’s body, carrying Ultron’s head after he took over Iron Man’s armor back in the day to returning to her normal form, but maybe we’ll learn that soon. Plus, the whole idea of Hank Pym becoming Wasp is kind of silly. The man has had more identity crises than any character in Marvel. I would actually have liked to see him die rather than her. Anyway, I wish that there was more new story than just eight pages. All in all, this was kind of disappointing. Khoi Pham’s art was pretty cool, though it needs a little polish.
Plot: 5.5 Art: 8.2 Dialogue: 8.0 Overall: 7.1
