Avengers: Millennium #3 (Marvel)

writer: Mike Costa

artist: Carmine Giandomenico

This issue features Mike Costa settling in to his story.  Sure, there's more Spider-Man nonsense, but once it becomes apparent that even though Hydra seems to have everything figured out, the Avengers are still going to come out on top, and in a thoroughly Mike Costa way.

The image demonstrates how Costa is approaching Hydra in his familiar way, too.  The difference between his approach here, however, and how he would have done it in one of his G.I. Joe/Cobra comics is that Hydra is represented anonymously, whereas there are many famous figures to use or even create over at IDW.  Costa has learned that he doesn't need to do things the same way in order to get comparable results.  This is a considerable step forward from his Blackhawks experience.

He likes to make logical puzzles out of his stories, too, a key element of his IDW work, and certainly something Millennium at least suggested early on but is only now getting to actually demonstrate.  This is definitely true of how the issue ends, a moment that proves the story is going to show exactly how the good guys pull it off, which is the most insidious aspect of how Costa always presented Cobra, how he's done Hydra here, and even why the good guys were always worth rooting for in the midst of all that Cobra posturing, because the best laid plans can still be defeated.

So I'm pretty happy at this point.  I just wish he would ignore the impulse, whether by his own instincts or encouraged by Marvel, to present wacky nonsense alongside the rest of it.