Avengers: Millennium #4 (Marvel)

writer: Mike Costa

artist: Carmine Di Giandomenico

The conclusion of Mike Costa's four issue weekly is a worthy ending to a project that at times seemed like it was spinning its wheels.

Costa's trademark is springing a well-devised trap, and that's exactly what this story promised and what it delivered.  Getting there was a little more complicated.  Working with any set of characters other than the good and bad guys of G.I. Joe over at IDW has for one reason or another proven to be something of a problem for Costa.  With Millennium he tended to swing radically from manic dialogue to the kind of character work he does best.  In an effort to be mainstream, he lost sight of his writerly instincts.

It's not a bad thing to be goofy.  At times it seems to be a mandate in comics, whether working with superheroes or otherwise (Chew is kind of what you get if you try to be goofy and clever all the time; personally I found Chew to be exhausting after a while; however, this is a formula that Atomic Robo has routinely made work extremely well).  So it's not surprising to see Costa attempt it, because the Avengers have been that kind of franchise since Brian Michael Bendis and/or Robert Downey, Jr. took control of its voice.

Fortunately that's not all Costa did with his story.  The thing is, however, that four issues ended up seeming like he needed to rush the ending, having characters explain what needed to happen rather than let it play out.  This may be a problem of trying to have too many lead protagonists.  This is always a gamble of superhero teams.  In his G.I. Joe stories, Costa normally has one lead per story and a bunch of supporting players (and all of them have motives that are clearly established; that's what makes them so great).  Likely he was given permission or didn't feel comfortable doing this with the Avengers.  But he should have.  He should also have, as I've previously pointed out, featured more than a generic Hydra agent as the bad guy.  Hydra was the basis for Cobra.  Costa knows Cobra.  He could be the guy to make Hydra as interesting as Cobra became.  If he was at all interested in doing so, this particular opportunity got away from him.

But this is still a step up from other non-Joe projects I've seen from him.  Hopefully Marvel took notice and will entrust him with bigger projects.  He uses Hawkeye pretty well in this finale; maybe Costa can write Hawkeye at some point.  Already there's Clint Barton and Kate Bishop and their complicated relationship, which is something right up Costa's Joe-honed instincts.

(Seriously, make this happen, Marvel.)

And no, it doesn't matter that the big threat Hydra set up was so easy to defeat, because this was a story about the Avengers out-thinking rather than outfighting their enemies, which should definitely happen every now and then.  Plus, dinosaurs are awesome no matter how they're used.

(I'm looking at you, Atomic Robo enemy Dr. Dinosaur!)

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.

Avengers: Millennium #1 & 2 (Marvel)

writer: Mike Costa

artist: Carmine Di Giandomenico

I've been a big fan of Mike Costa since discovering him in the pages of IDW's Cobra comics, where he's recently returned in the pages of G.I. Joe: Snake Eyes, Agent of Cobra.  The only downside in Costa's brilliant career is that he can't seem to connect with other material the way he has G.I. Joe.

A certain amount of that opinion has to do with my admittedly limited attempts to actually read that other material.  Yet my personal track record holds the opinion to be, at least for me, reasonably accurate.  When DC launched the New 52, Costa wrote Blackhawks, a military series that for all intents and purposes was a mainstream version of the work that had made him a name in the business.  And yet, he chose, or perhaps was mandated, to approach Blackhawks differently than he has Cobra.  (Which is to say, maybe this is one of those matters about creative freedom.)  In the pages of Jonathan Hickman's God Is Dead, which Costa has been writing for most of its run, there's not much of the Cobra vibe, either.

All the same, when I saw Avengers: Millennium listed, I was excited all over again.  This is a self-contained limited series.  Surely more room for the authentic Mike Costa to breathe?  To a certain extent, it seems.  And again, maybe it's just me, pigeon-holing the guy.

The page I included here is the second one from the first issue, and for two pages I saw exactly the Mike Costa I like so much, a writer fully engaged in a character, their particular nature fully on display.  And then, for the remainder of the two issues thus far released, he just kind of does Avengers Adventure Time.  Which isn't so bad, but it's not what I want to see from Mike Costa, specifically.

Most of these issues is also dedicated to the wacky banter of Hawkeye and Spider-Man.  This is nice to see, in a way, because it certainly broadens the scope of what Costa could be known for, but it also instantly limits him in a way.  Spider-Man has a way of swallowing writers whole, the ones who let their guard down.  Deadpool happened because Rob Liefeld, basically, let his guard down.  Deadpool is Spider-Man without any of the angst.  It's just wacky banter all the time, and stories attempting to reflect that.  Some writers can make sense of that.  Others can't.  Spider-Man is riding a wave of popularity at the moment because Dan Slott was able to focus more than writers tend to, without getting all mopey and woe-is-me (Spidey is basically manic-depressive, kind of like Daredevil), but a lot of what Slott did to make Spidey popular was the gimmick route that led to Spider-Verse.  Slott ended up taking the Geoff Johns approach, what Johns did on Green Lantern for nine years, event after event, except Spidey has more limited possibilities for such things than Green Lantern, so you get things like "Spider-Island" and what I always like to call Doctor Spider-Man, which was another character taking on the role, surely a comics staple, but in this instance more like when Ed Brubaker brought back Bucky, a genius character move.

...I feel like I have massively digressed.  Anyway, this is to say, I hope I see more of the Mike Costa I know and love in Avengers: Millennium, but even if I don't at least this time I'm committed to the experience one way or another.