Comic Books

Avengers: No Road Home #3 Review

An enjoyable third issue continues to probe the characters well while offering new wonderments for the characters to interact with.

David Brooke

February 27, 2019

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It’s a battle between gods and men, or in this case gods and men who turned into god-like heroes. Hercules’s entire family is dead and he aims to get revenge, but how can he do that with a villain who is so unpredictable?

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So what’s it about?

Read our preview.

Why does this matter?

The beauty of this series is how it balances character work with action and plot development. With most team books you get two or three heroes as the main characters of a story with most of the others serving as supporting characters. In this series, much like No Surrender, every character seems to have a moment and is not forgotten. That makes the read more fulfilling on a team level. If you haven’t read No Surrender, check out our review.

Fine, you have my attention. What’s good about it?

This is his hell.
Credit: Marvel Comics

This issue opens with Hulk, Hawkeye, and Rocket Raccoon trying to make sense of where they are and what is going on. This section of the comic taps into the sad sack nature of these characters. They aren’t the shining beacon on the hill, but more of the downtrodden heroes of the team. They are preyed upon and there’s an interesting new wrinkle added to the narrative on their side of things. Marvel fans should get out their encyclopedias for the villain that pops up. The way Hulk is written is also fascinating. Using Hawkeye’s perspective we gather this new “immortal” Hulk has a different personality of sorts when communicating.

Most of this issue is devoted to Vision, Hercules, Scarlet Witch, and Spectrum trying to get an item to help them defeat Nyx. They arrive at a familiar place of magic and mysticism that is quite cool, since it opens up the story to even more wonderment. The actions at this location set up a suitable albeit familiar cliffhanger that should be interesting to see how it is resolved next issue.

Art is by Paco Medina with inks by Juan Vlasco and color by Jesus Aburtov. The style is colorful like one would expect from a superhero comic. One element that’s striking is energy effects. I think it’s easy to forget how far coloring has come in comics as these effects have varying looks thanks to shading and use of translucency. This issue uses a lot of long panels that are a bit unusual, but help create a dramatic effect that works.

Someone is getting a pounding.
Credit: Marvel Comics

It can’t be perfect, can it?

As a much more episodic miniseries, the story isn’t progressing very quickly. That is by design to be sure, but it’s a bit of a bummer to not get more progress out of the story. It’s going to be a read that’ll serve best in trade paperback, which does beg the question why Marvel and other publishers don’t just publish the whole thing at once.

The cliffhanger I mentioned above is a trope we’ve seen so often it’s not going to surprise you. Nor will you be all that curious how it plays out since it happens so much and is reversed so easily.

Is it good?

An enjoyable third issue continues to probe the characters well while offering new wonderments for the characters to interact with. The theme of gods fighting men is a good one and it’ll be fun to see how it plays out and how it might change the Marvel universe going forward.