REVIEW: Avengers Arena, Volume One: Kill or Die

PLOT: Trapped on an isolated island, 16 superhuman teens (including cult favorites like members of the Runaways, the Avengers Academy and Darkhawk) are given a chilling ultimatum by their demented captor: Fight or die...only one will walk out alive! Thus begins a primal battle that will test the skills, stamina and morals of each combatant. Welcome to Murder World, where secrets are plenty, alliances are fleeting, and the key to victory might be rewriting the rules of the game. Who will survive? As Cammi and Hazmat battle the mysterious Deathlocket, X-23 and Juston Seyfert's Sentinel join the fray...but who is the killer stalking the heroes in their sleep? Who are the students of the Braddock Aacdemy? And why does Darkhawk equal death?

REVIEW: This book is incredibly sad in the worst way possible. For months, I've been anxious to read this Marvel NOW! title more than pretty much any of the others. So now I've found out for months, that I'd been duped by Marvel. Not only is this series one of the worst to come out of the Marvel NOW!, but it's quite possibly the most tangible reason that Marvel has fallen by the wayside and DC Comics' New 52 is considerably more successful. I've never seen such cowardice by a comic team, that in order to re-brand Marvel and create great new stories, they stole ideas from elsewhere. I get that concepts are borrowed in literature, and that nothing is 100% original or unique, but Avengers Arena is about the worst example of this I've ever seen. I also understand that this is somewhat an attempt at being clever and twisting a popular skeleton of a story around Marvel characters, but it just doesn't work at all as its own thing and basically comes off as a joke. From the beginning, sixteen super-teens are chosen and placed on an island to wage war against one another until there is only one left standing. Does that sound familiar to you? With the recent popularity of all things The Hunger Games, it leaves a lot of the not so popular books grasping for straws at how to make their stories as relatable as Suzanne Collins did for Katniss and Peeta.

The sad part is, that Marvel should be the pioneers of comic book hero stories, considering they're one of the top two comic producers out there. Instead, they're not even borrowing, but straight ripping off a concept from a popular teen fiction series and trying to make it their own. They could have easily taken a bit of this concept and put a unique twist on it to make it their own, as many others already have in this dystopian trend that I'm sick of, and with some success. There's nothing about this comic at all that is cool, original, or awesome. I was so disappointed that I had to read six issues of this comic and not get a single great thing out of it. A lot of the reviews I'd seen had claimed that this was intense, superb, and leaning towards adult. This is a teenage Marvel fan's dream comic I suppose, but I wasn't really expecting what I read at all in Avengers Arena. This series should be titled, Marvel's The Hunger Games, because that's about all it is. If you like The Hunger Games, you may like this. If you like Marvel NOW!, you may like this (and I really haven't so far). If you're an adult and want to read something worth your while, pass on this. Even one of the covers was a straight rip of the mockingjay pin on fire poster for the movie, but with an Avengers A! Marvel, this is pathetic.

WRITING : ( 5 / 10 )

ARTWORK : ( 7 / 10 )

STORY : ( 3 / 10 )

COVERS : ( 6 / 10 )

AWESOME : ( 2 / 10 )

FINAL RATING : ( 4 / 10 )