New Avengers #15: "See How the Swans Fly"

[superboyprime]

Reed and the Beast have already used the Bridge to run a search for the Black Swan.



The first sighting is of the Black Swan, as a young girl, traveling back in time to the destruction of her home by the Black Priests and briefly confronting them. The second is of her performing some kind of grisly ritual sacrifice. It's the third that Reed and the Beast found especially alarming, though...

Comments

[halloweenjack]

Had to stop at "This is pretty much the foundation of every piece of bad science fiction ever written." That's so wrong that it's not even funny; it's Hickman trying to write like Warren Ellis, tripping, falling flat on his face and not just breaking his nose but shattering his jaw.

[icon_uk]

I can imagine the Watcher hearing that and thinking "Oh REALLY Richards? See how much I help you next time Galactus shows up."

[lbd_nytetrayn]

Why Richards? It was McCoy who said it. ;P

[icon_uk]

Ummm.... guilt by association?

Nah, I got nothing, good catch! :)

[doodleboy]

Part of me though the New Avengers were a bit slow on the uptake... I mean she was introduced in the first issue betraying the people she was working with and killing their planet...

I did enjoy the next issue though aka "The Justice League are so much better then the Avengers" issue.

[matrix_dragon]

She's evil?! I am shocked. Truly.

[thanekos]

" There is no saving.. anything. Especially this horrible beard. "

[cainofdreaming]

I have this niggling feeling that I should know that costume. Is it an old design, or is my memory playing tricks on me?

[espanolbot]

Kind of reminds me of the Silver Banshee, but not quite.

[drtechnobabel]

I think it's just one of those generic designs that gets reused for female characters over and over again. That doesn't bug me as much, but you know what really throws me off about this character? 'Black Swan' was the name of a villainess in City of Heroes, and as an avid player until it shut down, it makes me think of her every time the name comes up. She was an evil alternate universe version of one of the NPC heroes who was able to travel between the Dark Dimension and her home dimension, and could summon dark energy from it and stuff. She even looked kind of like this Black Swan too, come to think of it... all you'd need to do is extend the top down her stomach a bit and make her hair black.

Seriously, see for yourself: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Black_Swan

[cainofdreaming]

Actually I was referring to the guy she seems to be allied with. Rabum Alal? Or is she referring to something else wit that? I really should have specified.

Nice to meet another former Cityite, though.

[stubbleupdate]

The blonde man is another Manifold (like Eden Fesi), which might be why he is so familiar

[doctor_spanky]

Meh. I like it better when superheroes are fun

And when they actually do stuff instead of talking for pages about made-up "science"

[mrstatham]

Dear God, this is bland. How many alternate worlds and sets of characters does Hickman feel the need to kill off, knowing full well that in the end, once his tenure is over, the Avengers will still be there having inevitably won? I can understand wanting to up the stakes a little, but given the sheer number of Alt!characters and worlds dead, now, it's ridiculous.

[spacebetween]

Really, he needs to get off this Incursion thing the story has been going for so long that is dry, dull and boring. Anytime we go to an alternate reality it is to watch the characters just annihilated to make the big bads of the story look so powerful and threatening.

[obsidianwolf]

Yeah this whole incursion thing should have been a 12 or so issue event instead of dragging on through so many titles for so freaking long.

We only needed to see one or two alternate worlds destroyed to give a sense of drama and scale to this conflict. Hell since he's dragging this thing out so bloody much why not spend a few issues on an alternate world and let us really care that these characters die instead of yet another Look alternate universe oh they are dead because of my awesome bad guys who will be defeated easily by ass pull and then you'll see another world show up and die for the next over 9000 baddie.

[wizardru]

tl:dr...that should be the summary for this entire title. This is just...DULL. I agree with someone else that this feels like Hickman trying to pull of Warren Ellis and failing (something, admittedly that even Warren Ellis sometimes fails at). But this has been going on for what feels like forever and it's just boring.

I took a pass on the entire big event that Hickman just did, but because of the Guardians of the Galaxy event, I picked up copies of the Annhiliation and Annihilation: Conquest trades...and enjoyed them immensely more. Things happen, stakes are raised and the plot moves. I understand that Hickman wants to use some of his own characters, but I just don't like most of his new creations and they don't feel like they'll have any real staying powers. I mean the name Rabium Alal doesn't exactly roll off the tongue for someone you're positioning as one of the MU's new big bads...a field already pretty crowded for some knockoff Ras al-Ghul/Darkseid hybrid to muscle in on.

[bizarrohulk]

I confidently predict that Barium Anal or whatever his name is will either be dead at the end of this event, or will simply be shuffled off into limbo and ignored by all future writers.

That's the problem with pretty much all of Hickman's new villains - they're all so off-the-scale powerful and game-breaking that no other writer will ever want to touch them - except, perhaps, to have them killed off by the Big Bad of the *next* major company event (and so the cycle continues).

In fairness, Hickman himself seems to be at least on some level aware of this, why is presumably why he killed all the Builders.

[mrstatham]

But then the only problem is that Hickman made the Builders into chumps by saying "OH, YOU'RE LUCKY THEY WEREN'T X AND Y, AVENGERS." Which completely no-sells his own creation while trying to big-up the next big fat bundle of whatever he's trying too push as a bad guy.

[mrstatham]

The difference is that Ellis wouldn't stretch this shit out over twelve plus issues, as you point out. Go back, look at the Authority, and an alien incursion threat is handled in like, three issues. And the severity of the threat and exactly how scary they can be is handled so much more quickly - because Ellis in part used civilians to show the level of damage the bad guy is capable of. Here? Hickman is killing off legions of Not!Avengers - which just means this is going to be a complete ass-pull when the Avengers inevitably kick these people in the teeth. Just like they did the ultra-bland Not!Prothean Builders.

[q99]

It's something I often say, killing lots of characters doesn't equal raising the stakes. Especially not emotionally.

[mrstatham]

Not on the scale Hickman is doing it, no. We aren't given time to care about these characters or investigate how they work, all we need to know in terms of why they're significant is a - they're alt! versions of the main heroes, and b - the villains can kill them. It's incredibly lazy to expect us to formulate an attachment to a character just because it's an alternate Thor, or whatever. In fact, it's a very silly assumption to assume the reader will care just because they slapped name X on someone they're killing off.

[q99]

EXiles often made me care about Alts, but in a few pages, even sometimes half an issue, of showing their history or such beforehand...

[md84]

So Black Swan turned out to be an evil servant of the cosmic world eating horror? Big surprise.

On the bright side, it means that Rabum Alal probably isn't nearly as unstoppable as she claimed, given that she's a lying liar who lies.

[doodleboy]

Well... reading the series, Black Swan hasn't been lying. Not even by omission, she said several times before that there was no saving earth.

She's just really really really damn obtuse.

If I had to guess at her motivation, she's probably training the New Avengers to be Black Swans like her. She wants companions on her world-destroying journey.

I guess what I do wish for is that Hickman will drop the sci-fi mumbo jumbo when it isn't helping the story. She especially suffers in this, it's hard to relate to her when you have to decipher meaningless nerd-words. Especially in her back-story issue.

Maybe she's supposed to come off as alien, but alot of the time she comes off flat.

[captainbellman]

Is...is Hickman intending the Black Swan's nonsense-words to have a vaguely pseudo-Islamic tone to them? That last bit of garble seems to have diction oddly reminiscent of "Allahu Akbar", and even "Rabum Alal" sounds similar to "Allah".

Maybe I'm overreacting, but I'm getting warning bells. (No pun intended). I'm not saying Hickman's an Islamophobe, just that he seems to have chosen an...interesting style for his pseudo-religion's pseudo-prayer words. Especially as Marvel has so recently stretched out a hand to Islamic audiences with. "Ms. Marvel".

[cainofdreaming]

It's actually a bastardized version of Akkadian (the story says it's 'High Sumerian' but no such thing actually exists).

Just aping from here since knowledge of ancient languages isn't actually one of my foremost attributes.