Scans_Daily

It's a workmanlike tale of the Avengers and the Fantastic Four running up against a scheme of Kang the Conqueror's - and a scheme of Ravonna, the Conqueror's love-turned-enemy, against Kang.

As a sequence of events, it's a satisfactory read. As a comic, a thing that combines visual storytelling techniques with dialogue and plotting, it's a staid read.

There's clever panel layouts, enough to keep the reader's eyes moving in ways that aren't just " left-to-right " - but there's also dialogue that's nothing but expository and often superfluous, egregious even when taking into account " the writing's just trying to cover any potential misses in the art ".

The plotting extrapolates from " Kang is a Conqueror with time-travel at his disposal " with ingenuity that doesn't go beyond the surface - the idea of " Chronopolis, Kang's city-state base reflecting his temporal conquests, populated with actual citizens ", isn't rendered as anything other than the backdrop for fight scenes.

Likewise the Anachronauts, Kang's pan-temporal collection of minions introduced here. Their function in this story is to be a distinct band of henchmen, and they fulfill it. Their visual variety and leveraging of accumulated details of continuity helps sell the scope of Kang - but beyond that, there's just their fight scenes and the dialogue therein, and they aren't especially much.

( They're introduced as the cliffhanger of Fantastic Four Annual #25's main story. )