Blade finds himself in a world where Steve Rogers was never thawed out of the ice so the Avengers never formed. What’s going on?! Oh - another desperately thrown-together and bloated Marvel event book that’s not worth reading.
If all you want to see is a slightly different Marvel universe, then Heroes Reborn is for you. Robbie Reyes isn’t Ghost Rider, Coulson is President, Doom has the Juggernaut thingamabob to become Dr Juggernaut, Tony Stark isn’t Iron Man, he’s just a drunk weapons dealer, Thanos has Infinity Rings, and so on.
It’s really boring. What If?-type stories don’t do anything for me and that’s all this silly noise was. The story itself is so empty. Blade and Cap know things are amiss but tread water until the story needs to end so they can punch whoever and restore the status quo.
I guess Jason Aaron wanted to write a DC vs Marvel-style story and this was the closest he’d realistically get. So he subs in Marvel D-listers Hyperion, Nighthawk and Power Princess (who?) to be the DC Trinity of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman (with Green Goblin as Joker in Ravencroft, Marvel’s bargain-basement Arkham Asylum).
Before this, I’d have been interested to see that. Jason Aaron’s been at Marvel for pretty much the entirety of his comics career and the one Penguin comic he did for DC years ago was so good I’ve hoped he’d one day write a Batman run. That said, his “Batman” issue with Nighthawk (drawn by Scalped/Goddamned artist RM Guera) was disappointingly weak and forgettable so maybe he wouldn’t be that good a Batman writer after all.
Aaron also seems to write the Frank Miller version of Superman with his Hyperion, as a tool of the US government using brutal strength and ruthlessness to enforce authoritarian control. Supposedly the world we’re presented with in this book is a better one than the usual 616 world but I didn’t see that which only made the feeble premise even less convincing. It’s pretty clear which side Aaron’s trying to skew readers’ feelings towards and it ain’t the suddenly DC-flavoured one in this Marvel book, surprise surprise.
All this amounts to is the most banal of things: superheroes punching superheroes. Sure, there’s some imagination to the new combos of characters/roles in this alternative universe, but there’s none at all when it comes to the story itself. And that’s the worst part of it - it’s a story masquerading as imaginative and novel but it’s really just the same old structure with the most superficial of veneers.
Like all Marvel event stories, Heroes Rebored: America’s Dreariest Heroes was dull, overlong, pointless and messy, even with a writer like Jason Aaron who used to be a great writer but seems to only crank out rote superhero drek these days. And, also like all Marvel event stories, I suggest sparing yourself the tedium and skip it entirely.
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