AVENGERS #30
GRADE: D-
STORY BY: Brian Michael Bendis
ART BY: Walter Simonson
COVER BY: Leinil Yu
PUBLISHER: Marvel

SYNOPSIS:
Its date night with Hawkeye & Spider Woman! While doing battle with the enigmatic Mr. Negative to keep him from stealing some Hydra tech, Hawkeye and Spider Woman find the time to have couples counseling while thwarting Negative’s evil machinations.

THE GOOD

I have always been a fan of Madame Hydra (or Viper as she sometimes like to be called) so it was cool to see her pop up and be as Machiavellian as I like her to be.
And its good to see Walt Simonson drawing a monthly.

THE BAD

Ugh, the dialogue in this book was just infuriatingly bad. What the hell is wrong with Bendis? Does he really think that anyone besides him found the utterly cringe-inducing exchanges between Hawkeye and Spider Woman to be entertaining? Aside from the fact that the relationship between these two characters has been weakly written from the start, does he really think having two experienced super-heroes prattling on about their relationship while being severely outnumbered and outgunned is funny or something? It wasn’t funny it was stupid and served to further my absolute hatred of Bendis’ writing on the Avengers books.
Spider Woman came off as an insecure harridan which has never been the way this character behaved especially not over some relationship that, as far as the readers have been shown, is the definition of casual. She seemed two canceled dates away from boiling Hawkeye’s pet rabbit. And Hawkeye in his own book does not come off as nearly as gigantic a douchebag as he is written in this one.

THE UGLY

Can someone tell me why writers like Bendis and that gawd awful Chuck Austen felt the need to make Hawkeye into some kind of Lothario? Austen started it on his terrible Avengers run having The Wasp jump Hawkeye’s bones out of nowhere and then Bendis just continued it by having him bed down pretty much every female that joined the team. They completely discounted the established history of Hawkeye as a loser in love from the moment he started following Black Widow around like a puppy dog right up to his relationship with Mockingbird. He went from a guy who fell in love at the drop of a hat to the horn dog Barney Stinson of the Marvel Universe. It’s like really bad writers are living their geeky sex fantasies through the character or something. Just pathetic.

FINAL VERDICT

When is Bendis leaving this book again? Because it really doesn’t seem to be happening nearly fast enough. This was one of the worst issues of any comic book I have read in quite a while.