Avengers: The Initiative started life as a miniseries, but on the strength of initial orders, it's been upgraded to an ongoing title right from the word go.  The result is a curious first issue, which clearly displays its roots as the start of a miniseries.

Now that the Superhuman Registration Act is in force, the registered heroes have to get on with the job of recruiting and training the new wannabe heroes who have signed up.  That takes place at Camp Hammond, the Initiative's HQ, insensitively located at Stamford.  In theory, the new heroes get trained up and then assigned to the fifty state teams, thus ensuring that Vermont is forever safe from nastiness.

This is billed as an Avengers title, but for the life of me, I can't fathom out why.  It's actually a comic about a superhero boot camp, told from the perspective of the students.  A couple of the tutors are Avengers, but they're not the lead characters, and the logo seems to have been shoved on the cover simply to boost sales.  Unless we're now claiming that "the Avengers" encompasses all the registered state teams, in which case the term is about to become even more diluted than "X-Men."  The cover design - which simply has the Avengers logo with the line-wide "Initiative" banner, thus making it look like a tie-in Avengers issue - also seems needlessly confusing.  Does this poor book not deserve its own logo?

Dan Slott is best known for writing semi-comedy books like She-Hulk, and he's very good at it.  This time he's aiming for something more straightforward.  For him, this book would count as almost grim and gritty, but it's still reasonably light by today's standards generally.  The new students arrive at the Initiative, start to settle in, and we get a series of introductions along with the first sign of the government covering up any problems with the place.

There are bits that don't quite work.  The plot seems to suggest that this is a draft, and that every new superhuman is being dragged along for training whether they like it or not.  Strangely, nobody seems to express any resentment at this.  I suspect that I'm simply not understanding the way this is supposed to work, since all the characters behave like volunteers, and there are some scenes where people are being persuaded to join.  Whatever the position, it's yet another example of Marvel's utter failure to explain in a remotely clear or coherent way what the Superhuman Registration Act actually is.  Even if they think they've done it before, this is the first issue of a new series, and it should be spelt out again.  Otherwise, you haven't explained your premise, which means you've botched a central plank of the story.

And given that this isn't a comedy book, the scientist with the German accent has got to go.  ("Und I haff discovered something vhich is most disturbing...")

Other than that, though... not bad.  Some likeable characters, a workable premise, nice clean art.  I'm not quite sure what you do with it as a long term book, especially given that in theory it has to co-exist with Young Avengers - who surely ought to be playing a major role in this book. 

But it's still a promising start, and Slott's storytelling skill holds up outside his usual comedy area.  I can see this working, as a series about a group of trainee superheroes.

Rating: B+

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