Avenging Spider-Man #1 - Everybody loves a Team-Up book when it's done well, and this was at times laugh-out-loud funny ("Someone yell for some Kool-aid?") and fun throughout. It turns out i don't have a lot of books with Joe Madureira art (looks like mainly Deadpool: The Circle Chase), but i quite enjoyed it here. My only minor complains is that JJ was a little too calm and quippy in the face of crazy moleoid danger. I know he's been through a lot and he's an ornery guy, but it still felt out of character for him to be making jokes, and any Marvel "civilian" should still be pretty terrified when kidnapped by degenerate morlocks.

New Avengers #18 - I want to hate this because it's so totally a rehash of a plot that we just freaking read. I mean i just don't get it. What happened to that Ultron plot from the .1 issue? Even Ultron would be a character we've seen in Bendis' Avengers already, but we've had like 10 years of Norman Osborn. Enough already. That said, i thought this was a well written book. All the villain organization heads talking about how on paper they should be ruling the world by now but they keep failing is great, and does a lot to revitalize these organizations like AIM that have been around so long that they look like losers just because good guys always have to win. So i liked that. I thought Viper and the AIM leader were both well written with their anti-government, anti-corporate agendas (although... do they know Osborn used to run OsCorp?). And i always enjoy recruitment issues. Regarding the characters recruited, after seeing Barney Barton (Holy crap, they brought back Barney Barton? Who died in Avengers #64 in 1969? Are these people nuts?) i thought maybe all these new Dark Avengers were obscure older characters which was going to send me down another back-issue death-spiral, but it turns out the other ones i didn't know were from the recent Osborn series. So, a bullet dodged there! For now...

Resurrection Man #1-3 - Aha, Abnett & Lanning! I caught you. So this is why your quality has been declining on the Marvel books - you've been cheating on me! I've been told i'm not allowed to comment on the cheesecake art because it's "supposed to be that way" but when min caught me reading one of these issues she wanted to know why i was looking at porn. Cheesecake aside, i didn't love the art. As for the story, it's ok. It might have been better to have a more straightforward plot instead of starting right away with this meta-level demon and angel stuff. And maybe some bad guys that didn't already know Resurrection Man's powers; these didn't really feel like introductory issues to me (when he came back with stone skin powers, i actually briefly thought it was the old man busting onto the scene in his super-villain guise; a combination of bad storytelling in the art, a lack of familiarity with Resurrection Man's powers, and my poor reading comprehension). Kinda felt like i was thrown into the middle of an ongoing series. Which i can roll with, and if anything, too much exposition was provided. I dunno. I certainly wouldn't get this on my own, but if Wanyas keeps getting it i'll keep reading it.

Barney Barton was brought back in the Hawkeye: Blind Spot limited series.

Yeah, i saw the tortured MCP entry. ;-) That's why i didn't blame Bendis specifically.

I actually like the Bendis/Brevoort philosophy of using new characters created by contemporary creative teams to keep them from fading into obscurity (Sentry, Echo, Hood, Gorgon, resurrected Barney Barton, Ai Apaec, etc.) Unified Marvel Universe!

That said, bringing back Barney Barton was still dumb.