Not a terribly memorable event. Without spoiling anything, this event kind of wraps up with extremely minimal lasting effects. Like many of Marvel's recent events, the main series mostly just sets up a concept for the various tie-ins to explore. Unfortunately, in this case the concept wasn't even all that interesting...

Blah. Mostly forgettable. Some decent parts but in all honesty it's more like a 2.5. Remender is normally a reliable writer but it seems that nobody apart from Hickman can do events well at Marvel these days (Unless you count Slott and Spider-Verse as well). Like most Marvel events, it's designed to provide launching points for new ongoing series such as Superior Iron Man.

A Marvel event is what got me into comics the first time: Chris Claremont's Fantastic Four Vs. The X-men. Over the years, many a Marvel event has disappointed me in different ways: Secret Invasion was an excellent concept that lost its direction part-way through, Avengers Vs. X-Men had too many writers and too inconsistent a tone to keep my interest, Original Sin and Shadowland were both mildly interesting premises that weren't executed well.

I love Rick Remender's comics. And while I haven't been a fan of all of his Marvel work (Uncanny Avengers wasn't for me), I loved some of the seeds of this event, particularly his Uncanny X-Force run. So when I heard the idea for Axis, I thought "That sounds awful. I wonder how he's going to turn this terrible, trite concept into something readable."

He hasn't. This series is nigh unreadable. The dialog is atrociously hokey. The plot is facile and completely without any surprises. And the whole concept of a Hulk within Hulk that he calls Kluh, is almost impressively stupid.

I stopped reading this in issues because I hated it.

When I decided to read the trade paperback, I, initially started skimming about halfway through because I couldn't force myself to keep reading the dialog. But once I finished, I went back to see if maybe, maybe, there had been at least one good thing in this book that I had missed by not reading it thoroughly.

Nope. Apart from a humorous Chip Zdarsky variant cover, every part of the book ranges somewhere between mediocre and failure. There isn't even an interesting panel of art between the four artists who shared duties on this nine issue title. I suspect this is because the only thing that could inspire them to work on this title was the paycheck.

There are so many elements here that I love and sadly they combined into a total disaster. Rick Remender seems to only want to see what happens when good guys are bad and vice versa. The story in itself isn't close to self contained. It actually doesn't even start here. The actions of the protagonists make little sense, so many pieces are moved off the board in the laziest of fashions, and the ending is nonsense. The dialogue is so heavy handed at times that I can't believe it was Remender. The book has four fantastic pencilers on it and all of them deliver work below their normal standard. I can't imagine why except time constraints. Overall, this book is the final chapter in an overly long Uncanny Avengers story. Too much going on accomplishing nothing.

Who greenlit this arc?

Wow! For the amount of hate this trade gets, I was shocked with how much I liked it. LOTS of action, lots of character flaws, lots of Spider-Man. Not sure what there is to hate. Is it breaking any new ground? No, but it’s fun and that’s what comics are supposed to be. Second half is much much stronger than the first. I was actually prepared to give it a 3 or 4 because of the mistreatment of Spider-Man, but the second half is awesome, and he really shines. The overall banter is outstanding as well. Laughed out loud quite a few times.

Don’t worry about other people’s reviews, give this a shot. Really. It’s on sale on a few websites, could probably find it on some lonely shelf in a comic book store, get it. It’s a damned thrill ride, and you’ll thank me.

*edit* Oh and I forgot to mention, the art is gorgeous! Seriously, fights are amazingly drawn, and the colors are outstanding. What more do you want? Go get it!

remender......U blocked me on twitter so I gotta tell u here this sucks , it sucks! It, sucks

Good guys go bad and bad guys do good and a few straddle the middle as they always have.