Alex Ross - Super Powered Fiction

I have been a huge fan of the Invaders since I was a kid. I discovered them through the Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe and thought they were some of the coolest looking character I’ve ever seen. I tracked down back issues, brought the 90s limited series, and otherwise tried to find every issue I could featuring the characters. I even own most of the lackluster New Invaders series conceived by the infamous Chuck Austen.

Over the last couple years, Marvel, Alex Ross, and Dynamite Entertainment have produced multiple books featuring the characters starting with Avengers Invaders moving in to The Torch and ending with the book I’m reviewing today Invaders Now!

After the previous two books returned both Toro and the Human Torch to action it seemed like a perfect time to reintroduce the original unit as a team, and that is what Invaders Now! is all about. Plotted by Alex Ross and scripted by Christos Gage (Avengers Academy) the book has a good pedigree on the writing side. Unfortunately it falls flat on the art side. Brazilian artist Caio Reis isn’t untalented, but he’s far from ready for primetime. Perhaps with a better inker he could have pulled together a better book, but as it stands his art suffers from strangely malformed hands and heads that don’t quite look like proper humans.

While the low quality of the art is quite distracting, the script falls rather flat for what feels like it should be a major event story. Instead, the writers produce a simple tale of a lost Invaders mission gone wrong and the fallout of that event in the modern day. While that event does lead to the resurrection of a certain Marvel elder god, it never really feels like a major threat that would need Captain America, Namor, Torch and company to respond.

The $25 hardcover seems to be too much for the rather lackluster collection, but fortunately it does come with gorgeous cover art by Alex Ross himself. Unfortunately, his art stays away from the interiors or perhaps the experience of Invaders Now! could have been improved.

As a whole, I have to say that sadly this book is Not Recommended.