5. It's Not Well Written
Something in the quote from Donner got me thinking. Something about the mingling of characters. AvX didn't mingle their characters terribly well. The plot, too ambitious (even for a comic book) and the scripts were disjointedly written by Marvel's best and brightest (at gunpoint, I assume). Theoretically, it's a great idea: Brian Michael Bendis, Matt Fraction, Ed Brubaker, Ed McGuinness, Joe Kubert, and anybody else Marvel can scare up, all writing a comic book together. I'm sold. In theory, I'm sold. But the practicality of having all those talents in one room (not in a Google chat, not on email threads) writing and workshopping the book is a superhuman feat in itself. And it probably happened once, if at all. So, to me, each individual's issue seemed to play too closely to their strengths. Brubaker was hard-boiled. Fraction was cosmic, spacey, and Iron Man centric. Bendis just wanted the Avengers to just get along, and show us how many puns Spider-Man can get in an issue. Everyone wanted their moment in the sun or in the caustic blinding light of the Phoenix Force, in this case. Imagine that mentality in a screenwriters meeting: pitting the best and brightest in comics' egos and narratives against one another, all the while trying to develop an intelligible story arc that translates into film. The overall arc in the comics, however, lacked luster, with throwaway plot points and a conclusion that left me wondering why I'd even followed the series. (Nova? He's your go-to-guy?). Iron Man's attempted solution to mitigate the Phoenix force: Screw it, I'll build a giant robot and we'll blow it up. Cable's lack of involvement in any substantial way most of his stories in the past 8 years have centered around protecting Hope Summers, the mutant messiah. The Phoenix Five and their astoundingly slutty choices in costuming, both male and female. Or maybe it was Hope's climactic transformation into Phoenix in the final issue, when she proclaims, "I am fire and life incarnate. Now and forever." Until about 10 frames later when she decides that it's not worth the trouble, 'cause she's, like, really good friends with Scarlet Witch now and she told her not to. In the end, there was little finality. Sure a major character died (I'm not going to ruin it for you, yet) and there was drama, albeit forced, but that happens to major characters in comics on an annual basis. It's easy to kill a good guy for taking his own sense of righteousness to its fullest extent. It's easy to forge an unquestionable, circumstantial martyr. But it doesn't make it good writing.