Editor's Note: Mighty Avengers #14 arrives in stores tomorrow, May 21.

This issue of Mighty Avengers abandons the Nick Fury-based plot threads that we've seen develop over the course of the last couple of issues, instead shifting its focus to the Sentry and exploring his role in the Skrull invasion. The issue provides a recap of the Sentry's character for those who aren't familiar with his history or his peculiar idiosyncrasies, and effectively creates the impression that he could be one of the most significant "wild cards" in the entire Secret Invasion crossover. However, I can't say that I found it to be a particularly strong story.

What had me most excited about this issue were the art previews that indicated that Bendis would be returning to the flashback scene featuring the Sentry and the Void that we saw in the comic-within-a-comic in New Avengers #8, and again in the time-travelling story in Mighty Avengers #10. Since this scene has been referred to more than once (and was one of the first explicit references to Skrulls in Bendis' Avengers run), I've been eager to see how it fits into the big Secret Invasion plan, and what seeds Bendis may have subtly sown in those early issues before the Skrull plot was revealed to readers. I was disappointed, then, by the fairly straightforward way that the scene plays out in this issue, with no apparent significance to the Secret Invasion beyond showing the Sentry's first encounter with the Skrull race.

Despite this, Bendis does manage to introduce some interesting wrinkles to the Skrull invasion plot that relate to the Sentry. Many readers have bemoaned the fact that we still don't really know the full extent of the Sentry's vaguely-defined powers, and Bendis spins this as an aspect of the character that could also cause problems for the Skrulls, who are wary of getting too close to him in case his powers allow him to detect their presence and expose their threat prematurely. We also see the Skrulls display a little more conniving subtlety than usual in their infiltration plans, with a Skrull impostor posing as Jarvis who plays on Tony Stark's guilt about the Scarlet Witch in order to access confidential files about the Sentry, and the hatching of a canny plan to make Bob suspect that the Void may be responsible for the Skrull invasion (a plot point that's slightly undermined by the fact that we already saw the plan come to fruition in Secret Invasion #2).

Khoi Pham takes over the art duties for this issue, and I found his work to be a bit of a mixed bag. The characters are all recognisable and consistent, and Pham deals with the demands of a big team book well, with no noticeable shortcuts or rushed-looking panels. However, I don't find his work particularly attractive or interesting to look at, and the storytelling is sometimes unclear: a case in point here is a silent sequence of panels that shows the Sentry's journey into outer space, which is fairly difficult to make sense of. That said, there are some occasionally beautiful individual moments (such as the emotive full page shot of the Sentry which immediately follows that sequence in space), and there are times when Pham's storytelling is much stronger - particularly during the exciting earlier scene in which the Sentry chases down a Skrull spaceship on a suicide mission. I can't say that I'd pick up a comic on the strength of Pham's artwork, but I don't think that it would prevent me from enjoying a story either.

Readers of the core Secret Invasion title will be pleased to see this issue intersect with it directly, reprising the action that we saw in Secret Invasion #2, and showing us what happened to the Sentry after that issue's big fight in the Savage Land. The final pages provide a neat and intelligent twist that feels logical yet unpredictable, and add a new dimension to the Sentry's dual-personality disorder that I'll be interested to see explored further. It reminds me a little of the logic of opposites that Grant Morrison used in his JLA Earth 2 graphic novel, and it's nice to see that Bendis has taken the time to fully consider the implications of the Sentry's conflicted personalities and to do something novel and interesting with them.

However, despite my enjoyment of the last few pages, it feels as though this issue has been forced to end at an arbitrary point in the Sentry's story in order to avoid spoiling the events of future issues of Secret Invasion. It doesn't feel as though we get a complete story here, and although I'm sure we'll see elements of this issue returned to later on in the crossover, it makes this particular issue feel abruptly truncated, and unable to provide us with any moments of real revelation or significance beyond some enjoyable secondary details. I'm getting used to the two Avengers titles being used as an avenue for Bendis to explore subplots of Secret Invasion that don't belong in the main book--and in fact, I'm quite enjoying reading these more focused backup stories in conjunction with the main event.

Unfortunately, though, it hasn't been possible to make all of these issues stand alone on their own terms, and this issue feels more like a footnote or appendix to the main event than it does a story in its own right.

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