Editor's Note: New Avengers #47 arrives in stores Thursday, December 4.

This marks the final chapter of the Great Experiment that has been New Avengers before the lights go out and the next Great Experiment, Dark Reign begins. The path from Disassembled to House of M to Civil War to Secret Invasion hasn't always been a clear one, and, unfortunately, there have been more creative misfires than direct hits, particulary in this, the parent title (or as some may later muse, The One That Binds Them, though this places Bendis in the role of Sauron which is kind of a stretch as it would make Joe Quesada Morgoth which would, I guess, cast Jack Kirby as Eru Ilúvatar. You're on your own in determining Stan Lee's identity in this increasingly silly metaphor).

From the still unresolved mass breakout from The Raft, through the Savage Land conspiracy, the wobbly introduction of The Sentry into mainstream continuity, hordes of ninjas and more conspiracies, we arrive, finally, at this small tale of Luke Cage attempting a reconciliation with his estranged father. A stark, downbeat denouement. With ninjas.

Bendis' favoured use of a recursive and self-referential narrative structure and stuttering "real" dialogue provide elements of verisimilitude when they work and mass confusion when they don't. Here we have a mixed bag. Without having read everything he's written, it's my understanding that the basic story, Luke's search for his father, has been previously explored. Unlike the principal flaw with many Event tie-in books, where exactly the same stories or scenes are repeated almost to the point of self-parody, I'll work under the assumption that we're reading something (mostly) new. Viewed in this context, the familiar if somewhat strange dialogue and ill-fitting, hyperactive leaps in time and place seem more like novice mistakes in structure and pacing than an attempt to place the story in a wider setting. The dialogue might be less of an issue were every single character not forced to speak in exactly the same, tortured way almost all of the time. The initial exchange between Luke and Jessica is particularly stilted in that it seems as though two acquaintances are trying to pose as intimate; real people simply don't speak this way.

While I have no issue with the framing sequence focussing on the baby (drawn by Billy Tan, with the lion's share of the work undertaken by Michael Gaydos), the structure of the flashback is hard to decipher. Written as a story told to the baby, we begin with Luke's second encounter with Jessica, jump to his hiring her to locate his father, then to what appears to be a later New Avengers mission where Luke is interrupted with a text message from Jess. Except that they would have been married by that point. It might be a reference to an older Alias or Daredevil story, but lacking footnotes we're back to speculation. Perhaps Bendis presumes that anyone reading what he's just written will naturally have read everything else he's had published... which would make that Sauron metaphor rather too apt, so far as blinkered, maniacal, self-aggrandizement goes.

The central story, Jess finding Luke's dad and the sad conclusion to the quest is rather nice, though. Gaydos' dark, economic style perfectly serves the "ground level" aspect of superheroics, evoking Miller and Janson (and Quesada), and is, therefore, still better suited to realistic settings and characters. Billy Tan's work is typically pretty with his Cage looking like a chiseled god and Jessica lovely as ever. This is all nicely blended with Justin Ponsor's dependable pallette. Ugly baby, though. Oh well, give her time; in my experience, inter-racial marriages tend to produce transcendentally beautiful children (particularly if there's some Guyanese in there, which is a racial melting pot to begin with; where's Luke's family from, again?).

The last couple of pages bounce us back to Manhattan in the throes of invasion, where baby Jones-Cage has been nabbed by Not Jarvis, leaving Lucas in anguish amid a backdrop of devastation. Since Marvel is saying nutt-tink! about "Dark Reign", I'm guessing that a portion of it will be spent in retrieving the baby, as well as uncovering the whereabouts and status of the primary replacees (Hank Pym, Jarvis, etc.). And, of course, it will be Dark. Like there hasn't been enough of that for the past, oh, twenty years... In the end a slightly uneven tale but lovely to look at thanks mostly to Gaydos, if you're deciding how to spend your budget, this week.

(Hey, you know what? When I was doing some digging on what work Michael Gaydos has done for Marvel, I naturally searched their website. It was a smack in the face all 'round that his name wasn't included in the book credits on their catalogue page, but there it is. Anyway, the search returns a bunch of hits, the top one being a link to Gaydos' creator page. I clicked and... got a flash-pop-up-redirect-hellspawn moment where, ultimately, I'm left at the subscription page for their digital comics service. It didn't even have the dubious manners to open itself in another tab. Nope, it just hijacked the whole search function and now I don't know what Marvel has to say about Gaydos, whom they don't bother to mention in the promotional credits for New Avengers #47. Nice, huh?)

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