Siege #2
Writer: Brian Michael Bendis
Penciller: Olivier Coipel
Inker: Mark Morales
Colorist: Laura Martin
Cover: Olivier Coipel; Gabriele Dellotto (variant)
Marvel Comics
Price: $3.99; Release date: February 3, 2010

As much as I enjoy Brian Michael Bendis‘ work on a variety of titles, his big event work at Marvel has generally left me cold. There weren’t a lot of things wrong with series like “House of M” or “Secret Invasion” per se, but the stories were never as exciting to me as they should have been. I think a lot of that can be blamed on their length. Fortunately, Bendis and Marvel made the wise decision to make their new event “Siege“ only four issues, which I think has forced Bendis to cut all the filler and get straight to the killer. And as it turns out, that killer is the Sentry.

Siege #2 finds Norman Osborn’s attack on Asgard in full swing, but unfortunately, he loses control of one major player, just as the Avengers are planning their counterattack. Ares has been one of Osborn’s big guns, but when the god of war finds out that he’s been played for a fool, he decides to take Norman out. Unfortunately, Norman has another big gun, and calls in the Sentry to take on Ares.

One good thing about this issue is that Bendis cuts to the chase, and it serves the story well. The action moves quickly, and he does a great job of blending the more serious moments with a decent running gag of Osborn’s armor alerting him of incoming objects. This is Bendis at the top of his game. Bendis is generally well regarded for his dialog, which is always good, but he handles the action scenes in this issue just as well. I would say that it’s a shame that the story really isn’t contained in the main Siege mini-series as there is a scene with Thor that happened in last week’s issue of Avenger: Initiative, and it turns out to be fairly important to this issue. I’m worried that since I’m not reading several of the Avengers series, I may miss important information myself.

The other good thing about this issue is the art by Olivier Coipel. It’s unfortunate for me that I haven’t read too many of the series’ that Coipel has worked on before, but he is a perfect fit for this story. Coipel is loading up the pages with great battle scenes, and makes the most of the big spread pages throughout the issue. His style is very reminiscent of Jim Cheung’s and that is perfectly fine with me. This is a big action movie, and Coipel’s style fits this to a T.

So, halfway through the series, everything is looking good. However, we’ve seen this before from Marvel events, and they’ve let me down, so I’ll wait to judge the whole series until it’s done, but I’ll retain hope that it ends well. This issue on its own is very fun, and has one of the best last pages I’ve seen in a while. Bendis and Coipel are at their best here, we just have to hope the series reaches a satisfying ending.

Rating: 5 out of 5