Terrible. I was initially bummed when I realized that this series had left the capable hands of Brian Bendis, but I had read one series by Dan Slott before, a pretty funny (in my memory) in-continuity parody called the Great Lakes Avengers, so I decided to be optimistic. I allowed myself to have high hopes going in. Destroyed. Worse than never being funny, this book never stops failing to be funny. There's a reference to Taylor Swift MP3s in the first few pages. Nope. Shut it down.
In a post a few days ago, I talked about how annoying it can be when an author tries to write dialogue for Thor without an appropriate sense of the rhythms and nuances of Asgardian speech. If they just give it their best two-dollar British, the character quickly starts to sound false, and you start to dread each additional speech bubble. Here's an author who finds a way to ignore the intricacies of not only his Asgarians, but to also mangle the necessary syntactical discretion due Hercules, the Hulk, robots, teenagers, and scientists. There is a dialectical sophistication required to adequately portray these characters. Readers expect them to project certain voices. It's a shame when an author doesn't bother to respect that, and it's a minor calamity when he does it just for the sake of a joke as weak as these.
Khoi Pham's art is serviceable but never impressive. I'm tired of trying to find ways to describe uninteresting art, so that's all you get.
Worse, he not only drags down these issues with his indistinct filler, but is also given the opportunity to leave his mark on the series by designing a new costume for the triumphant return of Hank Pym, who helped found the Avengers as Ant-man. Immortalizing his dead wife, The Wasp, by adapting her persona? Interesting. Toying with gender identity in a superhero book? Neat. But you can't replace even the least iconic of Pym's many superhero identities with brown stripes and sunglasses.
The only thing this book has going for it is what is inherent to it regardless of the team: technically, it's the Avengers. The only reason to read this book is to know what happens next, to get to the other side, where hopefully, someone more deserving can pick up the pieces and craft a worthy contribution to the saga. Eventually, though, you have to wonder how bad, how boring, a particular team of creators would have to be before that motivation no longer warrants your attention. How bad do they have to make Avengers before "being Avengers" becomes a negative instead of a positive? As of now, we're closer than ever.