Seriously, Araña is a way better name than Spider-Girl.

This was not what I was expecting at all, and I really, really liked it!

Each volume in this series has been different, so you really don’t need to read them in any particular order, but this one in particular stands on its own. It’s told from the POV of Spider-Girl, Anya Corazon (who wanted her superhero name to be Araña, but no one could pronounce it properly). It could have ended up cutesy, what with the whole point of the story being that Anya wants the Avengers to help her rescue her teacher, Mr. Schlick. But it wasn’t cutesy at all. It was sharp and clever and fun.

The story actually takes place as other world-ending events are occurring (specifically a Terrigen bomb has been dropped and all the potential Inhumans have either transformed or cocooned). Anya’s history teacher is one of those who cocooned, only his cocoon has been stolen. As the Avengers are otherwise occupied, they take turns pairing off with Anya to figure out what’s going on. First it’s all the Spider-Ladies together:

Then she teams up with Wolverine, Iron Man, the Hulk, and then all of them together to defeat evil sociopath Jane Covington, who is obsessed with obtaining new mutations.

This works as well as it does because writers Kelly Sue Deconnick and Warren Ellis make the most out of their format, and use each team-up to illuminate things about all the characters involved, and the Avengers themselves. Plus, it’s just fun.

Something that made me laugh on the very first page is that it opens up with this bleak monologue, I think by the villain Jane Covington, about her mother being dumb but pretty and about how there is no God and things like that, and I’m thinking to myself, wow, this is bleak! But then I looked at the ocver and saw Warren Ellis’s name, and then I thought, Yeah, that makes sense now.

I think this concludes my fun with the Avengers for now, unless Kelly Sue writes any more comics with them, and unless someone tells me there are some stories that I absolutely NEED to pick up. Superhero comics are just too overwhelming otherwise. There are just too many of them. I need to be selective.