By Jacob Cordas — I do my best to stay up to date on what is going on in comics, but sometimes news still catches me off guard. For example, when the editor of this very site told me one of my picks for the Best Comic Of The Year for the last two years was getting another volume, I audibly gasped. I had assumed Savage Avengers was going to be everything good about the Metal Age of comics crystallized but then placed on a shelf, left as something I’d bond with my LCS over. But now we are getting more!

Marvel has announced volume two of Savage Avengers coming out in May, written by the friend of Comics Bookcase David Pepose, with art by Carlos Magno (and colors by Espen Grundetjern). Now, Magno is mostly a stranger to Comics Bookcase personally but admired around here because of his great work on The Invaders. This team is exactly what I would want from those that dare to follow in the flawless footstomps of the last team, writer Gerry Duggan and artist Patrick Zircher. Pepose appears to have found the perfect balance of silliness and scale with his work on Scout’s Honor and Spencer & Locke. And Magno can do impossible grandeur, absurd action, and personal drama — confirming that he hits every base an artist needs to make something this excellently silly work.

Oh, and the new Savage Avengers line-up. What the hell is happening here?

So we’re working with Conan, Daredevil (Elektra), Anti-Venom, Black Knight, Cloak & Dagger, and HULKVERINE. Maybe it is targeted marketing, but if you add HULKVERINE to a team, I will get way too excited and send a series of profanities I can’t repeat here because the aforementioned site editor will stop me (editor’s note: I’m okay with some profanity but yeesh, not at that level). That alone would’ve won me over, but the audacity of this line-up. None of these people should really be together (save Cloak & Dagger and Daredevil) but like every absurd team comic, traditional logic doesn’t matter. What matters is that we will have Anti-Venom and Black Knight together in one comic. 

And what will they be doing? According to the press release, “Together, they’ll fight their way through the Hyborian Age with an evil Deathlok hot on their trail!” Perfect. 

Part of what I loved so much about the first volume of Savage Avengers was its willingness to embrace its heavy metal extremes. It was an excuse to just be epic with scale without consequence. It felt like seeing a light show at a planetarium with your dad, synced to his favorite album from high school. If this line-up and this plot tell me anything, it’s that the series is in the right hands. I can’t wait, and I will actually fistfight to read these comics, if it for some very metal reason comes down to that.

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My name is Jacob Cordas (@jacweasel) and I am starting to think I may in fact be qualified to write this.