By Zack Quaintance — Heroes Return #1 arrives today, marking the end of the new Heroes Reborn miniseries, a micro-event that supplanted the main Avengers title for a month. This is essentially the eighth issue in the series, albeit with a slightly altered title (the others were Heroes Reborn #1 - #7), and a new number one, always a move to bolster commercial viability. There’s a little bit of irony to this book getting a new #1, in that it doesn’t mark the start of anything, not even close, and is instead the end to this Heroes Reborn/Heroes Return interlude.

In a moment we’ll get into whether or not this series and this individual comic works (the whole point of a review!), but first a word about the name. If you are an old like me Heroes Reborn and Heroes Return are loaded names, harkening back to the late-90s when the majority of Marvel’s mainline heroes sacrificed themselves to stop Onslaught (a terrible union of Xavier and Magneto), before returning as everyone knew they would. This story has absolutely nothing in common with any of that. Not even a little bit, and to me the naming convention felt like a total distraction. Those stories from way back whenever also are not exactly beloved, and so I don’t get this name. Almost anything else might have been better; deploying a 20-year-old name from a clumsy story that is frequently mocked is an odd move.

The story that concludes here in Heroes Return #1 is bloated and a bit unfocused. Essentially, we have spent eight issue in an alternate version of the Marvel Universe, wherein the main Avengers heroes are replaced by the Squadron Supreme, which has long been made up of analogs for the heroes of DC Comics. We get a team that is basically Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Flash, and Green Lantern at the center of this story, with brief cameos from some of the bygone auxiliary Squadron members in one of the supporting titles…which immediately kills them all.

Within this, some famous Marvel characters and villains still exist in slightly tweaked fashion. It’s all fine, and definitely interesting as an overarching premise. Where this story goes wrong in my opinion is that the eight-issue length (with more than a dozen supplementary one-off books) doesn’t really have a point. The big bad here is Agent Coulston for some reason, who is being manipulated by Mephisto, whose only real goal is chaos. That boils down our narrative to power hungry G-man makes deal with devil to get more power, do things his way.

In this comic, the Avengers as we usually know them return, beat up the Squadron, return things to normal. I’m left with the feeling that it was all a fluffy novelty. The Squadron being there doesn’t really say much, not for the narrative nor for them as characters. It’s not a commentary on anything. It’s all just sort of there, which is fine if this is a story arc within Avengers and not an 8-part micro event with so many tie-ins, which range from kind of fun to unreadable.

In the end, Heroes Return #1 marks the end of an instantly forgettable story that functionally does little more than set up another conflict with Mephisto to come. It throws some meaningful ingridients at the wall — political power, perception, differing ways of seeing heroics — but does little to tie them together in any meaningful way, making it all seem like a cash grad. Interested parties could 100 percent just read this comic, skip everything else associated with the micro-event, and not really miss a thing.

Overall: Heroes Return #1 marks the end of a bloated alternate Marvel Universe story that lacks a point or anything much to say, besides hey wouldn’t this be kind of interesting? And the answer to that is yes, but not for two months and eight issues. 6.0/10

REVIEW: Heroes Return #1

Heroes Return #1
Writer: Jason Aaron
Penciler: Ed McGuinness
Inker: Mark Morales
Colorist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Cory Petit
Publisher: Marvel Comics
An epic, oversize slugfest between the Squadron Supreme and an otherworldly group of Avengers for the final fate of the whacked-out world of HEROES REBORN.
Price: $5.99
More Info: Heroes Return #1

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.