The Avengers In The Veracity Trap! by Chip Kidd and Michael Cho (graphic novel review).
‘The Avengers In The Veracity Trap’ is a new adventure that harks back to the very early days of Marvel’s Avengers, a superhero group now famous worldwide thanks to some of the highest-grossing movies of all time.Yet it started simply in 1963 with a pencil, some Bristol drawing boards and Stan Lee and Jack Kirby bringing a bunch of individual Marvel heroes together to form a team.
Rumour has it that the success of the Justice League of America inspired the creation of the Fantastic Four, but surely that is much more so with the Avengers. The FF were a family with a shared origin. The Avengers, like the JLA, were individual stars with their own comic books, coming together to increase the company’s profits. I mean, fight crime and injustice.
The story goes like this. Loki lures the Avengers to Asgard, where he has assembled a horde of monsters to fight them. The monsters resemble Kirby creations from the early 1960s Marvel books, and someone nerdier than me could probably identify most of them. I recognised Fin Fang Foom, and with further research, discovered that there are now two omnibus editions of these vintage works, but I don’t own them yet, and cross-referencing from internet sources would take too long.
The Avengers fight the monsters, and individual splash pages of our heroes bear the strapline ‘A Marvel Masterworks Pin-Up’ in another homage to the early comic books. The pin-ups were in the back pages then, not part of the story, but Michael Cho’s artistic intentions are good. The Avengers line-up for this story is: Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, the Hulk, Giant-Man, and the Wasp. While the others fight monsters, Thor is looking for Loki and finds him at an ancient temple, which also contains the Veracity Vortex.
At this point, the story turns into metafiction, which is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as ‘writing about imaginary characters and events in which the process of writing is discussed or described’. The process of writing here involves that pencil and Bristol board and two men collaborating. The way metafiction is introduced is clever, original and part of the story, so I won’t spoil it.
I think the advertising blurbs for the book mention this aspect of it. Lee and Kirby did a sort of metafiction in at least one early FF, ‘Fantastic Four,’ which showed them creating an issue but having difficulty because Reed had not yet updated them on the FF’s latest adventure. The pretence here was that the FFs were real, and the comic creators were telling true stories about them. Joe Simon and Kirby did a similar thing with the Boy Commandos back in the 1940s and maybe the Newsboy Legion, too. Kidd and Cho take it a step further.
Nerdy notes: the Avengers line-up of Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, Giant Man, the Wasp and the Hulk is only featured in one comic. That was Avengers # 2, in which they fought the Space Phantom. In Avengers #1, Hank Pym was little Ant-Man, not Giant-Man, and the Hulk left at the end of Avengers #2, disgruntled because the others mistrusted and feared him. To fit into the original chronology, this episode would take place sometime between the first two issues. Ant-Man would have been pretty useless against giant monsters, even assisted by his little friends. Are there ants in Asgard?
The art by Michael Cho is a decent homage to Jack Kirby, albeit from a slightly later time than 1963. Cho’s drawings look like Kirby inked by Joe Sinnott. The first three issues, featuring the Hulk, were inked by Paul Reinmann, a solid professional but no one’s favourite Kirby inker. It’s a minor criticism, but some of the figures are a bit wonky. Now, Kirby often went wonky, especially in later years, but, around this time, his figures were perfectly proportioned.
Cho does capture the good, clean lines of the art. Many of the poses are straight lifts from comics of the time. As an homage, this is fair enough. The pictures are big, bright and colourful, with few panels to a page, often one, and capture the spirit of the original. Cho is more of a graphic designer than an illustrator, but so was Kirby.
At a mere 64 pages, ‘The Avengers In The Veracity Trap’ is a brief bit of fun for old fans and may appeal to new ones or aficionados of Michael Cho’s graphics. Given the small price differential between eBook and hardback, it might be worth going for paper on this one. I suppose the decision depends on your financial situation. The hardback book measures nearly 12 x 9 inches in imperial units, making it a decent size. Worth a look.
Eamonn Murphy
August 2025
(pub: Abrams ComicArts, 2025. 64 page graphic novel hardback. Price; £18.99 (UK), $25.99 (US). ISBN: 978-1-41977-067-8). Ebook price: £13.77 (UK).
check out websites: https://abramsandchronicle.co.uk/products/9781419770678 and www.abramsbooks.com/product/avengers-in-the-veracity-trap_9781419770678/
