Captain America (Bucky)

Note: This article may contain spoilers. If you dont care about that, read on.

Norman Osborn is going down. There’s no doubt about it. The “Dark Reign” looks to be collapsing and as casualties on both sides pile up in Seige, the dawn of the Heroic Age is just around the corner.

With the Heroic Age coming, some Marvel books will be coming to an end, most notably New Avengers. In the aptly named New Avengers: Finale, scribe Brian Michael Bendis and artist Bryan Hitch will tie up the loose ends of every New Avengers tale that has led to this point. With no cover image even leaking on to the internet yet, no one knows exactly what’s to come from this book.

This will all come to a head in April, giving perfect timing for Marvel’s latest set of promotional art entitled, “I’m an Avenger” and “I’m a Secret Avenger”. With a “May 2010″ tag, these pieces feature work from John Romita Jr. and show some of the current stars expected to be present in the Avengers team post-Siege. The most shocking has Hawkeye, not Ronin, pictured which could mean that Clint Barton may finally be returning to the good old purple and blue.

The five “secret” pieces show simple silhouettes of various members of the new Secret Avengers along with different quotes they’d use to describe themselves. Of the Secret Avengers thus far there are many theories going on about who might be on the team.

Take a look for yourself at them all below and let us know who you think may be screaming for their team to “Assemble!” come May.

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Due to the holiday, this week’s books were out yesterday and the publishers treated us to a huge week of new top titles. Choosing this week’s Pull of the Week wasn’t an easy choice.

Pull of the Week:

Wolverine #72 – Marvel – $2.99
Score: 9.0

This is the Wolverine we know and love. Despite being fifty years down the line and having lived through one of the most traumatic experiences ever when he was tricked into killing his own teammates years ago by Mysterio, this issue of the “Old Man Logan” story proves that some people never really change. Logan is the best at what he does and this issue proves that even as an old man, he will still be the best.

The issue starts with a grim flashback of the day the villains won as the Red Skull explains to Captain America how he united the world’s super-villains in an effort to finally take over. There’s something very eerie about the Red Skull as he stands over the fallen Bucky-Cap, knowing that in this world, he has taken out both Steve Rogers and his successor successfully. Now, fifty years later, Skull stands in his trophy room surrounded by weapons and pieces of costume from various iconic heroes (including the costume and cape of the Sentry, giving me hope that he can be killed off and never brought back), reflecting on his successes as his minions bring him the corpse of Hawkeye and what they believe to be a dead Logan.

What comes next is one of the best fight one on one fight scenes in recent memory as Logan and the Skull take to each other using the weapons of the fallen heroes. Even knowing that this is an alternate reality, it’s still somewhat heart wrenching to see Logan forced to fight for his life and that of his family around the trophies the Red Skull had claimed off his former comrades. But like much of the rest of Logan’s life, the issue ends in tragic fashion before a very stark and powerful two page spread. Never before have two pages with literally no illustration on them been as meaningful as they are in this issue.

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