Next week is a big one for Nadia Pym, Marvel’s new Wasp. She’s stepping into the solo spotlight with her first ongoing series, The Unstoppable Wasp, and over in the pages of Avengers she’s racing through the timestream to save her superhero teammates from being killed as babies. The story of this latest Avengers volume from writer Mark Waid and artist Mike Del Mundo is pure superhero fantasy, featuring an army of time-travelling supervillains and a plot built on a tangled web of paradoxes, and it’s been an action-packed spectacle with a dynamic visual sensibility. Waid excels when he embraces the more fanciful elements of the superhero genre, and he’s given Del Mundo a narrative that allows him to flex his action muscles in the page layouts and panel composition.
Mike Del Mundo is one of the most exciting artists currently working in superhero comics, and while he’s best known for his bold, innovative covers, his interior art is similarly evocative. The vibrant opening splash of this preview for next week’s Avengers #3 could easily have been the cover for the issue—it’s puzzling that Del Mundo isn’t doing covers for this series—and that flurry of rectangular panels is used to bring extra dimension to the action in the proceeding pages. With coloring assists by Marco D’Alfonso, Del Mundo creates a psychedelic atmosphere for the timestream sequence that disappears when the story jumps to the Avengers fighting on Earth, and while the layout is more conventional in the last page, Del Mundo’s vivid, high-contrast rendering maintains the intense energy of Nadia’s sprint through the ages.