In the last arc, Clone “Ragnarok” Thor trashed The Initiative’s base in a battle against The Initiative and the New Warriors, while a smaller “shadow Initiative” contingent tracked down Hardball and Scorpion in Madripoor, who are now with HYDRA and have possession of MVP’s dead body.
This issue starts with Justice holding a press conference to reveal that MFP was cloned and then leaving, along with the rest of the New Warriors.
Ultra Girl quits The Initiative and leaves with Justice’s team. Norman Osborn is happy about it, because bad media coverage for The Initiative will make it easier for him to shut it down.
Flashing to the shadow group, we see Scorpion shoot Komodo.
It doesn’t kill her, though–the gun simply removes her abilities.
The team is then stranded in Madripoor and must then fight various threats (including Roughhouse and Bloodscream).
After a whole bunch of action, Norman Osborn reveals his secret plan to reimagine the Initiative–and he offers Taskmaster the leadership role. Not only that, but Red Hood gets to help train new recruits, too.
It’s odd that Red Hood would agree to a role like that. He’s always wanted to be a criminal, not a teacher.
Osborn also releases the heavily drugged Penance from prison to serve alongside Tasky.
Issue #25 wraps up the MVP storyline, with The New Warriors taking his real corpse to his family, but it also throws in a few pages on many members–establishing multiple storylines for the future.
First, Tigra got pregnant when she had sex with skrull Hank Pym during the Secret Invasion–and Norman Osborn wants the baby.
She runs away with Gauntlet, who also needs to flee because Osborn is threatening to take his gauntlet.
The Hood assembles a team to go after them–but the New Warriors protect them and decide to form a resistance group against Osborn.
Osborn also fires Gravity from the Nevada team, and sends him to be a part of the Great Lakes Avengers.
This is obviously a major reset for this book, which had started to get stale. It’s a little hard to keep track of it or care much, despite lots of interesting ideas here, because there’s more characters than your average X-Men comic. It’s hard to connect with anyone.
Still, this is the most entertaining A:I story in quite some time and I’m looking forward to see what happens next.