Issue #16 is a slow build into the slow build of issue #17, which is formally labeled as part one of the Collective arc. Issue #16 does a nice job of showing Maria Hill trying to figure out what House of M was all about and complaining about how the Avengers live outside of the jurisdiction of registered intelligence agencies.
One thing they’re doing is returning to “street level” action, helping normal people with normal problems.
It’s pretty typical Brian Michael Bendis: Lots of dialogue and philosophical pondering, while action happens briefly in the background. That’s not a complaint, by the way. I loved Steve Gerber and Steve Englehart’s classic works that did the same things.
While Hill is arguing with Tony Stark to try to figure out what happened to all the mutants, we see a glowing space threat crash in Canada. It takes out Alpha Flight quickly and off-camera…
It’s not entirely clear at first, but most of the team are truly dead—all except for Sasquatch. Then, the threat heads towards Alaska, forcing Director Hill to call in the heroes she’s been so suspicious of.
The threat is a mutant called Collective. When the House of M occurred, all of the “mutant energy” removed from homo superiors by Wanda Maximoff’s spell, we’re told, had to “go somewhere.” It went to a mailman named Michael Pointer. (The fact that it came from space is really unnecessary and it’s not clear to me why Bendis added it, except as one of his many misdirects.)
In their first encounter, Collective blasts Ms. Marvel and she absorbs the blast—which kind of turns her back into Binary for a bit…
The Young Avengers guest star.
Then Sentry arrives and punches Collective hard enough to send him out into space. We’re not done with him yet, but he’s out of the way for a short bit.
After being hit by his power, Carol tells her team-mates that the energy that hit her had some kind of sentience.
The science geeks on the team (Peter Parker, Toney Stark, and YA version of Vision) study Collective’s energy and figure out that Collective’s “energy signatures” are from former mutants. Because SHIELD is associated with this investigative team, this means that Hill finally learns what happened in House of M.
Collective is able to get back to Earth and attacks Magneto, who calls Collective by the name Xorn.
This is Brian Michael Bendis’ attempt to fix some concerns about how Grant Morrison’s run, where Xorn was shown to really be Magneto, and subsequent desires to bring the character back and say he was actually really a unique dude. So it turns out this being, Gestalt, woke up the real Xorn(?!?) and possessed Xorn along with Michael Pointer? Or Xorn is mind-controlling both Gestalt and Pointer? I dunno. It’s confusing.
Anyway, the force that empowered Michael Pointer, called the Gestalt, is looking for a more suitable host and thinks Magneto is the right one. It begins moving from Pointer towards Magneto. To stop Magneto from getting the power, SHIELD agent Daisy Johnson blasts him into a coma.
Daisy takes the code name Quake and asks to be part of the team.
After losing its possible host, The Avengers collect the Gestalt and toss it into the sun. Presumably, it’s dead (although the premise of this story is that energy can’t be destroyed so it may return). Pointer retains a little bit of power and at the end of the story is trying to decide what to do with it. Wolverine yells at him a lot because the dude killed Alpha Flight and Logan thinks he should become a superhero to make up for it.
In the final pages, the SHIELD transport holding Magneto’s comatose body disappears. We’ll learn later that this experience re-powered him. Meanwhile, Maria Hill has evidence of a book Magneto was writing. We aren’t told what it says, but its contents visibly disturb Hill.
Issue #19’s letters page has facts about the Illuminati. For several issues now, Bendis has been using this space for editorial content instead of letters.
