I began reading Marvel comics with Journey into Mystery, Vol. 1: Fear Itself and then found myself working backward to Siege out of sheer curiosity. I wanted to see how the characters got where they were. I loved Siege and decided to read Dark Reign; only it has no central event arc, unless you count the Dark Avengers.

Villains have occasionally gotten a mini-series, or one-shot, but this is the first full-run I have seen that puts the villains at the forefront of everything. This is their series and our usual heroes make only the rare cameo. Upon ascending to power as Tony Stark/Nick Fury's replacement, Norman Osborn creates his own team of Avengers - substituting our beloved heroes with their villain counterparts (e.g. Venom becomes "Spider-man", Bullseye becomes "Hawkeye", etc.) - and Osborn taking the lead as the Iron Patriot. Osborn wrangles them in with promises of power, glory and money. But these people put the "I" in team! What is surprising about the book is that the team does manage to successfully accomplish some missions. They are skilled, but beyond dysfunctional. Interspersed among the stories are meetings of Osborn's cabal of villains, and flashes of Loki who is manipulating Osborn. The art and the story-telling are perfectly in sync and completely engaging. As befits a group of villains, the story often gets very dark and violent - including more than one murder.

One weakness of the collection is that it sometimes focuses too much on Osborn and Sentry's psychological issues. Both are hanging onto sanity by a thread (Sentry's thread in on fire, I think) and their psychotic episodes take up a lot of pages, to the detriment of the other members. Moonstone, and her sexual crusade to bed all her team-mates, does get plenty of screen-time which definitely makes this rated T for teen. I was also disappointed that issues 7 & 8 were missing. I understand that they were so intertwined in the X-Men story as to not stand alone, but a couple of paragraphs setting the stage could have helped integrate them so the collection was actually complete.

Overall, this is an excellent collection! The book has beautiful production values - bound in leather, with hot foil stamping and sewn binding that made it easy to read. I'm almost sad that Siege brought the Dark Avengers to an end. They were a lot of fun and gave me a hell of an entertaining ride! Highly recommended. ( )

LIDO!

Although billed as an "omnibus," this collection is much more like a oversized-hardcover (think Fraction's Invincible Iron Man) instead of what I picture as a Marvel omnibus (which are the size of a phone book and weigh a ton). Also, this collection doesn't include the two issues of the Dark Avengers that took place during the Utopia crossover with the X-Men (while they probably wouldn't have made sense out of context, the completist in me wishes they were included).

Still, I enjoyed the Dark Avengers immensely, especially the first two trades' worth of material that is included here (Assemble and Molecule Man). The team's dynamics are hilarious as they try to settle into comradeship, especially under not-so-stable leadership. The third trade's worth of material, which is what occurred during the Siege event, isn't as strong, but it's interesting to watch the team completely disband.

I'd recommend this as a buy for fans of the Dark Avengers or the Dark Reign event in general. For the more casual reader, I'd recommend borrowing the trades. ( )