Recalling the massive failure of Messiah War, I am pleased to say that Second Coming certainly lived up to the expectations of Messiah Complex.

Avengers Academy 2

Teen Teams in comics have always been something to be wary of. Often filled ridiculous villains and even more absurd situations, the books target the youthful and rebellious teen audience, who look at those ridiculous villains and absurd situations and laugh... then pirate the entire series.

Teen heroes have a horrible reputation of being one dimensional, angsty,and shallow. It's okay to admit that when Marvel writers Chris Yost and Craig Kyle began to systematically murder all the "New" X-men, you were a bit happy that the poor kids were executed for their lack of individual personality as wells as total rip offs of the OC. (more than slightly anachronistic, but if you think of X-23 as Ryan, Hellion as both Marissa and Luke, and Prodigy as Seth it makes complete sense.)

Just M-day brought about the "New" X-men and the disbanding of the elderly Avengers brought about the Young ones, THE HEROIC AGE (as it must be written in all caps) brings along its own team of angst filled youngsters. But wait, there's always twist.

Not only are these kids angsty, but they are justifiably so.

You see, when he wasn't leading the crazy avengers, keeping the Sentry from completely snapping, banging his son's girlfriends, talking to voices in his head, half destroying San Francisco in a battle with the X-men, or destroying Asgard, Norman Osbourne was doing what every psychopath worth mentioning was doing and torturing a bunch of meta-human kids.

Now Norman Osbourne is out and Captain America is in and we have a bunch of psychologically damaged youth with super powers. So Steve Rogers in his infinite wisdom puts them in the capable hands of Tigra (the single mother of a cat-baby-thing), Speedball (you know the guy that caused Nitro to blow up a school and y'know start the whole civil war), Hank Pym (pretty straightedge but theres that whole inability to not screw up a relationship thing), Justice (killed his father which was justified but, still) and Quicksilver.

Yep, Quicksilver, you know that guy who's the son of Magneto, manipulated the Scarlett Witch into creating the whole House of M thing, and as a result of which is responsible for that whole M-day thing, which in turn caused the Civil-War, which let everyone get all careless about the Skrulls, and then Norman Osbourne took power. Oh wait that was a Skrull...

The kids themselves are nothing out of the ordinary when it comes to meta-humans. Except of course for the fact that they are all budding sociopaths that have the potential to be the next super villain.

And that, dear readers, is a damn good premise.

This second issue focuses on the teams prime almost villain, Finesse, a polymath (superlearner) who finds it difficult to relate to her teammates and instructors. After watching a documentary on Quicksilver given to her by Hank Pym, who hopes that by showing her how he overcame the sociopathic tendencies bred in him by Magneto, she would be inspired to overcome her own.

Of course, instead of learning how not to be supervillain, she figures out that Quicksilver lied about being replaced in the Skrull invasion, and he did actually cause EVERYTHING to go wrong in the Marvel U.

With this new found dirt, she does what every logical person would do:

blackmail and ex-AVENGER into teaching her how to be a proper terrorist.

And that is good storytelling.

I'd give this book a solid B-. Because everyone poses alot, and nothing actually happened till the end and a good quarter of the book is the biography of Quicksilver which is possibly ripped off his wiki.

But damn that enticing premise.