What is this book about?

After a botched attempt at sneaking up on some villains that were hiding out, the superhero team “The New Warriors,” started a fight that escalated out of control and eventually the fight was brought directly to a school filled with teachers and children. One of the villains had the ability to cause explosions so he used his power while on school grounds killing everyone at the school.

This is where the government stepped in and said that super humans were out of control and needed to be held accountable for the damage they cause. So they initiated a superhuman registration act that anyone with powers must register with the government.

In addition to this, the government wanted to set-up a training program for inexperienced heroes and how to use their powers and abilities so something like explosions at schools won’t happen again. And also to make sure this wouldn’t happen again, the government, decided that having a super hero team in every state would be a smarter idea than to have all the heroes centralized in one city such as New York.

This series focuses on the training facility located at Camp Hammond, in Stamford, Connecticut. And each issue reveals more about the teams from each state. Such as who is stationed there and what kind of threats do they deal with.

The story in particular I want to recommend to you is “Bug Hunt” (Avengers the Initiative # 3).

Why you should read this book

Because it speaks out about the mis-use of authority and it also raises the question “do the ends justify the means?”

In this story the cadet, Komodo, is selected for a special assignment. She is asked to hunt down unregistered super powered people and “de-power” them until they register with the government.

So her assignment is to go after: Spider-man. (Who hasn’t registered with the government and does not want to).

As Komodo and her instructor, War Machine, get closer to their target they see Spider-man in mid battle with three deadly villains. Who appeared to have stolen something. Anyway, as the villains get away they’re still going after Spider-man, who has never done anything “wrong” per se; other than not register himself with the government.

Komodo was just following orders to go after Spider-man, meanwhile he wasn’t even a threat! Any innocent bystander could’ve died while the villains were getting away and War Machine and Komodo were trying to detain Spider-man. She never once questioned her orders. She was just full of blind rage to detain anyone who didn’t have a piece of paper saying that in the governments point of view Spider-man has been trained to our standards so that in case Spider-man does something wrong, he and his trainers can be held accountable in a court of law. Now, granted, the Initiative had a back-up plan and brought the Scarlet Spiders, (a contingency plan in case things went wrong and the needed back-up). They caught the villains. So in the end it worked out, but Komodo didn’t know the Initiative had a back-up plan. She still went after the lesser threat.

I love reading this book because a) it reminds me that this system we have, this structure of rules and laws, it has a lot of holes in it. One of them is that the guys who uphold it come from the same frail, flawed species it’s meant to be there to control. And b) because it speaks out against government, military and law enforcement by saying that there needs to be more saving of lives and less taking of them.

Even the following book, issue # 4, shows the cadets in training being called into New York to help save innocent bystanders from the rampaging Hulk. Except that they’re all hot headed amateurs who think they can take down the Hulk by themselves. And maybe they could, but the point of the fact is to save lives first. They disobeyed orders, thought for themselves, and made matters worse by possibly putting people’s lives in jeopardy because they wanted to hit something.

I feel the moral of this story (and the reason you should read it) is that the laws and rules that we’ve created to safeguard need to be questioned because they were created by just people, regular people who had an opinion against an action that they didn’t like personally, meanwhile that law or rule could make matters worse for a whole lot of other people. The other moral is that up and coming officers in any branch of protection need to be taught equally to save lives and destroy lives.