By Eric S Brown
City of Sickles and To Dine with Doom, the first two collected trades of Marvel’s Savage Avengers series set the bar very high. Sadly, the third trade, Enter the Dragon doesn’t live up. It opens with a strange relationship being introduced between Dr. Strange and Elektra, making them lovers. Many Marvel readers will likely be freaked out by this just as Daredevil and Clea would be. In the time period where this takes place, one could argue that such a thing could happen, but it still seems vastly out of character.
From there, Enter the Dragon continues to go downhill. As Marvel doesn’t own the rights to Kulan Gath’s true origin that was told in the pages of Dynamite Publishing’s Red Sonja, they opt to make him a cannibal in a very unoriginal twist. The powerful and ancient mage comes across as a poorly written new version of Sylar from the old TV series Heroes.
While there are some interesting and even cool new additions to the Savage Avengers lineup such as Magik, the Black Knight, and even the Juggernaut, the overall plot of the series begins to flounder about as if the creative team is just killing time until they can come up with the next arc of the Kulan Gath storyline. Hopefully, Volume 4 will find its way back to the quality of the first two volumes and come to a conclusion worthy of the storyline they set up.
