Arkham Asylum, Ryker’s Island, Belle Reve, The Raft, all superhuman prisons designed the be relatively improbable to be broken out of—although, let’s be honest, their walls are typically make of colanders. It isn’t often, though, that someone tries to break into any of these prisons. And less often that someone breaks in with the express intent of killing six random villains under the guise of justice. But maybe those random villains don’t die. And maybe this isn’t another branch of vigilante justice being carried out. Al Ewing, Leonard Kirk, Alex Sinclair, and Cory Petit take a look at this locked room puzzle in the first issue of Avengers Inc.

The Raft is meant to be an impenetrable fortress holding dozens of villains from around the Marvel universe. But that is a moot point when six of those villains end up with holes in their foreheads and Janet Van Dyne investigates how that could happen. Van Dyne is one of the original Avengers. She coined the name at the very beginning, so she knows about revenge. But this is different, especially when all six of the villains wake up in the morgue with no knowledge of how they ended up there or why they have holes in their heads. Or why David Cannon, the villain Whirlwind, suddenly doesn’t know who David Cannon is and is referring to himself as Victor Shade—one of the aliases of the hero, Vision.

As a locked-room mystery, the first issue of Avengers Inc lets Ewing, Kirk, Sinclair, and Petit show their mastery of the mystery. In one issue we have a series of murders that aren’t murders, mayor Luke Cage assigning Van Dyne the case while being told to avoid any costumes, and a new identity residing in an old foe. Oh, and Hank Pym and Eric O’Grady doing some kind of dirt in the sewer. So much of the series from this first issue barely feels like a superhero story despite them jumping out at every page. It’s going for the idea of grounded realism in a mystery story while still maintaining its detectives as superheroes doing the occasional superheroic feat. It’s a strange balance to pull for an Avengers story, but what the team have here is bordering on the Vertigo-esque in its blend of classic heroism with a pulp-mystery aesthetic that immediately feels like something we haven’t seen on the shelve in a long while.

Avengers Inc works well within its confines. It isn’t aiming to tell cosmic-scale tales with these characters, preferring the quiet conversations in private bars or secret labs. It embraces the genre and its trappings wholeheartedly, crafting a mystery that does feel genuinely different from many other superhero murder-mysteries in the past. Even in the first issue we can see the initial piece of the Rube Goldberg machine within the story falling into place and we can’t help but want to see where it leads. 

Get excited. Get detecting. 

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.