Secret Avengers #35 Review Father delivers an ultimatum to the United Nations.

We've come down to the last few issues of Rick Remender's Secret Avengers run and the series in general. At this point Remender has managed to successfully tie all of his threads together into one gigantic conflict as Father leads an armada of synthetic lifeforms in an attack on the human world. It's nothing if not an epic finale for this quirky team of Avengers.

One of the more welcome elements of this issue is that Remender doesn't paint the Descendants as faceless oppressors. Starting with the opening flashback of Human Torch's early years that transitions into Torch's rallying speech and ranging all the way to Father's speech to the United Nations, Remender paints these characters as simply one culture struggling to coexist with a hostile world. And though Father's actions throughout the series sort of betray his true nature, it's hard to ignore the ring of truth in his words.

Issue #35 ups the scale even further as Remender begins involving the rest of the Avengers and even the Fantastic Four in the increasingly degenerating conflict. The down side to this is that we don't get enough face time with the Secret Avengers themselves. There are some fun scenes on Earth-666 as Captain Britain, Beast, and Hawkeye work to wrap up their mission. But the rest of the core characters are reduced to small roles, if they even appear at all. That's been a common problem with this series -- that too rarely does the full team roster enjoy time in the spotlight in any given conflict. With two issues remaining, hopefully Remender can finally reverse that trend.

Issue #35 is another strong effort from Matteo Scalera. Scalera is given ample opportunity to flex his stylistic muscles. The opening flashback is muted and and quiet, while other pages overflow with superhero action and robots of all shapes and sizes. But Scalera is perhaps strongest in the bizarre, grotesque realm of Earth-666. I would happily buy an ongoing series set on that planet if Scalera rendered it. But given how adeptly he's handled the Secret Avengers thus far, I suspect bigger things are in store for Scalera at Marvel.

Jesse is a writer for various IGN channels. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter, or Kicksplode on MyIGN.

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