One of the most refreshing comic books I have read lately is the limited series Original Sins. A collection of shorts, each of the five issues contained a narrative featuring Young Avengers Hulkling, Marvey Boy Noh-Varr, and Prodigy facing off against the Hood. The Original Sin story arc has to do with the strange cognitive dissonance set off by the detonation of one of the Watcher's eyeballs.
In the Young Avengers narrative tenement junkies have been zapped into a zombie state by being caught in the blast zone of the Watcher's eyeball. The Hood convinces the Young Avengers to try to save the brain-bleached junkies by building a "cerebro," a device that can scoop all the information out of their brains. Needless to say the Hood has ulterior motives.
What is noteworthy here is the art of Ramon Villalobos. Ryan North's storytelling is vibrant and Jordan Gibson's colors are superb, but Villalobos' work is totally reinvigorating, a reboot of the Golden Age superhero yarn vis-à-vis underground comix.
I want to hypothesize that this visual style holds a key to deciphering the dire straits of our present age, or as Heracleitus philosophized, "The way up and the way down is one and the same."
Below are scans of eight pages from Original Sins #3:
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