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This series is the one bright spot of this whole Civil War/House of M debacle ( )

Dark stuff going on here, and Tony Stark talking to the 'empty' room while Dr. Strange had them all hidden was pretty emotional. And then of course LOTS of ninjas was great too as well as the reveal of the beginning of the Secret Invasion. ( )

When the Superhuman Registration Act was passed, many heroes refused to register and went underground. Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, Spider-Woman, Iron Fist, Wolverine, Luke Cage, Hawkeye and Jessica Drew are some of those who refuse to work under the US government's control. Instead, they split their time between opposing government forces and with their usual superheroing. In this case, that means saving Maya Lopez, who took up the mantle of Ronin but was eventually overwhelmed by Elektra's Hand ninjas.

The writing is clever, easy to follow, and gives a good feel for the characters and their histories with each other. The art is much better than I'm used to getting in modern comics, which generally seem to compete to hire the least talented artists possible. Alex Maleev's work in the first few issues is a beautiful marriage between comics and Klimt:
Leinill Yu's work is good, although there's too much heavy shading for my tastes. And he does occasionally gift us with something ridiculous like this:

I don't care how many superpowers Spider-Woman has--her boobs shouldn't be as big as her head and twice the size of her waist. Stop drawing shit like that! ( )

After the last tpb of the New Avengers, I went into this one with high hopes. If I had to describe this arc in one word, it would be "messy." The narrative bounces back and forth a couple of times in each issue, and everything gets very jumbled.

The Scarlet Witch makes her reappearance, thankfully, but I didn't particularly like that issue. The art by Maleev was okay and added a dream-like quality to the issue, but it was too sketchy for my tastes.

Yu's art (every issue in the collection except #26 [the first]) wasn't that great. Everyone looked ancient and extremely wrinkled. ( )