Damage Control #1 Vol. 2: No Vault Insurance.

After the unique opening chapter in Acts of Vengeance, one might expect a more conventional follow-up.  Perhaps a story that gives us a glimpse at the hidden forces behind the Vault breakout or one that escalates the threat toward the superhero community.  Instead, we get, well, Damage Control.  

Amazingly, the only story that ties directly into Avengers Spotlight #26 is Damage Control Vol. 2 No. 1.  This series begins with a simple question: who cleans up the collateral damage after a massive super-hero battle?  The answer: Damage Control, a massive corporation dedicated solely to that mission.  It's a light-hearted take on the hidden systems that allow New York to continue business as usual despite the number of times it is wrecked in a calendar year.  And who would use what is essentially a humor comic as a central focal point for a massive crossover?  Why, the same man that brought us the strangest opening issue of a massive crossover: Dwayne McDuffie.  

While this issue is, as you can see, #1 in a 4-issue miniseries, it is actually the second 4-issue miniseries for Damage Control.  Here is a sampling of the first miniseries, which also crossed over with the previous event: Inferno.  (Which I didn't care much care for, but that's beside the point.)  It would also make a brief re-appearance during World War Hulk, not to mention a brief comment here and there throughout the nineties.  

Issue #1 begins with Thor holding up the George Washington Bridge while Damage Control starts to put it back together.  We meet the main characters on site and Thor gets a surprisingly good joke in.  

I'm going to skip over most of the character bits and get right to the heart of the matter.  This is how Damage Control gets involved in this issue:

Yes, the old "dialed the wrong number for the Avengers" trick.  One might think that alerting the Avengers to a jailbreak would be more elaborate than speed dial.  (And, by the way, how is the Fantastic Four underneath Damage Control AND the National Guard? There's your problem.)

Once they get the message, Damage Control sends their finest team to the Vault: John Porter - Account Executive, Gene Strausser - Head of R&D, and Bart, the intern.  Fortunately, the doors are wide open.

Unfortunately, not all the villains have escaped.  

Don't worry.  He just needs to go to the bathroom.  No...really.  

At any rate, our heroes are soon discovered by the Wrecking Crew.  Thanks to a fortuitous relationship between John and Thunderball, our heroes manage to outwit the rest of the crew, contact the Avengers and escape from the Vault in one piece.  Captain America arrives on the scene and knocks out the Wrecking Crew.  Well, almost all of them.

Whoops.  

  

For any continuity buffs out there, this pretty clearly places this story during the act break of Spotlight #26.  There is some confusion in that issue as to how Iron Man and Hawkeye were notified of the breakout.  It appears that the Damage Control team sent out the wider message. In addition, the doors are still open, which places it before Hawkeye's electromagnetic pulse. Apparently, Captain America, and not Iron Man, was the first Avenger on the scene.  He didn't appear in that issue because he was knocked out by a wrecking ball.  

Despite being a comedy book, Damage Control #1 does a fine job of balancing the two parts of it's mission.  It manages to advance the plot, by explaining, in further detail, what happened at the Vault, while being pretty funny. While the Spotlight issue was ostensibly a more serious issue that had some strangely out-of-place humor, this series is designed as a pure humor title. The actual plot development is just gravy.