**SPOILER ALERT** Brian Michael Bendis’ Siege: The Cabal #1 at #51 was a coincidental follow-up to #50. It packs a memorably malicious exchange between Dr. Doom and Norman Osborn and lead into Marvel’s new “Siege” event, but it also left me completely stunned throughout the second half with a scene I misinterpreted with anticlimactic consequences. So this review is going to be as much about what didn’t happen as was did happen.
The premise of the Siege title going into this read was presumably that it would be about Norman deciding on what to do about the big fat kingdom of Asgard that’s currently hovering above the United States and how he’s going to storm the gates and get rid of it. His anti-Illuminati cabal of villains, The Hood, The Taskmaster, and Loki are predictably along for the ride when he solicits the help of Dr. Doom. There’s a beautifully melodramatic discussion between Osborn and Doom about why that won’t happen that leads up to a Siege of a different kind, but my post-9/11 reading of the sequence ending that confrontation had to be rewound and reread. My explanation requires an extra image, which you’ll see after the jump…