Issue 5 is a tie-in to World War Hulk and follows up on last month's story, in which the young recruits of Tony Stark's 50 state initiative decided to disobey orders and take on the Hulk and his Warbound in personal combat. A covert ops team is formed and sent to Manhattan to extricate the team from their plight in order to save face for the whole Initiative scheme.

This is done in a very clever way, touching on the fact that what the government is doing with The Initiative may not be an improvement on the situation it is supposed to rememdy as personified by the fate of the New Warriors, which, you may recall, started this whole Civil War kerfuffle.

From everything that's been established in the book up to this point the members of The Initiative are soldiers for the American military and, from what I recall of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, disobeying an order is not exactly the equivalent of jaywalking, so it will be interesting to see what, if any, consequences there are for their actions. So far the book has played fair with the reader in suiting consequences to actions in the book, but with the established feature characters nearly all rebelling, I wonder how writer Dan Slott will handle this.

A subplot concerning one of the recruits, Terrance "Trauma" Ward, is nicely tied in to the action and Slott gives us an interesting twist on the use of his powers and his fate. As a bonus, the subplot involves Danielle Moonstar, and I always did like the New Mutants. This was my favorite part of the issue, not least because without it the book is nearly fifty percent exposition, even if it is in the form of dialog.