I Read This: AVENGERS ASSEMBLE Vol. 2

At long last, I'm free of the backlog that had accumulated (Just in time to get started on possibly more backlog, but we won't dwell on that for now) and finally finishing up our look back at the totality (focused or otherwise) of Kurt Busiek's Avengers run, as Marvel was good enough to put Volume 2 back into print as a trade and spare me from having to drop $70 or whatever for the hardcover (now if you'd just do the same for Infinity Abyss, that'd be swell, guys!) Naturally, as we're doing the second part last, this will doubtless lead to some confusion, but I like to think of that as standard operation procedure, as for a blog that is as sexless as this, 60% of my hits seem to be people doing Google searches for "tits" and "breasts."

It's not an exaggeration, either. I frequently look at the stats and wonder what it all means.

Anyways, when we left off, volume 1 had ended with Wonder Man back in the land of the living and Hawkeye had departed the team. Well, we pick up there in issue #12 as the Avengers find Hawkeye (who's been busy trying to become leader of the Thunderbolts) and a big fight ensues, because, well, why not? They've not long had one in issue 12 of Thunderbolts, and this begins a number of team-ups between the two teams, which seemed poised to become an annual thing, but in practice only happened like, three times, I think.

In any event, it's perfectly serviceable stuff. The Avengers and the Thunderbolts fight and trade quips, and it's kind of fine, but not all it could be. For one thing, the Thunderbolts as a group of villains trying to straight could have some resonance with Justice, who's a convicted murderer himself, but nothing's really made of it and the opportunity was pretty much missed.

On the other hand, this is the issue where Songbird calls the Avengers "Jabronis," which is one of the many reasons Kurt Busiek's in my good books. There will be others, and there are a few in this book.

Since this is a double-sized issue and "two teams fighting over a misunderstanding" isn't enough to cover all that, we also have a villain of the piece in Dominex, who in addition to sounding like a laxative, is yet another agent of Lucifer, a footnote of an Avengers and X-Men villain who gets brought back because anything that happened in the first 100 issues of Avengers or X-Men is gonna show up at least once more time, whether it should or not. There is precious little you need to know about Lucifer, because he's not terribly interesting, unless you consider he's been running a woefully inefficient plan to dominate the Earth for the past 40 years or whatever. Then it's something.

We tie up a few meandering subplots as Hawkeye trundles off to go hang on with the Thunderbolts and give that book's second year some focus and come back in time Avengers next annual, which, in addition to the interesting choice of Leonardo Manco on art (he's not bad, but I can imagine it was a hell of a gear change if you were used to the regular team and/or Carlos Pacheco from last year's book) is a perfectly adequate spot of continuity maintenance that answers the question that was apparently being asked enough to warrant devoting a whole annual to it: Why did the Black Widow disband the Avengers after Onslaught? Well, the answer turns out to be not all that exciting (the real reason would be I expect that at the time Marvel thought that two Avengers books running at the same time would confuse things or dilute the brand. Thank God they learned their lesson, huh?) but it has a few good character bits, some good Manco art, and the Avengers fighting the sphincter-clenching terror that is Fabian Stankowicz, the Mechano Marauder.

Yes indeed, a villain even Lucifer can say "Who, now?!?"

Anyways, back to the title proper, as we get an issue of Triune Understanding fooferaw and Justice and Firestar featured as being caught betwixt and between the New Warriors and the Avengers. For all that this is a thing, Justice is still so far out of character here, it ends up pleasing no one, really, and the advent of Triune bad guy Lord Templar doesn't have the impact it should, partly because he's not terribly interesting, partly because despite 40 issues more or less devoted to it the Triunes are not that interesting, and partly because issue #14 introduces the other, far more interesting, Triune bad guy:

Pagan.

Oh, Pagan is so awesome. I don't know what the thought process behind his creation was, and whether he was intended to be a parody of someone, but oh my lord, Pagan is a hoot and a half. Little more than a big strong guy who walks around yelling and throwing things, Pagan acts and speaks as his font would indicate he lives his life--in 30-point bold Impact. Here's a little bit of the wit and wisdom of Pagan:

"HAH! YOU CANNOT STOP PAGAN WITH GUNS, HUMANS! POLICE CANNOT STOP PAGAN! SOLDIERS CANNOT STOP HIM! PAGAN DOES WHATEVER HE WANTS!!"

It's even funnier when you imagine it being said kinda like this:



This issue also has a bit of fourth-wall breakage as Busiek and Perez show up to explain that what the people really want to see this issue --namely Beast and Wonder Man hanging out and talking about why everyone's hot for the Scarlet Witch (something which I have never understood, especially after trying to read Avengers: The Children's Crusade--sorry Diana, it didn't quite make it there for me. On the other hands, The Legend of Korra was just F'N awesome.) With all due respect to Messrs. Busiek and Perez, I actually came to see PAGAN.

Issue #15 sees the return of Blackrobat--er, Triathlon, sporting a really cool new costume. Despite hating the Triune Understanding subplot and all the connections to the 3-D Man, I really did like Triathlon. Hated that they busted him down to being 3-D Man again for . . .well, reasons, I suppose, but I guess I should stop being shocked that superhero comics are reductionist and frightened of change, shouldn't I?

Anyways, issue #15 is more confusing Triune nonsense, and is thus of little note (except, hey, MORE PAGAN!) except that it teases the big Ultron story . . .which is about three issues away (and hilariously, it's not the only time they do that, which implies that Ultron has a hell of a time shitting or getting off the pot) Issues #16-18 feature Jerry Ordway taking over as writer and artist and . . .they're not all that bad, really (even if I associate Ordway with DC stuff so much it's weird to see him drawing Marvel characters) It's a rather bizarre three-part story wherein the Wrecking Crew take over Polemachus (if you have no idea where that is, don't be too concerned. Remember what i said about pre-100 Avengers stuff coming back, whether it had a good reason to do so or not?) backed with an odd story about the Doomsday Man wanting Ms. Marvel, because of reasons.

It's got some good bits, namely the Wrecking Crew, long a bunch of stupid brutish mooks, getting to act like kings and being exactly as good at it as you'd imagine stupid brutish mooks would be, but the Doomsday Man stuff is just baffling and never really goes anywhere.

But before we can get to "Ultron Unlimited," generally considered the book's high point, we have a little Wizard zero-issue recap of Ultron's (and the Avengers' ) status quo up to now. Stuart Immonen's back to provide art and for the rather slight story it is, does very well with it.

Finally we're on to "Ultron Unlimited" a story which can be boiled down to "Ultron embraces his inner Dalek, and there's a bunch of nonsense about Hank Pym that only succeeds in making you wonder just what the hell sort of doctor is Hank Pym, and why is it that every time they dredge up his history he looks more and more like a shitheel?"

The good thing about all this is that being a very tight four issues, the story doesn't slow down long enough for you to dwell on the weaker bits (Hank Pym, the dunderheaded Freudian underpinnings that are in every Ultron story) that much and does a good job with pushing the stakes higher and higher with every issue, which helps one forgive the ropier story bits, or at least not have time to dwell on them so much. Having re-read it, I still prefer the Kang Dynasty story as it has more scope and the stakes feel much higher, but I do like the focus and intensity in this one as well.

To further confuse the issue, the trade closes with issue #23, which I already covered when this whole thing began with my write-up of Volume 3, which is as good a way as any to close the loop, I suppose. If you're reading this linearly, I suppose I'll finish by pointing you back where we began and leave you to pore through the complete run.

I Read This--AVENGERS ASSEMBLE: Vol. 1

Boy, thank God for that Avengers movie, eh? Without it I wouldn't have a hope in hell of completing this series because Marvel would have blithely let two fifths of the run fall out of print and I would have spent inordinate amounts of time staring at price lists online offering copies for $100+ used muttering "you must be out of your god damned minds."

Anyways, my angst aside, once again the most ass-backward-yet-somehow-right-for-this-place retrospective look at Kurt Busiek's run on Avengers continues and goes back to the beginning (say it with me--"wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, dodgy availability") to the start. Picture it: Marvel, 1998. We've just gotten the Heroes Reborn business over with and we're trying to get back to the basics with our core characters (generally because Image-ising them didn't work very well and Grant Morrison's JLA was doing big sexy numbers) and someone said: "Get me Kurt Busiek. His near-encyclopedic knowledge of Marvel history will serve us well, especially since Roy Thomas is still burnt out and babbling in the basement."

To further sweeten the deal, they also retained George Perez, who hadn't done a regular run on anything for something like ten years at that point. I like to think--and no, I cannot prove this--that his recruitment went something like this:

MARVEL: Look, we need someone to draw huge crowd scenes and since Liefeld flaked out on us, we're going to try someone who can actually do it right this time. Are you in?

PEREZ: I dunno, man . . .I'm not really feeling it.

MARVEL: You can draw the Scarlet Witch in various kinds of bondage for the first two issues. How about that?

PEREZ: [Puts on sunglasses] I'm hip. Let's ride.

And so, Avengers #1 is born (for the third time), and with all credit to Busiek, the book starts off with an excellent three-parter that manages to hit some familiar continuity buttons and provide something new in the process (it looks like we're going to do yet another Loki brings the Avengers together story, but it's actually Morgan LeFay using Asgardian knickknacks to rewrite reality) and we drag damn near every extant Avenger into it, and by issue #2 give them all sweet medieval redesigns (how the variant hungry action-figure folks never jumped on this, I'll never know) and we even manage to bring Wonder Man back from the dead. It's a genuinely enjoyable romp that really gets the book off to a rousing start, even if this means the book doesn't really settle down and start moving forward until issue #4.

Issue #4 gets the team down to a more manageable size (10 from the original 39) and as is customary at the Prattle, it's time once again for ROLL CALL!

CAPTAIN AMERICA--This is the Mark Waid-era hyper-competent Cap who rides herd on everyone, however reluctantly at times. Over the course of the rest of the issues in this collection, will fret overmuch about how goddamn fractious the team is, but that doesn't really come to a head until much later in the run.

THOR--The designated team muscle, Thor is there to be the hotheaded emeritus member of the team, constantly on a short fuse and the one person who you can be certain that if you step to him, he will bring the pain on your ass. Fades a bit into the background for a bit as the new status quo in the Thor book is established, and rotates in and out periodically from then on.

IRON MAN--Man that armour design he had around 1998 was hella awesome. Anyways, Iron Man shares a subplot from his own book with this one--namely, as a recovering alcoholic, he's deeply worried about Warbird's Sudden Onset Alcoholism Subplot, and well he should, because it is one of the most clumsily handled plot threads in Busiek's entire run and is just . . .embarrassing, really.

SCARLET WITCH--Oh dear. You know, for all I love the Busiek run on this book, this was the exact point where I realised if I never had to read another story featuring the Scarlet Witch, my life would improve dramatically, because the concluding arc in this here collection involves another dry, dull, utterly uninteresting explanation of how her hex powers work (the only correct explanation is of course: "Who gives a flying turtle fuck?") which is in itself nestled in the subplot involving her choosing between Vision and Wonder Man (who remains kinda dead-ish) which, let us not forget, means choosing between a robot and a dead guy/crackle of Kirby-dots. None of this makes her interesting, and I wish she'd said "No More Wanda." I really do.

VISION--Hey, what better way to ensure that one side of a love triangle is doomed to lose out (not that they won't drag it out for THIRTY MORE ISSUES ANYWAY) than to have Vision basically be a non-entity/expository device after issue #3? Because that's totally what they did. Vision gets torn in half in issue #3 and doesn't get back together successfully until much later. The rest of the time he spends moping about as a hologram, occasionally peeking in on Wanda having sex with the dead Kirby-dot guy. This is sick, people. Really sick.

WONDER MAN--Back on the old Avengers mailing list (man, remember those?) one of my biggest criticisms of the early parts of the Avengers run was the following plot progression happened far, far too much: Avengers got their asses kicked, Wanda summoned Wonder Man, Wonder Man kicked ass while Wanda fretted and fussed over why he would appear when he was needed (even though it had pretty much been settled as early as issue #3) and the whole thing was just a hair away from all the Avengers pointing at the sky and calling for the Megazord (or, as I called him, Wonder Robo). I was shouted down, as I remember, but I thought it was pretty fucking funny at the time.

WARBIRD--"Ms. Marvel" may not have been the most imaginative name ever thought of, but sweet shit, it was leagues better than "Warbird." Was the other Ms. Marvel even still around at this point that not confusing the two characters was an issue? Anyways, I imagine that Busiek's goal was to do right by her this time, as Carol Danvers has been the most shit-upon character in the entire history of Marvel Comics. That's not hyperbole--the only one who comes even close is Polaris (and for much the same reasons, now that I think of it) I mean, the 200th issue of the Avengers is basically sending her off to be drugged and raped by her own time-traveling son and the Avengers are waving and going "Okay, have fun!"

That aside, in the name of "fixing" the character, Busiek makes Warbird a bit of a bitch on wheels who hides her de-powering from the team, develops an awfully drama-generating drinking problem, yells at everyone, and eventually gets tossed off the team for being such a hot mess. None of which would be bad, necessarily, except we're never given a moment where she's not being an utter jackass to empathise with her and see the pain that leads her to self-medicate--we're only told after the fact and then, in the shrillest way possible.

Never mind so much of this nonsense could have been avoided with someone having a simple conversation. In short, Warbird is a fictional example of what the late Richard Jeni one said: "This is what happens when you keep fixing something until it's broke."

HAWKEYE--For all that you may say I'm completely negative about even things, I purport to like--here's two awesome Hawkeye moments from this book--Hawkeye takes out the Whizzer, who won't shut up about his super-speed allowing him to run rings around him, and Hawkeye coolly sniping the Corruptor.

Hawkeye is not really on the team for that long a time--he's basically being set up as being discontent with his place on the Avengers (small wonder, he was leader of the West Coast branch for years and years) and setting him up as leader of the Thunderbolts (which happens in the next book) and as a foil for Captain America, which works OK except god damn Hawkeye is shrill as fuck when he's picking arguments with everyone and it kinda ignores the growth he'd made since his earliest days, but as I said, he's not around for long.

FIRESTAR--Firestar and Justice are the two reserves moved up from the New Warriors with the idea that giving them a spot on the Avengers would give them sufficient rub to make them major Marvel characters (see Cage, Luke) The deeper game Busiek was playing, I think, was that even though Justice had always wanted to be an Avenger (New Warriors #1 had him trying and failing to impress Captain America) Firestar would actually be the better Avenger when all was said and done (it would help, of course, that Firestar didn't lose 500 IQ points when she joined, unlike Justice) which is a clever switch and had things gone different, I probably would have liked that wrinkle.

It never quite comes off, because Firestar spends way too much time whining . . .about . . .everything. She's an Avenger only because she tags along with Justice (nothing says "strong female character" like "whiny codependency!") She hates her new costume because her boobs threaten to pop loose at any moment, and she frets over the fact that her powers could kill her (a plot thread that kept getting picked up and dropped because no one consistently dealt with it, and she bitched about Justice pushing her to be more Avenger-y.

Which is fine, but when that's all she does, it becomes so grating that you wish she'd raise up and leave already. As with Warbird, we need more of a larger picture of who she is and what she's about before we start laying on the drama with a trowel.

JUSTICE--In my time reading comics, I have discovered a few constants that exist, and are not unlike Newton's Laws of Motion and the theory of relativity in that they are seemingly immutable. The one law germane to this discussion is as follows: No One Gives A Fuck About What Fabian Nicieza Did. Now allow me to prove it in four steps:

When Cannonball was promoted to the X-Men and moved up after years of being a sober, experienced leader who didn't speak in ridiculous pidgin Southern in the pages of X-Force, he was immediately treated as though he'd just come from New Mutants and acted so ridiculously naive that one expected him to pop out of the bathroom and yell "HOLY SHIT--INDOOR PLUMBING! WHAT AN AGE OF WONDERS WE LIVE IN!" I mean, you could still have done the "rookie plays in the big leagues" thing, but a little subtlety would have helped. Not surprisingly, this was a completely uninteresting way to use the character and Cannonball has now been knocked down to the New Mutants because if comic fans fear anything, it's change.

Cable went from a subtle manipulator playing a long game that would ultimately reshape the world into a utopia (with examination of the consequences of that) to being in some bizarre mash-up of Lone Wolf and Cub and a Roadrunner cartoon.

The Thunderbolts went from being the last bastion of old-school Marvel superhero stories to Warren Ellis Writes The Same 10 Bastards He Writes In Every Story And Oh Look, Speedball's A Cutter Now.

And, most relevant to our subject today, Justice went from being the New Warriors' ace in the whole--wise beyond his years, cool under pressure, well aware of the consequences of his actions (he'd done time in jail for accidentally killing someone) into a callow, reckless starstuck idiot who does for the book what Wesley Crusher did on the Starship Enterprise.

Okay, well, after all that and only four issues covered, let's get back into it. Issue #5 and 6 feature a fight with the Squadron Supreme, who, even Busiek seems to think, have been victims of mind control to an astounding degree. Oh, I think they have the wrong character being a magician, but whatever. Naturally, they're all being mind-controlled here as well because in these heady pre-JLA/Avengers days there was no way we were ever gonna see the Justice League and the Avengers actually fight, right?

The mind-controller du jour happens to be the Corruptor, a Z-list villain from Nova back in the 70's who himself is working for Imus Champion, and even the editorial copy can't believe the continuity backwaters Busiek pulled him out of. This will all be tied up in an annual later in the book. For a quickie two-parter it does very well for what it intends to be--a couple of big fights that set up a conclusion later on and keep the internal subplots humming along.

But before we get to the conclusion, it's time for "Live Kree Or Die," or as it could be more accurately known, Warbird Fucks Up Everything Like Three Times And Nearly Gets Everyone Killed. Seriously, this could have been a done-in-one save for how utterly and repeatedly she messes up and how we watch her fail every single time in nigh-excruciating detail.

Here's all you need to know--after Operation: Galactic Storm, a few Kree survived and are attempting to put together a device that will turn everyone on Earth that it doesn't kill into Kree. As with all Kree plots, it is incredibly convoluted and dumb, and the Kree soldiers trying to make it happen really aren't clever enough to pull a greasy string out of a cat's ass, never mind accomplish a military operation like this.

But they didn't count on Warbird (who, I remind you, is supposed to be undergoing major character rehab) who, after telling off Iron Man for assuming she's a drunk (she is) gets her load on and nearly attacks Iron Man in the same place where (wouldn't you know it) the Kree have been working on their plan. A big fight ensues, and Warbird flies off to prove herself, which obviously is bound to go well, huh?

The story continues in Captain America, wherein Warbird gets herself captured by the Kree and thrown into a death camp (questionable taste, that) calls in Captain America, who actually gets a great scene in this issue when he beats down the head Kree and gets in the following good line, which is worth quoting:

"No. YOU fight for a crumbling empire of a cowardly sadists. You slaughtered innocent men and women who did you no harm. Well . . .I fight for them."

It's a great moment, even if it threatens to become eye-rollingly pretentious because it's a fistfight in Space Auschwitz. But it works, because it's everything you need to know about the Kree and Cap in three sentences.

Anyways, Warbird gets herself captured again (the character rehab's really going well, isn't it?) and we move over to Quicksilver (I cannot believe that Quicksilver once had his ongoing series. Just can't believe it.) wherein Quicksilver, the Scarlet Witch, and Hawkeye try stop the Kree from stealing Terrigen Mists from the Inhumans, only to fail because Warbird gets herself stinking drunk on Space Booze and starts firing wild. On behalf of every alcoholic and every human being everywhere, I would like to apologize for the depiction of Warbird being drunk in this issue. Even Otis from the Andy Griffith show handled the disease of alcoholism with more taste and conscience than is done here.

We cut back to Avengers for the finale in time for Warbird to get cashiered out of the Avengers for being a colossal fuckup and an alcoholic (delivered with the gentle feather-light touch of a claw hammer to the temple, of course) and then it's off to the moon to beat the shit out of the Kree and reveal that . . .yet again . . .this has all been a convoluted plot by the Supreme Intelligence to cover up ropey plotting . . .I mean, part of his master plan for the Kree (which doesn't get covered until Maximum Security a few years later) which, is, as always, utter horseshit. Meanwhile, we're supposed to be sad because Warbird's hit rock bottom, but really, it's an empty moment because we've never been given a moment where the reader can sympathize with her.

That being over and done with, it's time for the Avengers/Squardon Supreme annual mentioned earlier. Imus Champion makes his move (something about blowing up the world) and, in what could be best termed a dramatic inversion of every Avengers/Squadron story up to now, they team-up and split into groups to fight him. And nary a single person is mind-controlled. All pretty standard stuff, but it has some great art by Carlos Pacheco (at this point well into his ascendancy as a top artist) and the whole thing moves efficiently enough, and hey, we get a happy ending for the Squadron (who get to go back to their own Earth, and if I remember right, are never seen again as the new version gains more prominence) and the Swordsman and Magdalene also leave, which is just as well because they only reason they were Avengers in the first place is because they kept hanging around the mansion.

So, there's your Annual, and it's back to the main book for a two-parter wherein Busiek tries to get even more obscure than Imus god damned Champion by pitting the Avengers against Moses Magnum, and I, for one, could not be more delighted. We are also introduced to Silverclaw, who will soon be our newest reserve Avenger and is Jarvis' Save The Children child (because naturally in the Marvel Universe, even something as straightforward as sponsoring a starving child in the Third World means they'll probably have superpowers or something) and Triathlon shows up for the first time.

I've done all my bitching about Triathlon's connection to the 3-D man elsewhere (if you're reading these in chronological order, this means I am retroactively referring to something which for you has not happened yet and as such I am capable of time travel, and this is absolutely blowing your mind) I will, however, say a few other things: I like Triathlon. He's neat, even if by the time he finally joins he spends too much time bitching about being the token black dude.

Also, Triathlon is also responsible for my first realisation that my concerns and the concern of most comic fans follow parallel but not necessarily intersecting tracks, as his introduction and power set (he is as strong and as fast as three men) began a weeks-long debate on the aforementioned mailing list over whether he was as strong as three regular guys or as strong as three Captain America, who is at the peak of what a human can achieve without enhancement. Yes, this was an actual thing, and it on for ever.

To lighten the mood, I shot my mouth off (never a good thing now, even less so then when I was even more of an opinionated pain in the ass than I am now) and said words to the effect of "Thank God we lived in a more enlightened time (give or take--after all, 1998 was the year the New Radicals' "You Get What You Give" held a terrified nation hostage) because otherwise Traithlon would be gadding about in a midriff-baring outfit calling himself the Black Athlete."

This landed with a thud, and everyone went back to arguing the "human vs. peak human" thing, the upshot of which was that when Triathlon came back, it was made explicitly clear that he was three times what a peak human could be because that distinction is IMPORTANT, god dammit.

Anyways, Moses Magnum looks like Mr. T and acts utterly bugged out the whole damn time, which is extraordinarily funny to me, because it's Moses Magnum (or, "who gives a shit?") and because this is part of an on-again off-again thing that happens whenever someone haules Moses out of the mothballs--Moses was apparently reconnected to be working for Apocalypse (because he appeared in X-Men once, and well, everything has to fit together even if no one really cared.) and has the power to create earthquakes and no control over it, hence the being bugged out and being dangerous enough to cause the Avengers two issues of headaches.

Oh, and while this is going on, by the way, the aforementioned icky scene of the Scarlet Witch and Wonder Man getting it on while the Vision watches. Yeah. This happened.

Avengers #9 has one of my favourite overwrought, clunky titles of all time: "The Villain Who Fell From Grace With The Earth" (seriously, try to say that out loud. It sounds like two trains colliding) and ties up the Moses Magnum thing with a big fight. Oh, and Traithlon and Hawkeye crawl through air ducts long enough for Triathlon to rattle off his origin. There's a big fight, Magnum holds his own, and falls in a hole, because that's what super-villains tend to do. Oh, and the Scarlet Witch and Hawkeye both leave the Avengers for different reasons.

Avengers #10 and 11 are another two-parter, which handily manage to wrap up the Wonder Man thing (or at least get him out of the Wonder Robo formula) and allow George Perez a chance to go utterly apeshit as he manages to draw in one page every Avenger who's ever been an Avenger and a goodly portion of their villains in two separate panels, and the Stuntmaster and Chili show up. If you said "who?" and "who, now?" well, so did I. Life was hard before Wikipedia.

The Avengers celebrate 35 years of continuity (it's all sorta metatextual, really) and in the B-plot the Scarlet Witch frets to Agatha Harkness (who's alive all of a sudden, I guess?) about her powers and we get alternating pages of thrilling summations of the Avengers' history and boring-as-whale-shit explanations of how the Scarlet Witch's powers work for awhile, and then, mercifully, the Grim Reaper shows up, resurrects a team of dead Avengers (85% of whom have been resurrected by now) who promptly beat the living Avengers asses because this is part one of a two-parter and dead Avengers standing over the defeated bodies of living ones is frankly, one hell of a cliff-hanger.

Part 2 starts with the Scarlet Witch returning to the Mansion and getting captured and--you guessed it--tied up while the Grim Reaper monologues to the captured living Avengers about his utterly convoluted plan about how to Not Be Dead Anymore and . . .I've read this thing three or four times now and it just does not make one goddamned bit of sense, really, having to do with the weakening barriers between the living and the dead and love pulling people across and . . .uhm . . .yeah. Wonder Man's alive and he and the Scarlet Witch happily canoodle, and oh yeah, Wonder Man's antler-headed crazy asshole brother also comes back to life because shut up, that's why.

On the whole, one could do worse in trying to bring back the Avengers (and they did a year before this!) and there were enough new wrinkles in the early issues to get me past the bits that didn't work to well and there were a few subplots that worked well enough to balance the ones that got in my nerves.

So . . .yeah. Join us next time whenever the trade for the second volume gets published for the second and final (but not the end--I'm blowing your mind again), when we will cover the early peak of the Busiek Avengers run--"Ultron Unlimited," get a visit from your friend and mine Pagan, and Iron Man learns a valuable lesson about friendship when he fakes the funk on a nasty dunk. Let's all be there!

I Read This--JLA/AVENGERS

There is a theory out there in the blogosphere that JLA/Avengers is not all it could be, because it's "nothing but fanservice."

To which my response is, "Yeah, well, that's kind of the point of intercompany crossovers are for. What else did you expect?"

I suppose part of it may be because it came out at a rather unfashionable time for that sort of thing--late 2003 was the end of the big Marvel creative renaissance, and the genuine revitalisation was giving way to its own type of excess and there was a general sense that this kind of old-school superhero stuff wasn't very hip anymore and, as I remember reading reviews at the time that were sort of "Oh well, let's look at this, then . . .it's OK for what it is. *sigh* . . .I guess."

In a sense, it's kind of the end of an era for both JLA and Avengers, as Busiek's more backward-looking run was soon to be supplanted by Bendis' vision for the Avengers franchise and Morrison's big epic JLA paradigm would soon be undermined by . . .well, Joe Kelly's inexplicable love of The Elite, really. This is kind of the last hurrah for that mid-90's moment, I'd say.

That aside, and with seven years of hindsight, we can say that while JLA/Avengers is fanservice, it's mostly very good fanservice and manages to weave the insanely tangled and convulted continuity headaches that characterise the publishing histories of these two teams, provides the requisite level of spectacle, and also gives you more than a few Easter Eggs to enjoy in the bargain (seriously, there's probably a web page out there with exhaustive annotations on all this stuff). While on one level that is that woeful bugbear of "comics about other comics" as it occurs in a controlled self-contained environment story-line wise, it just about gets around it.

Not that it's perfect--the forcible inclusion of Hal Jordan and Barry Allen in the third chapter and their amount of screentime turned out to be a bit of unintentional foreshadowing, both in their reintroduction to the DCU and the clumsy way in which they're dropped back in and forced importance is . . .well, that also turned out to be a premonition too, dinnit?

Anyways, enough pre-amble, let's get to the story. After a Crisis on Infinite Earths homaging beginning we get to to cases pretty quickly. Krona and the Grandmaster agree to play a game, wherein the JLA and Avengers compete to collect a number of famous McGuffins. The first issue wisely concerns itself with setting things up--we see the JLA fight Terminus (who once again goes out like a bitch--Terminus must be the most oversold and least successful Big Threat Marvel ever devised--seriously, there has never been a Terminus story where he wasn't played for a giant-size schmuck) Meanwhile, the Avengers fight Starro, there's some travelling to each other's respective worlds and we get our first good bit--Heroes in the DCU are idlolised and super-famous, Marvel heroes are outsiders and viewed with suspicion by the general public. This also helps to build in some animosity between the two teams and better justify the obligatory "heroes fight until they figure out it's all been a misunderstanding, thing." The Avengers think that the JLA must have set themselves up as figures of worship as an oppressive force, and the JLA think the Avengers are dangerous loose cannons.

The two teams don't acually meet until the last page, and then the fight's on. It's a good use of pacing to use the first issue to build the stakes up to that point--these are the two biggest superhero teams out there and there'd been decades of buildup to seeing them meet, so the moment when they finally face off should, ideally, be a Big Thing, and the first shot in their battle is a hell of a cliffhanger to leave things on (especially since there was a bit of a delay between the first two issues and that made the anticipation even more unbearable) but you actually feel the catharsis when the fight begins and escalates in issue #2

The second issue concerns itself with the battle between the Avengers and the JLA and the subsequent quest for all the McGuffiny Basically half the issue is taken up with the main casts having a rumble, and during the treasure hunt for the second half, we get various reserve JLAers and Avengers getting some face time whilst Batman and Captain America try to figure out what's really going on (we also get a cool image of Darkseid with the Infinity Gauntlet, which was a great "oh shit" moment). Finally, we get one last throwdown in the Savage Land before the cliffhanger of this issue--Krona goes nuts and attacks Galactus, and the Grandmaster reveals the purpose for the various McGuffins and seals everything up in a nice little pocket universe . . .

. . .the results of which we see in issue #3 (Did anyone ever name everyone who was on the cover? Are they still sane?) which starts as a succession of riffs on the old JLA/JSA team-ups that were a staple of Justice League of America for . . .ever, really and this is pretty much the "all fanservice" portion of our program as damn near everything that is possible to fold into an invented shared history for both teams, including (insanely) the aborted JLA/Avengers team-up from the 1980s. The "shared history" bit soon unravels as it becomes plain that Krona is planning to shred the universes apart and only by going back to the way things should be can things be set right.

This is set up to be a hard choice for both teams to make, but I was more amused that it involved more or less the characters accepting that they'll have to endure more than a few shitty retcons and/or dying. This is where Hal Jordan and Barry Allen get shoehorned in, to the slight detriment of the story--considering they soon get folded back in the main plot, their inclusion here at best is only to add more weight to the "hard choice" that must be made, but when you consider that their replacements show up again in the last issue, well, it makes the whole thing seem like a digression and makes their successors look like second-stringers. Which, for a certain segment of the comics-reading population, I guess they always will be.

Anyways, it's all to set up the big cathartic moment where the Justice League and the Avengers put aside their animosities and team up to fight Krona. It's a great punch-the-air moment too, not least of which because it's been earned over the course of the story and there's been the weight of expectation that they would, ultimately, team up.

And issue 4 delivers on that as damn near every Justice Leaguer and Avenger that ever was teams up to fight every Justice League and Avengers villain George Perez felt like drawing (SPOILER: A lot) and it pretty much delivers on the promise of grand-scale action, ties up neatly and just . . .really works. I'm glossing over the specifics of the plot here basically because 1) it's better if you read it and 2) really, the plot's just a vehicle for the spectacle of the crossover, and really, no surprise there.

Ultimately, JLA/Avengers exists to create a broad canvas for two of the linchpin superteams in the Big Two, tell a reasonably coherent story, provide enough big moments to justify itself, and then get off the stage. It doesn't blaze any new trails, but then if you're doing an intercompany crossover, it's not the greatest time to try and blaze trails--that way leads Deathmate or Spawn/Batman--and it succeeds in what it was designed for with aplomb and efficiency.

I Read This--AVENGERS ASSEMBLE Vol. 5

Continuing our look at the Kurt Busiek run on Avengers, we close out his run on the main title with volume 5 of Marvel's collections, and from here we stop in for a cup of coffee with JLA/Avengers, then back to volumes 1 and 2, assuming Marvel will be good enough to reissue them, because paying $200 for a used hardcover is just goddamn foolish. I mean, I was born at night, but it wasn't last night.

Anyhow, this volume is, barring the teaser at the end of volume 4, the entirety of the Kang Dynasty story. Of the various sagas that Busiek did on the book, the Kang Dynasty's probably, warts and all, the best of them. Oh, it has it's usual ropey bits, the art gets inconsistent after Alan Davis leaves, it has two endings too many, has an interlude with the Scarlet Witch and Wonder Man in a concentration camp which is in questionable taste to be sure but suffers mightily because you have two of the most boring Avengers ever trying to carry a story, we revisit the unfortunate Avengers #200 very obliquely and it never really goes anywhere. and there's another one of those even-more-unfortunate-in-retrospect "'Nuff Said" issues right at a critical plot moment, and we stop the story dead for the finale of the 3D man plot, which is annoying, but at least it's over with.

On the whole, though, it works. Kang Dynasty has a sense of scope and real high stakes that have been missing from Avengers stories for quite awhile. It also benefits from being expansive (in that it spans the globe with various beachheads and conflicts) but also being contained (as it's only in Avengers--I think, anyways. Did it end up crossing over with anything?) and unified as it only happens under one writer's direction. What's more, it presents Kang the Conqueror as a credible threat (almost Grand Admiral Thrawn-level, at times) without resorting to plot-convoluting time travel shenanigans and brings in a whole bunch of Avengers and some unlikely supervillians and feels, in its way, like the end of Morrison's JLA run--a summation of all that's gone before cranked up to 11.

So let's get down to it. Last week, we ended volume 4 (kinda) with the appearance of Kang and the Scarlet Centurion, who is not the same Scarlet Centurion who's been previously seen in the MU. This may or may not explain why he has a costume one might theoretically walk out in public without being laughed at.

Anyways, Kang lays down the law thus--as a time traveler, he knows that the human race is in for an assortment of dark futures, and so, in the name of protecting Earth, he will conquer it, and over the generations, build it into the star-spanning empire we saw a glimpse of in Avengers Forever. To put an exclamation point on this, he blows up the UN Building (though he saves everyone else--he's big on destructive object lessons here) and, when the UN Assembly refuses his offer and launches missiles at his Damocles Base (which is naturally a big flying sword. In space.) he lays down just how screwed Earth is: In the midst of his whole spiel about the futures Earth needed to be protected from, he also made an offer to the world--anyone who overthrows their leaders, and declares loyalty to Kang will rule as his vassal. Almost immediately, this leads to Atlantis attacking (yes, again) the Deviants invading China, and the Presence (yes, Busiek dug deep for him! You don't get much more obscure than a Soviet bad guy from the 70s suddenly popping up in a story from 2001. Except maybe Imus Champion, but that's neither here nor there) is turning everyone in Russia into a hive-mind of radioactive zombies.

So already the Avengers have a lot on their plate. Our first stop is the battle with the Presence, which is a good bit and appropriately scary, even if the Presence is a bit of a shackle and cackle style villain who's not evil as much as he is utterly irrational, Meanwhile in plots B and C, The Wasp and company turns back the Atlanteans and Jack of Hearts gets to be an Avenger officially because, well . . .I'm not entirely certain why Jack of Hearts gets to be an Avenger. Maybe Busiek liked the guy. Anyways, Stingray shows up on the next page to help out. Stingray is awesome. Oh, and Warbird and company throw down with the Deviants. Oh and Yellowjacket's fading away, and rather than doing the smart thing and letting it happen so we can get back to more interesting characters, we derail the plot momentarily for Avengers Annual 2001 to tie all this up.

I don't want to spend a lot of time on this because Hank Pym's identity crisis is not particularly interesting to me. Neither is the Triune Understanding, which is the lever by which we resolve the "Two Hank Pyms" thing, finally--apparently they split apart because they're two halves which reject the other and need a way to reunite and they do and everyone looks annoyed because they know the Triunes are up to no good and can't prove it (Like the readers have known for the PAST THIRTY ISSUES OR SO) and hey, look, Ivan Reis does the pencils here! It's funny--between this and Ethan Van Sciver on New X-Men, it's amazing how many fill-in guys at Marvel went on to become names at DC.

Back at the main plot, Stingray single-handedly stops the Atlanteans (thanks, Kurt--I like to think that one was just for me) and Warbird deals with the Deviants. One of the ongoing threads in the Kang Dynasty is Warbird coming into her own, which . . .kinda works, but not really for reasons I'll get into in a bit.

Meanwhile, Thor nearly kills the Presence, and we get a good bit where Thor talks a bit about how he likes hanging with the Avengers, but being an immortal god, he knows it's ultimately a temporary thing (like a girl in trouble) from his point of view. There's an attempt to play him against Firebird (who as we know from the whole Contest of Champions sequel, is immortal--did anyone else ever do anything with that?) who is just getting into her whole "immortality" deal, having not become a Presence-assisted zombie and all. Oh, and we learn the US Government's backup plan should the Avengers fail--a whole mess of Sentinels. Yeah, that'll work.

But before that, a new threat shows up--the Master of the World, or just the Master (no, not that one) who magics up an indestructible wall and declares that he will hold the line against Kang. Because hell, we just had the Presence, show up, why not an Alpha Flight villain, eh?

I should also add here that the art team begins its rotation here. Kieron Dwyer had been announced as the new artist after Alan Davis, but doesn't end up doing that many issues for reasons I've never had satisfactorily explained to me. Art generally bounces between Manuel Garcia and Bob Layton, Ivan Reis, Brent Anderson, and Dwyer. They're all sound hands, and the only bad thing I can say about this is that the story feels a bit more inconsistent because there's not a unified artistic vision to complement the writer's vision. It's a minor thing, and while it doesn't kill the story dead any more than all the fill-ins on New X-Men did . . .you find yourself wondering what might have been.

So now the Avengers go off and fight the Master and his Plodex wolves, which have and always will sound like some sort of nightmarish feminine hygiene product that could not and should not exist. It seems his tech can hold off Kang's assault, so it's up to the Avengers to take it and use it against the conqueror, who pops in every now and again to remind us that he's the one behind all this, and when the Avengers try to mess with Damocles Base, he swears reprisal.

Meanwhile, Warbird is having dreams of Marcus, and really, I'd hoped to avoid this bit. Marcus is a hold over from what is often considered the worst single issue of Avengers ever, issue #200. Without wasting too much of your time, it basically involves Warbird (then called Ms. Marvel) spirited away into limbo to have sex with Marcus' son, Immortus. She then gives birth to Marcus, whose presence on Earth causes all manner of stuff to happen, and even though this is basically time-travel assisted date rape and it's a really icky comic and I've read Faust, for God's sake. This comic was so toxic (you can read more about how here, and also here. I don't want to get off-point any more than I already have) that it was near-immediately repudiated in another Avengers issue, quietly buried, and is one of the reasons people don't like Jim Shooter. Seriously guys, it's an absolutely dire story. Avoid it like the plague. Or "The Crossing."

And like all dire stories, it should have just been quietly forgotten after the initial furor. However, Busiek has forgotten more about Avengers than I'll ever learn, but one of those things wasn't this, alas. So we have lots of Warbird fretting that the Scarlet Centurion is Marcus, and while he is called Marcus . . .he doesn't look anything like the Marcus from #200 and besides which, he isn't. That Marcus was the son of Immortus, the Centurion is the son of Kang, which given their former relationship is a clever bit of twinning, but doesn't go very far, ultimately.

So basically what you have is Warbird angsting about someone who only superficially is the guy who date-raped her with a time machine. The Centurion, meanwhile, just seems taken with her because he think she's really hot. And this is a big story problem, because we have the believe that the Centurion will go against Kang for her, but I wasn't ever really convinced enough to believe it--really, the Centurion is rather thinly drawn to begin with--and well, it just doesn't work and really, probably could have been clipped out without losing anything.

Anyways, thanks to Marcus help, Warbird reaches the master's throne room and kills him and they take control of the Master's base. Meanwhile, Cap and company take the fight to Kang (or try to) and the US sends its force of Sentinels to join the battle.

That works as well as you'd expect, as Kang takes control of the Sentinels and lays waste to Washington D.C. In more reflective moments I wonder if 2001 wasn't the year we all decided that Sentinels just were more damn trouble than they're worth, given that in one year they kill a shedload of people in Washington D.C. and Genosha. In the aftermath, the Wasp is forced to sign articles of surrender and we were officially at the Avengers' Darkest Hour.

So, naturally, on the way to the Avengers' eventual triumph, why don't we take a bit of time off and resolve the never-ending goddamned Triune thing, finally. I will not bore you with the wholly uninteresting and inconsequential details of this, except to say there's a big ol' pyramid of evil hurtling towards earth, there are three aliens, three pyramids and eventually the Avengers get control of it and have a weapon with which they can fight Kang on slightly more equal footing. I'm being intentionally vague because it really doesn't matter, as they just got through contradicting all of this in Atlas anyways and really, I'm just glad it's over.

Anyways, we're into the home stretch of the story now--well, if we skip over the Wonder Man/Scarlet Witch in the concentration camp, which we should--The Avengers finally counterattack against Damocles Base, there's a big fight between giant hologram Kang and giant hologram Captain America, which is supposed to be epic but doesn't come off as anything other than a bit silly and ultimately redundant, considering they have an actual non-holographic fight the issue after it. That should have been the ending right there (well, the issue should have been double-sized and covered all of it in one go, but it's split in twain) but things grind on for a bit as we take up the last few threads left in the wake of the Kang Dynasty and there's one more done-in-one issue that's an amusing digression about who has to settle the accounts for all the collateral damage the Avengers cause during the course of a typical day.

And that's Busiek's Avengers run. Following him would be Geoff Johns, whose work on the book is only now being reprinted, now that the statute of limitations has passed, who would go on to deliver the indelible image of Hank Pym, Clit Puncher on his way to pretty much running DC Comics. I'm not sure that these two things are related, and if they are, I don't know if I want to know how, exactly.

Join us next time when we take a look at JLA/Avengers, long-awaited and mostly worth it, and then in the later months we'll catch up with Volumes 1 and 2, which ought to make searching by tag really damn confusing. I'll see you then!

I Read This--AVENGERS ASSEMBLE Vol. 4

Returning once again to our review of Kurt Busiek's run on Avengers, which thanks to Marvel's trade policy is being done in the most bizarro numbering possible. Last week, we finished out the period of Busiek's run wherein he collaborated with George Perez and also had our last crossover with Thunderbolts. It is generally assumed to be the end of the peak years of Busiek's run.

This week, we begin what could generally be considered the lesser period of Busiek's run. Sandwiched between Perez's work on the book and the Kang Dynasty storyline this run is really neither fish nor fowl possessed of nothing one might consider definitive. What's more, apart from Alan Davis' run on the book, there's no consistent vision to hold things together and the whole thing feels very much like Busiek's tendency to play Subplot Theatre well past any normal human's point of tolerance, when he's not doing comics about other comics.

No greater example of this can be found than the opening story in the book, Maximum Security. Maximum Security was the last of the big crossovers that happened in the Marvel Universe books for quite awhile (I think--this is about the time that Joe Quesada rose to become Editor in Cheif, so things are in a bit of a state of flux, really) and with something like this, it's not hard to see why. All the alien races in the Marvel Universe get together and decide to deal with that damned upstart Earth (I'm sure I've seen this done before, y'know) and in the B-Plot Ego the Living Planet is looking for a seed of another Ego. In plot C, USAgent looks like Judge Dredd now for what I can generally assume is no utterly good reason, acts like his usual asshole self, few care.

To spare you a vast amount of paragraphs about this crossover (which I can assure you is as boring as whale shit--I've read it twice and it's like plowing through concrete) the aliens decide to make Earth a penal colony, which allows for handy red skies style crossovers where the main character beats some aliens ass. Meanwhile, we learn the Ruul, who seemed to be behind this whole thing, are the superevolved Kree (not that this is ever referred to again) and the Ego-seed gets stuck inside Quasar and he can't go back to Earth and Ronan the Accuser shows up and none of this is at all compelling to me, let's move on.

Because I am apparently a glutton for punishment, post-Maximum Security we return to the long-lived and negligibly interesting Triune Understanding plot (trying my patience for what feels like its second decade now. This thing felt like it ground on forever, and I read Chris Claremont's X-Men all the way to the end--I know from interminable subplots) in the midst of a two-parter featuring the Bloodwraith taking over Slorenia, the entire population of which Ultron killed the hell out of back in the "Ultron Unlimited" storyline.

Fortunately, this Triune Understanding thing is lightened by the presence of Pagan, one of the Triune's agents and one of the most gleefully stupid characters I have ever had the pleasure of reading. Pagan is a big strong guy WHO YELLS ALL THE TIME and constantly refers to himself in the third person, e.g. "YOU DO NOT NEED THEM, MASTER! YOU HAVE PAGAN!" Don't we all have a little Pagan in our hearts, when you get down to it? Not enough villains speak in 14-pt Impact Bold, and comics are poorer for it, I think.

His master, by the way, is Lord Templar, who has the power to make midgets of himself and be a patronising douchebag. The less said about him the better. Anyways, the wife of the original 3-D Man shows up to further drag this subplot into an uninteresting quagmire, just as the new 3-D Man made the final issue of Atlas an impenetrable mess of an issue that deserved to be ended lest superhero comics disappear up their own backsides completely and we just . . .I dunno, publish reprints. Seriously, that whole storyline was awful, and I say that as someone who really liked Atlas.

Oh and Goliath Hank Pym gets kidnapped by Yellowjacket Hank Pym because this subplot MUST CONTINUE. Tell me--have I yet successfully persuaded you that we could happily do without Hank Pym in the Marvel Universe? I don't mean kill him, just send him off to contemplate his navel somewhere where it will not result in more comics featuring Hank Pym. He's had his high point, and that was crawling out of the Wasp's vagina. [NOTE: THIS REALLY HAPPENED, in Avengers #71] There is nothing meaningful left to be said about Hank Pym once he added "tiny clit-puncher" to his resume.

Anyways, the second part of this story is pretty damn good, because we're actually dealing with something interesting and not dragging it out for 50 issues. The Bloodwraith is actually a pretty cool nemesis for the Avengers, based as his is on the Black Knight's cursed sword (long used as a macguffin in Avengers stories, too bad he was a contemporary of guys like Annex and Empyrean--there were a few good characters who came out of those Annuals, but they all get tarred by association with the lame ones) and his taking possession of Slorenia plays up a recurring theme in Busiek's Avengers--namely that their follow-through is occasionally lacking and frequently returns to bite them in the ass and they spend all their time playing catch-up. Their solution to the problem--to lock the Bloodwraith within the borders of the country is an appropriately phyrric illustration of limits of that philosophy.

Meanwhile, the Avengers fight Lord Templar and Pagan and the head of the Triunes looks smug and sinister about it all. Jack of Hearts becomes an Avenger by osmosis in an effort to make me care about Jack of Hearts, which I have never been able to do with any degree of success. Whatever. Steve Epting's art is really good over these two issues, I should say--this is the last I remember seeing of his older style before his Captain America work, which is a lot more photorealistic.

We join issue #38 with Diablo causing the population of a small Greek town to turn into Hulks. Meanwhile, the Avengers grapple with new ways to follow-through on their recurring threats to stop things like the Bloodwraith thing from happening again. Meanwhile, Thor rejoins the team and Alan Davis comes on as regular penciller for awhile, and well, he's a relaible hand, innit he?

This isn't bad as a palate cleanser when you get down to it. Diablo is a villain with an established pedigree, but one that can have his ass kicked without it having to become a long involved thing and it gives us page after glorious page of Multi-hulk vs. Avengers mayhem, and while it's generally pretty slight (save for a brief cameo by a certain father and son who will be fully revealed at the end) it's mostly a relief from issue after issue of nothing but Subplot Theatre, so I'm all for it.

Oh, and the father and son show up on the last page--it's Kang and the Scarlet Centruion, and their arrival means only one thing--"Kang Dynasty," y'all!

Or it would be, except we have this annual to get through. I have a high tolerance for comics that use the past as a resource. I also like the retro thrill of seeing old characters return. And yet, I hate hate hate comics about other comics--that being comic stories which exist only to undo other comics and try--typically in vain--to make some sense out of tangled continuity. They're never fun, dry as hell, and they always read like academic treatises in which someone tries to explain how Moby Dick is an indictment of the mercantile system.

Hellcat is the poster child for this. A remanant from Marvel's teen comics (back when they published stuff that was designed to appeal to girls . . .er . . .several generations ago) co-opted into the Marvel Universe as a supporting character then made a super-heroine with someone else's hand-me-downs, then made an Avenger, busted down to Defender, married Satan, died . . .then . . .zzzzz . . .

Yeah, I can't really be arsed to read about Hellcat, especially when the result is so boring and impenetrable and makes NO GODDAMNED SENSE TO ME AT ALL, and if even I can't parse out what's going on (comics nerd than I am) I can only imagine how nonsensical it must read to the completely uninitiated. I mean no slight to the people who created it--Busiek is obviously passionate about the character, Norm Breyfogle does great work here and Richard Howell does a great retro-styled scene, but for the love of Christ, reading this felt like homework.

The plot is that Hellcat goes back to her old hometown, only everyone's part of a cult, the Sons of the Serpent (who are actually racists not cultists, as one of the characters says and if you have the main characters pointing out plot holes . . .) led by Salem's Seven (who are supposed to be dead) and then this snake-guy comes up and the Avengers fight him and OH JESUS FUCK GOD I DON'T CARE ABOUT ANY OF THIS DAMMIT YEARGH BLOO GLERGH.

The final story in this volume is Avengers: The Ultron Imperative, a story which spins out of the finale of "Ultron Unlimited," wherein Ultron's robot bride Alkhema stole memory engrams of several of the Avengers and builds fake Avengers, as you do. The Avengers show up and investigate, Ultron shows up again and there's a big fight Ultron ends up defeated and in the hands of another member of the Ultron family--Antigone--who shows up again in Iron Man, which I refuse to recall reading as it was in the thick Frank Tieri and Chuck Austen's race to the bottom to see who could write the stupidest most insulting to the human intelligence as a whole.

It's by-the-numbers Avengers, which means it's passable and never gets too bogged down in its own history (no mean feat, considering this is a Busiek/Roy Thomas/Roger Stern joint) and there's some good artists at work on it, but as it picks up a plot thread that practically goes nowhere, it's more a curiosity than anything. Light years better than that damned Hellcat annual though. My God.

The backmatter of this issue is from the 2001 annual, wherein we deal with a few niggling continuity questions left over from "The Crossing" (which is damn hilarious, really, as Iron Man says "So am I liable for all those people I killed in "The Crossing?" I feel like I am." and everyone else is like "Naw man, it's cool, it was just shitty characterization. Now let us never speak of that bullshit again, OK?" as if his name was Armand Tanzarian or something) and a few other questions about Cap's shield and whether the Falcon is a mutant, which is really the kind of stuff you should shove into a Marvel Handbook rather than an annual, but better this than a list of top 10 villains or some shit, I guess.

And that's Volume 4. Join us next time for the finale of Kurt Busiek's run on Avengers and the "Kang Dynasty" story, which as grand finales go, is very ambitious and actually succeeds in living up to its ambition for the most part. However, this will not be the finale of the series on Busiek, as following that, we'll be looking at JLA/Avengers. See you then!

I Read This--AVENGERS ASSEMBLE Vol. 3

(NOTE: Owing to a whole weird confluence of circumstances, we're starting with the third of five hardcover volumes covering an entire Avengers run. As House to Astonish mentioned, the trade paperback edition of Vol. 1 is not due out until December and back issues of Vols. 1 and 2 and hardcover would run about $200 used owing to Marvel's dotty print run and my inability to get them when they were new, we will be covering these in the following order--3-5,1, and 2. If this confuses you unnecessarily, all I can say is to wait until it's complete and follow the tags, or simply look at one of those things you just have to live with in the name of getting on with things.)

There was no secret formula that led to Avengers finally becoming successful at the end of the 90s, save the same one that drives all decisions in corporate superhero comics, that being "The smartest idea will be used only after every other option has been exhausted."

Long treated as a red-headed stepchild at best when compared to evergreen cash cow X-Men, Avengers had spent most of the 90s wandering in the wilderness. Larry Hama's run was pretty sub-average, featuring Spider-Man joining the Avengers (and then immediately nothing being done with the idea) and introducing Rage who was . . .yeah. Bob Harras and Steve Epting then came on for a run that was at least sound, even if they all wore leather bomber jackets because that's what you did in the early 90's if you were a Marvel super hero. The nicest thing that could be said about the book was it wasn't quite muddled incoherent mess that was, say Force Works.

So it was decided a shot in the arm was needed and unfortunately that shot in the arm was the Crossing. I won't spend a lot of time on the Crossing because I've already talked about how it totally screwed up Iron Man so much to the point where Iron Man getting shunted off to Jim Lee was a step up, and because even after 15 years of careful analysis by top scientists trained in the field, no one has been able to successfully explain what the fuck happened in the Crossing.

So, having completely screwed the book up, they fed the Avengers to Onslaught and Rob Liefeld was set on the Avengers to set a new creative direction during Heroes Reborn. This didn't really work, as anyone who put the words "Rob," "Liefeld," and "Creative" in the same sentence unironically could have told you and soon enough, it was time to get the Avengers back to the Marvel Universe proper.

This time, a radical idea was proposed--why not get top-flight creators on the book with a sense of the title's history and a vision for the future? This would have seemed like more of a radical act had not this been exactly the same formula JLA had used to return itself to high sales after several years of mid-list irrelevancy. So Kurt Busiek (living repository of all the comic history Roy Thomas couldn't fit in his skull without his brain exploding) and George Perez (loves to draw hyper-detailed stuff featuring a cast of thousands) and set them to play in the Avengers sandbox.

The ultimate result, as we will see, is the best of times and the worst of times. At its best Avengers is a worthy counterpart to JLA, as it features superheroes in big spectacular adventures with the world at stake. At the worst of times Avengers ends up becoming Kurt Busiek's Caravan of Never-Ending Subplots wherein hopelessly boring plot points you can see the resolution of a mile away grind on for years with no advancement or resolution bog down story after story. Couple this with Busiek's Continuity Rehab, wherein various continuity backwaters are resolved (and by "resolved," I mean taken care of in a story only to be undone when the guy after Busiek never bothers to read the story and you have to go through the same shit all over again) you have the things which are directly responsible for my previous assertion that I never need nor want to read about the Hank Pym, the Scarlet Witch, or Wonder Man ever again. The whole thing comes perilously close to being "comics about other comics," and when this grates on me, who has a read an awful lot of comics in his time, we have a problem.

All of these will be covered as we delve deep into the pool of Busiek's 56-issue run, which, even as I will come down hard on the creators for, I still quite like--it was one of the last extended runs I followed religiously, in truth. So without any further ado-ackadoo we're gonna start this shindig right now.

Volume 3 begins right in the damn middle of Subplot Theatre, with the fallout of the Vision/Scarlet Witch/Wonder Man triangle, so we're starting strong, yeah. This was the fallout of a subplot that started with the book, wherein Wonder Man could come back to life as a human-sized bundle of Kirby dots through what is generally assumed to be the power of love. For awhile after that, Wonder Man basically ended up as the Avengers' giant robot, because Wanda always managed to find a way to contact him at the 11th hour and save everyone's asses. Now that he's back (through means far to torturous to explicate here) there's a whole lot of subplots to draw a line underneath, as Vision, Scarlet Witch and Wonder Man collectively have enough muddled continuity and inconsistent characterizations to fill a container roughly the size of the planet Jupiter.

This is pretty grueling stuff to get through even if you're familiar with their histories, and the nicest thing I can say about it is that it only lasts one issue before we're on to "The Eighth Day," which was one of those little mini-events that were all the rage at the time. "Eight Day" concerns itself with getting the Avengers to fight the Exemplars, who are, like the Juggernaut, avatars of mystic entities empowered by trying to grab something belonging to the mystical ent--y'know what, just read the Wiki entry--it's easier on all of us.

While this is a big time story featuring guest stars like Nova and Spider-Man, this doesn't really work all that well beyond the spectacle, as the Exemplars are basically ciphers with power sets, and given that they're mind-controlled through most of the story anyway, we don't really get a great sense of them as characters (they've never been used again, ain't hard to see why) The Juggernaut works as a character because of the inherent contrast in his character--he's a vast irresistible force who could conquer the world, but all he really wants to do is beat the shit out of his step-brother and hang around with his favourite Irish guy. Also, he's the Juggernaut, bitch.

Meanwhile, in Subplot Theatre, things are ticking along--Justice gets an ugly-ass new costume, the Triune Understanding (the ultimate never-ending Busiek Subplot) is behind the protests at Avengers mansion, and I'd totally forgotten that Quicksilver was Genosha's ambassador when Magneto took it over.

Oh yeah, and Captain America quits because the mission of the Avengers needs to broaden out and he doesn't feel he's the guy for the job. The Avengers will begin broadening their mandate and making more of an effort to keep on their various subplots from here on (no mean feat in this book) and, as a consequence, allows a wider variety of Avengers to be dropped in depending on the needs of the story.

But first, a slight detour. Our next issue features Captain America recruiting an ad hoc team of Avengers to strike against the Triune Understanding (Yes -sigh- again) only Cap turns out to be the Taskmaster and this whole thing ends up being part of a Xanatos Gambit to make the Avengers in a subplot is so boring and refuses to end and we know it has something to do with the 3D Man it;s as plain as day and we're like 30 issues away from some resolution of this DAMMIT--

Sorry, lost my head there. Anyways, art is provided on this issue by Stuart Immomen, who is still in his Adam Hughes-eqsue phase he was using on stuff like Legion of Superheroes and looks nothing like his Nextwave stuff would look a few years later.

Perez return in time for another "changing of the guard" issue, or to be more blunt about it "everyone stands around and looks upset because of all the goddamned subplots" issue. There's a good idea in here in that the public pressure causes Thor to quit and the government wants to see a bit more racial diversity on the team (which means the usual suspects of Avengers of colour--all 4 of them--get hauled out for cameos) which causes even more tension, and . . .oh yeah, the god damned Triune Understanding is back.

Sparing you another rant about them, I'll cut to the upshot--their official hero Triathlon (sporting a second, less embarrassing costume than the first--still no sign of a bare midriff or a renaming to the Black Athlete--sorry Kurt, we must never forget) joins the Avengers, and much like when the Falcon joined, he immediately bitches about being the token black guy, Despite the fact that he will spend the next few issues being a pain in the ass and beating the "I hate being the token black dude in the whitey gang" thing, I actually liked Triathlon back then, believe it or not--it was a way of building on the 3-D Man's legacy (to the extent that he can be said to have a legacy--seriously, does anyone like the 3-D Man that much?) in a newer fresher way that didn't require you to understand the history of the previous character. Naturally, they turned him into the new 3-D man during Secret Invasion and undid all that because comic creators fear change of any kind.

Our next two issues involve the Avengers packing up to Costa Generica for a two-issue fight with . . .Kulan Gath? Really? Really? It occurred to me I didn't remember reading this at all, but I must have done, because I was getting the book back then, but . . .wow. This is kinda random.

Anyways, as he did in those late-190s issues of Uncanny X-Men which are inexplicably fondly remembered, Kulan Gath turns back time with the help of Silverclaw's mother (Silverclaw, surprisingly, gets her subplot tied up relatively fast relative to her introduction--20 issues, give or take) who is a volcano goddess, of course. Apparently stepping into the past bubble causes you to be reset to the past paradigm, because for two panels, She-Hulk, Warbird, and Golaith get changed in a scene that was meant to set up one subplot and also because I think George Perez really wanted to draw She-Hulk in Red Sonja's chainmail bikini. Live your dreams, George.

Anyways, this is more or less quickly resolved, Kulan Gath is defeated, and we're zooming off to the next thing when--holy crap!--we learn that Yellowjacket has somehow split from Goliath, meaning there are now two Hank Pyms existing at once.

Oh dear. This is like my nightmares.

No time to harp on that now, as that subplot is still a ways off from resolution (do I even need to say that?) because we're off to start the final plot line of this volume--the big beat-down with Count Nefaria. This is actually a good bit, as it involves the Avengers (Avengers vs. Nefaria-as-off-brand-Superman is one of their classic stories) features a whole group of villains who have direct relations to Avengers cast (The Grim Reaper, Madame Masque) and feels a bit more "natural" as an Avengers story than Kulan Gath and volcano gods. I'm just sayin'.

This is also the second (and final, if I remember right) crossover between the Avengers and Thunderbolts, which seemed like it was gonna be an annual thing and then wasn't for various reasons. It was a lot of fun revisiting the Thunderbolts' issues of this crossover because for all I will rank on Busiek's unending chain of subplots, in contrast to Fabian Nicieza referencing every single non X-Men comic he had written at Marvel up to that time in Thunderbolts and creating a kind of critical mass for comics about comics he looks like a piker. Whether it's due to that contrast or by design, it benefits tremendously from being specifically focused--for once (at least in the Avengers' issues) we're not barraged by a whole mess of subplots watering down the impact of the main story as we go.

We begin by reintroducing the Vision in his civilian guise of Victor Shade which . . .oooh, this was a silly idea. Oh, and Iron Man is wearing his older 70's-80's suit because Joe Quesada and Frank Tieri are busy ruining Iron Man over in his main book, and very soon we will not see Iron Man in armour at all because no one can work out just what in the hell Iron Man is wearing at any given time. Oh yeah, and the two Hank Pym thing gets a couple pages to tick over and thankfully, we're soon on to the main plot--Wonder Man's been abducted by person's unknown and the Vision has stumbled on to a meeting of the Maggia (who are totally not what you're thinking) instigated by the Grim Reaper.

There's a little bit I was quite surprised by in the meeting--the Eel, who was at the time undergoing a bit of an upgrade as a foil for Daredevil back in his book when they temporarily decided that Daredevil need not regurgitate the same Frank Miller inspired character beats over and over again (naturally these people were immediately clubbed and skinned and Daredevil has been a joyless sourpuss continually being shit on by life ever since because comics don't play that shit) and it was just surprising to see that reflected anywhere else but Daredevil. The Eel was quickly busted back down to mook status.

Anyways, everything goes a pit pear-shaped, the Avengers show up and kick ass, and Madame Masque explodes for no readily apparent reason and off to the races we go.

Meanwhile, over in Thunderbolts, Atlas gets his ass kicked by Wonder Man and learns that trying to hit on a super-strong and very cock-diesel woman who calls herself Man-Killer is not gonna end well at all. The rest of the book concerns itself with its own subplots--Citizen V number 5,000 (I have seriously lost count by now--there are a fucking lot of Citizens V, believe me) vs. the Crimson Cowl; the Ogre, who is actually Techno, who is not the Fixer; the Scourge, who used to be Nomad, who is not at all Paul Kirk; and Moonstone losing her shit and going off to hassle the Fantastic Four. I forgot they had a pier warehouse as a headquarters, actually.

Back in Avengers, Madame Masque exploding leads to a lot of questions in the aftermath of last issue--for one thing, over in Iron Man, Madame Masque was supposed to be dead (again) and after that, someone looking very much like her had been a member of the Avengers, and sure that couldn't be right, could it? To their credit, the Avengers act appropriately confused by all this.

I know how they feel.

Meanwhile, Madame Masque is watching all this and it's clear that after decades of poor characterization, she's completely off her tree and paranoid. Busiek tries to make all of this seem tragic and straighten out some of her utterly messed-up continuity and cast her as a woman twisted by betrayals and resolved never to be a victim again, but it doesn't quite play out convincingly enough. I also noticed he left out all that stuff with Maqsue and Bethany Cabe getting their brains switch by Obadiah Stane, but really, just as well. The Avengers show up to investigate, the Grim Reaper attacks, and Count Nefaria shows up again, all superpowered and shit, with Atlas and Wonder Man as his slaves, and shit, as they say, just got real.

We hop back to Thunderbolts again wherein the Black Widow goes to recruit Hawkeye and have everyone recount the origin of anyone even remotely connected with the story thus far. Meanwhile, Niceza's metaplot corner continues, as the hot shrink from Nomad meets up with fucking Windshear from Alpha Flight (if you don't remember him, don't worry--no one but me was reading Alpha Flight back then anyway) and as I ruminate on the fact that the only thing Nicieza hasn't touched on yet is that Soviet Super-Soldiers one-shot he did back in the day everyone remembers, oh yeah, the Avengers are off getting their asses flattened.

Back to Avengers again, wherein Busiek name checks Soft Cell for the title of this issue, told completely from Madame Masque's point of view. As we learn that the Masque who fought with the Avengers was a renegade clone who acted out of character (you and everyone else in the Crossing, lady) The Avengers and Nefaira fight and fight and fight and fight and fight, fight fight fight, fight fight fight, and finally Nefaira decides he's kinda done with owning their assess and zooms off for the third act of our little drama and Madame Masque, having the Macguffin that will stop Nefaira, throws in her lot with the Avengers and the Thunderbolts in what could glibly be termed an uneasy alliance.

Back to Thunderbolts, where everyone stands around and lays the track for the final battle with Nefaria, while the subplots featuring Moonstone vs the FF and Nomad's hot shrink meeting up with . . .Jack Norriss!? God, talk about your continuity backwaters--he doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry--he's that obscure. Meanwhile, Scourge finally attacks Techno and we get the opening round of the final Nefaria/Avengers/Thunderbolts donnybrook. Katie, bar the door.

We return to Avengers for the finale of the Nefaira plot, wherein we learn the Count's master plan is to detonate a bomb that will make everyone ionic and therefore under his control, so that he can enforce his desire to have the respect due to someone of his noble stature. This was the same motivation Busiek gave to the Mandarin over in Iron Man, and as a driving force for a villain's actions, especially one who's spent five issues trashing Earth's Mightiest Heroes, it doesn't really work all that well. Thankfully it's secondary to the action and doesn't hurt things all that much.

Anyways, Masque finally shoots him with the Plot Resolution weapon and Nefaria obligingly blows up and we deal with the aftermath of all this. There's a good bit wherein one of the Thunderbolts tries to get Masque to open up, volunteering that one of the members of their team--Moonstone, last seen slapping the Fantastic Four around and generally acting crazy--is a shrink, and might be able to help her. Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is comedy.

It is at the conclusion of this story that we see the end of George Perez's run as artist of the book. Frankly, he will be missed, as Avengers will never again have an artist that feels as definitively Avengers as Perez did. It should also be noted that this is one of the last extended runs penciling a book that Perez has to date. Maybe Wonder Woman and New Teen Titans equalled his run on this? Someone will have to correct me.

Included in the backmatter of this issue is Avengers 1 1/2 (we're doing variant covers and shit again--how long until zero and 1/2 issues start up again? I hope I die before that . . .) which is an entertaining if slight bit of retro goodness featuring Roger Stern and Bruce Timm recounting a heretofore untold story of the Avengers fighting Doctor Doom. It's a good little story and the fake ads and letter columns within are a bit of a hoot but it's nothing one need go out of their way for, as it's very plainly a backwards-looking exercise.

And that's Volume 3. Join us next time as we crack open Volume 4. Maximum Security! More of the god damned Triune Understanding! Pagan! The Bloodwraith! Alan Davis! Diablo! A town full of Hulks! Hellcat! Ultron! Comics about other comics! JFK! Blown away! WHAT ELSE DO I HAVE TO SAY!