Avengers Assemble!

I've just realised that I passed the 150-posts mark a few days ago - the 150th was the brief ramble about the memory test on the BBC website. So hardly a highlight of this thing, but never mind. I wonder how much of my life I've wasted typing unimportant gibberish like this so far? But rather than worry about that, I'll do something I haven't done for a while - talk about the superhero comics I've bought lately.

Just one book, actually - Essential Avengers, volume 5. The 'Essential' giant paperbacks are wonderful for fans of old comics. They compile around 25 old comics from the sixties and seventies, printed in black and white on cheap paper, and sell for somewhere in the region of £10.99 - not bad for 500+ pages of reading, really. Okay, you could get a novel with probably more words in it for less money, but that's not the point. In a world where the American publishers can justify charging the equivalent of £2 or more for a 20 page comic, it's nice to get a bigger volume of story on the cheap.

If you don't know who the Avengers are (or if you're thinking Steed and Peel), a quick history lesson is in order. In 1961, after years of publishing nothing of interest, Marvel Comics released a new superhero comic called The Fantastic Four, written by Stan Lee and drawn by Jack Kirby. It caught on. It had something that those mainstays of superheroics, Superman and Batman, didn't have - fairly realistic characters who argued among themselves and were a lot more human and flawed than godlike and wonderful. Stan Lee put his thinking cap on, and over the next couple of years dreamed up a lot more superheroes, all with their own unique twists on the established formula, and Marvel Comics was suddenly a major rival for DC (whose Superman-Batman-Wonder Woman-Flash-Green Lantern based dominance looked like taking over the universe of comics until then). Stan Lee followed up FF with the likes of Thor, Spider-Man, the Hulk, Iron Man, Ant-Man, Daredevil, the X-Men and so on, and they were all very big. Except Ant-Man, who was very small, and also very unpopular.

So in 1963, Stan Lee was told by his bosses that since DC's Justice League of America (in which Superman and co formed a super-team to battle bad guys) was so popular, he should do something similar and make a team out of Marvel's popular characters. And thus were born the Avengers - Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, Ant-Man and his sidekick the Wasp. They hadn't realised just yet that nobody liked Ant-Man and the Wasp. The Hulk was just there to show how different this was from the Justice League - he didn't like his teammates, walked out on them after the second issue and fought them on and off after that whenever he was in a bad mood.

It wasn't the best of Marvel's 1960s comics, but it was still a lot of fun. The adventures were a bit more traditional than most superhero comics, until Stan Lee, who I get the impression had never liked putting the stars all together in one team like that when they had their own comics too, wrote out the other founding members and replaced them with heroes without their own titles (Ant-Man's own title had been cancelled by then, but few people cared when he was written out of Avengers too).

Anyway, back to Essential Volume 5, we're now in the early seventies. The collection starts with the 98th issue of Avengers. The spell of creativity that launched the company ten years previously has pretty much come to an end, and Avengers is more concerned with keeping the stories ticking along and celebrating the upcoming 100th issue. The previous issue was the end of the acclaimed Kree/Skrull War story, about the Avengers caught up in an intergalactic war, and it was a hard act to follow. Roy Thomas, who had replaced Stan Lee as writer a few years previously, fills time in this issue with an unexceptional story about Ares, the Greek god of war, stirring up violence in ordinary people and causing chaos in the city. This is just to give the Avengers something to fight until the final two pages, when their missing member Hawkeye reappears in an awful new costume (which seems to include a miniskirt), accompanied by former member Hercules, who's lost his memory and is uttering rhyming prophecies of doom. With Thor and Iron Man having rejoined the team to help out with the Kree/Skrull war, we're gathering everyone who's ever been an Avenger together, slowly but surely. The artwork, from Barry Smith (now known as Barry Windsor-Smith - presumably he didn't want to sound too posh back then) is excellent, like the art throughout this collection. Nowadays, an ability to draw a coherent story doesn't seem to be a requirement for Marvel's artists, but back then there were lots of talented artists out there who could produce a good story in the house style to a monthly deadline. And most of them, like Smith, could do it very well.

Issue 99, then, is unashamed setup for something big to happen in issue 100. Hawkeye explains where he's been and how he hooked up with Hercules, the Vision calls up a couple of other former members, the Black Panther and good old Ant-Man, to ask them if they can help (they're both all-purpose scientists, so it's not too much of a stretch to think they might be able to help someone with amnesia), and then we get the requisite couple of pages of soap opera (Hawkeye tries to chat up the Scarlet Witch, who's in love with the Vision, Quicksilver (SW's brother) interrogates her about it (the Vision's a robot, and Quicksilver wouldn't want his sister to marry one) and the Vision agonises to Jarvis the butler about his feelings). Then two bad guys attack, to provide the requisite fight scene, grab Hercules and escape. It's all by-the-numbers stuff, but very nicely done.

So then we're into the Big Hundredth Issue! Everyone who's ever been an Avenger converges at the Black Knight's castle in England (because everyone in England owns a castle, everyone knows that), including, for no adequately explored reason, the Hulk, who doesn't like them but decides to help them out anyway, and the Swordsman, the bad guy who joined the team under false pretences back in issue #20 only to betray them and try to kill them all. But now he's decided to give them a hand, just for the heck of it. This is typical Roy Thomas thoroughness - he's going to put every Avenger ever in the story, by hook or by crook, whether it makes sense or not. Barry Smith provides some unbelievably beautiful artwork showing all the heroes arriving - it really is a delight to behold, and somehow even better in the black-and-white Essential format than in the original colours. The rest of the story is unexceptional, though - the Black Knight has seen in his magic cauldron that Hercules has been kidnapped by Ares in Olympus, the heroes go there and sort things out. The end. Oh, after a bit of merry banter with a policeman back in England - Thor: "A moment, now... for silence." Policeman: "And I'd like to respect that moment, yank, but I'm afraid I got me a sergeant down at the station who'll be wantin' a report on what happened here. So if you'll just be tellin' me where that hole-in-the-air led to... or what all the to-do was about..." Thor: "My badge-wielding friend... in the words of an armor-clad philosopher... don't ask!" That's the punchline.

Issue 101 is a bit of filler while Roy Thomas works out what to do with his heroes next. It's adapted from a Harlan Ellison story, and it's not very good at all. All the ongoing plotlines are dropped to fit in the somewhat complex but repetitive plot, and the pacing is all wrong - it drags at the start and is very rushed at the end. Rich Buckler takes over as artist, and he's perfectly acceptable, but a step down from Barry Smith. The story, for what it's worth, is about an ordinary man who develops amazing powers and is told by a horribly out-of-character Watcher that he has to kill five people to prevent a future disaster. This ordinary man concocts a ludicrously convoluted plan to kill the first one - a Russian chess player who the entire Avengers team happen to be working for as bodyguards (not the kind of thing they normally do) by putting poison on a pawn and rigging the chess computer he's playing against so that he will touch the pawn at precisely the moment when this strange poison becomes deadly. How he does this we can only guess, since the rest of the story portrays him as a man of normal intelligence without access to rare poisons or anything like that. But then he races around the world and just zaps the other four with laser beams from his hands, with the Avengers getting there just too late to stop him each time. Then the Watcher shows up, with an explanation that doesn't really make sense, and takes the bad guy away for good.

Back to normality, the next few issues give full rein to the soap opera that made the comic so cool - the Vision and the Scarlet Witch continue to agonise about their feelings for each other, Hawkeye begins to get the idea that SW doesn't fancy him after all, and the Vision meets up with his supervillain "brother" the Grim Reaper. The Reaper is the brother of Wonder Man, the dead superhero whose brain patterns are the basis for the Vision's artificial intelligence. It turns out that the Reaper is keeping his brother's corpse (he's been dead since #9) in a frozen food locker, and he offers to put the Vision's mind in that human body, if the Vision refrains from stopping the Reaper killing the other Avengers. The Vision promises to think about it, and leaves the looney to whatever he does with his brother's dead body in a freezer. Then the giant robots called the Sentinels come flying out of the sun and cause troubles for the Avengers. They kidnap the Scarlet Witch and take her to their base in Australia, where they're using her 'mutant energy' to power a weapon that makes solar flares.

This is all a sequel to an X-Men story that Roy Thomas wrote a couple of years previously, and it would have fitted better in X-Men if the title hadn't been cancelled. Mutants in the Marvel Universe are people who are born with superpowers, and the Sentinels are robots whose mission in life is to rid the world of mutants. But most of the Avengers, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch excepted, aren't mutants - they got their powers by other means - and so there isn't really the personal touch that there should be in this story. But it's a good one, and the Sentinels' plot is wonderful - they're not allowed to harm non-mutant humans, so they've developed a plan to render everyone in the world sterile and then, when the human race has died out from natural causes, genetically create new humans, only without the mutants. Brilliant. Needless to say the Avengers beat them, but it's worth mentioning the strategy Quicksilver uses to beat one of the giant robots. Knowing that it can match his super-speed exactly, he runs headlong towards a wall. The Sentinel taunts him, noting that if Quicksilver can stop in time, so can it, but it turns out that Quicksilver can't, and deliberately crashes into the wall, breaking several bones and nearly killing himself, so that the Sentinel will do the same. I worry for the guy's sanity. He then disappears under mysterious circumstances, to provide a sub-plot for future issues and to write him out of the series (he goes on to show up in Fantastic Four).

That brings us up to the end of Roy Thomas's run as writer. It was never worse than bland, and usually excellent. Steve Englehart takes over after this, and soon launches into that epic storyline, the Avengers/Defenders War, which I might write about some other time. But Roy Thomas's work is a major reason why Marvel comics continue to be so popular today - Stan Lee started it off, but it's from Thomas that we get the traditions of referencing old stories, recurring characters from the past and tight continuity between the many different titles. Stan Lee could have passed his characters onto any old hack when he got bored with writing them, but instead he gave them to a fan who loved the superheroes he was writing about, and cared about making the comics great. It's a shame the current writer of Avengers is so terrible, but these things go in cycles, and I'm sure some day we'll get another Lee, Thomas, Englehart, Busiek etc chronicling their adventures. 42 years and they're still going strong!