Avengerous Tales 1.3 - Avengers #5-#6

 

To read Avengerous Tales 1.2, go here!

Hey there, everyone, and welcome to the third post in my new Avengerous Tales review series.  Before we begin, I think these issues need a wee bit of introduction. 

If you’ll recall the end of the last review, Banner’s confidante Rick Jones worried that the Hulk would be upset about his running off to be Captain America’s Replacement Bucky.  In Fantastic Four #25, which is an Avengers crossover along with Fantastic Four #26, we find out that ‘upset’ is an understatement, and even as the Avengers fly to New Mexico to try to track the Hulk down, the Hulk bounds off to New York to kick the Avengers’ butts for treating him so badly.  Dontcha hate it when you go all the way out to see someone and it turns out they’re not home?  That’s what you get for not calling ahead.

In FF #25-#26, in which the Hulk is referred to as “Bob Banner” for no discernable reason*, the Hulk and the Thing spar a little before the Avengers finally show up to try to take responsibility for their ex-member.  In the resulting fight, Hulk of course gets away again, but not before thoroughly trashing Tony Stark’s (one day to be Avengers’) mansion.  And that’s where Avengers #5 picks up.

The Avengers briefly survey the damage to the mansion (presumably while Tony cries behind his faceplate) before going their separate ways.

 

As you can see, the damage to the house was so extensive that Iron Man is reduced to sitting on air.  And his troubles aren’t over yet: at Stark Industries, an experiment is interrupted by an unearthly destructive sound from an unknown source.  When Tony gets word of this (while SMOKING A CIGARETTE DANGIT TONY WE TALKED ABOUT THIS), he mopes around for a while, leading to this bit of narration that I just had to share because I am a bad person.

 

Hee.  You said sober.

Anyway, Ant-Man.  He and the Wasp are doing vague research-type things in an anthill when that same noise causes the hill to collapse.  They narrowly escape, with Jan’s make-up being the only casualty.  Nice to know she’s got her priorities straight.  After their own encounter with the strange noise, Thor and Captain America (and Replacement Bucky, whom Cap was training at the time of the noise incident so I guess Rick wasn’t delusional when he dubbed himself Cap’s new partner after all) make for Avengers HQ, where they determine that the sounds are originating from the southwest. 

Meanwhile, at a southwestern army base, General Ross is having his own problems: a shiny green hill is growing out of the ground.  Bob/Bruce Banner, who turned back into himself at the end of Fantastic Four #26, randomly shows up to help investigate.  What they think an atomic physicist will be able to do concerning a geological problem, I don’t know.  Science is science is science, right? 

And just what is going on, you may ask?

 

These would be the Lava Men that the cover promised us.  One of them, Molto, turned up in Journey into Mystery #97 as an advance scout for the rest of his people, who planned an invasion of the surface world.  He was stopped by Thor and now pleads with the king of the lava men—and the witch doctor, who has been manipulating the king because of course he was—to ask the humans for help instead of shoving the dangerous “living stone” at them.  They are, uh, less than receptive.

Back on the surface, the Avengers finally arrive (by jetcopter—they didn’t get the quinjets till later).  Iron Man investigates first, since his suit will protect him if the thing turns out to be radioactive.  He realizes it’s an object of some kind, not a hill, and blasts his way underground to figure out its size, causing the Lava Men to attack him.

Cap and Thor come to Tony’s rescue, and Thor sends his human teammates back to the safety of the surface, since he’s the only one who can survive the Lava Men’s powers.  These powers involve melting the ground beneath him into, well, lava.

 

THOR IS NOT AMUSED.

When he survives the lava trap, the Lava Men decide to explain about the Living Stone instead.  Basically… well, there is no explanation.  The Lava Men just somehow found it one day, realized it couldn’t be destroyed without causing massive destruction for no apparent reason, and decided to push it up to the surface so it would be the humans’ problem because the witch doctor is evil.  Lee and Kirby must have stayed up real late at night coming up with that one.

Back on the surface, Ant-Man and the Wasp have examined the Living Stone and found the one spot where the Stone can be hit and destroyed without making Henry Bemis happy.  (Look it up.)  How they figured this out, and what’s so special about that one spot, are never specified.  Again, you can just feel the effort they put into this, can’t you?

The Lava Men attack again, trapping Cap in solid rock and requiring Iron Man to make the risky move of repulsoring him free.

 

Your crush is showing, Tony.  (I should stop picking on Iron Man, shouldn’t I?)

Meanwhile, Bob Bruce Don Blake Banner’s life goes from bad to worse when he suddenly becomes the Hulk.  Hearing the voices of the Avengers from underground, Hulk swiftly attacks them, uncaring of the fact that the Living Stone could explode any minute if they don’t act now.

Thanks to interference from the witch doctor—who then just runs off, never to be seen again—Thor is trapped in a cave-in, separating him from the others.  Deprived of Mjolnir, how will the Avengers ever find something strong enough to destroy the Living Stone?!!

 

Frankly, I’m surprised the Wasp managed to stop talking about make-up and Giant-Man’s blue eyes long enough to pull this off.

The Stone harmlessly implodes, Thor convinces the Lava Men to go home, and Hulk turns back into Banner just in time for his would-be girlfriend Betty to find him and take him home.  But the adventure hasn’t ended quite yet: the Teen Brigade has sent a radio message to the Avengers, “‘condition red’ emergency.”  But of course, if you want to find out just what that emergency is, you have to read Issue Six.

As you can imagine, the Avengers take a condition red emergency very seriously and rush right back to New York in response… after stopping in Chicago to refuel the jetcopter and give Cap a minute to try out his new toy.

 

Don’t you guys have some teen boys to rescue?  Stop flirting already. 

Cap says that he wishes Bucky was still around to see amazing tech like the advanced shield, which leads to a full-blown moping session.  Thor tries to cheer him up by showing him letters from all of his old friends, expressing their happiness that Cap isn’t dead.  Remember, this is only twenty years after World War II ended, so unlike in modern continuity, Cap’s friends don’t give him yet another reason to angst by being dead.  Wait, does Thor just carry Captain America’s fanmail around with him for some reason?

Anyway, the letters sort of help, and Cap swears to find the person responsible for Bucky’s death and avenge him.  Because he’s an Avenger.

We cut to South America (GEE, THAT’S SPECIFIC, THANKS), where the person responsible for Bucky’s death, an ex-Nazi named Baron Zemo, has been hiding out for the past couple of decades.  He keeps himself entertained by being a jerk to the natives, who put up with him because… I don’t know, he promised them cake?

 

That better be some darn good cake.

Zemo’s nameless lackey brings him news from the outside world stating that his old foe, Captain America, still lives.  Zemo is not happy about this and, as villains are wont to do, expresses his feelings via evil monologue.  He tells Nameless Lackey all about how he used to be an eminent Nazi scientist, hated by all except Hitler himself (hence the identity-concealing hood he wears).  One day, while working on a universal adhesive creatively titled Adhesive X, Zemo’s HQ was raided by Captain America, and Zemo got splashed with a bunch of Adhesive X by accident.  The mask has been glued to his face ever since, which raises a whole host of questions.  For instance:

How does he eat?

How does he drink?
How does he breathe?
How does he brush his teeth?
How does he wash his head?
Assuming he hasn’t done either of those last two things, how bad does it smell under there? 

Feel free to add your own.  I’m sure it’s not hard.

In the midst of all this excitement, you may have forgotten what instigated this whole adventure: a call for help from the New York chapter of the Teen Brigade.  What did they want?  Homework tutoring?  Help reaching the cookie jar?  Nope!  As it turns out, Zemo has brought together three arch-villains—the Black Knight, the Melter, and the Radioactive Man—for the express purpose of covering New York in Adhesive X.

And here’s where I’m confused.  The Teen Brigade called the Avengers at the end of Issue Five.  It wasn’t until Issue Six that Zemo had Nameless Lackey call up Black Knight and the rest and have them crazy glue New York—unless that scene was a flashback and the comic forgot to tell us—and the Teen Brigade seemed awfully surprised when the Black Knight showed up just now.  So… what was the “‘condition red’ emergency” message all about?  Did they have a really tough pickle jar that needed opening?

Furthermore, remember that Nameless Lackey got his orders to assemble the Masters of Evil around the same time the Avengers were goofing off in Chicago.  That means that Nameless Lackey had to fly all the way from South America to New York City, track down three different supervillains, explain and get all three of them to agree to Zemo’s plan, AND outfit them with Adhesive X IN THE SAME AMOUNT OF TIME it took the Avengers to get from Illinois to New York.

…Is there some sort of weird time zone thing going on here I don’t understand?  Because I never was any good at figuring out time zones.

Zemo gathered these villains together to attract the Avengers’ attention, thereby allowing Zemo to swoop in and get revenge on Captain America.  The Avengers, of course, do not disappoint, in that they show up.  However, they find it a bit difficult to fight against Adhesive X, which Cap recognizes from his prior battle with Zemo, and Giant-Man and Captain America are quickly trapped in the stuff.  But does that stop them?  You know the answer to that.

Wheeeeeee!

Thor saves his teammates from Iron Man’s terrible driving and they flee to Tony’s mansion to regroup.  As soon as they leave, Zemo shows up, and he gets a new idea.

 

“I, the greatest scientist in all the Third Reich, have never been able to create a solution for the adhesive that I myself invented, so surely the Avengers, none of whose secret identities I know and therefore I have no idea if they have any scientific know-how in this area, will be able to come up with a solution by the end of this issue!  IT’S BRILLIANT!”

Actually, my sarcasm is fairly accurate: the Avengers DON’T figure out the solution for Adhesive X.  Instead, they call upon the adhesive-themed and Worst Villain Name of the Year Paste-Pot Pete, who has invented a “super dissolver” and is willing to let the Avengers have it in exchange for a reduced prison sentence.  That actually makes sense, and I’m really impressed with the creators for writing this instead of having the Avengers miraculously discover a solvent themselves, but it’s still a sad day when Earth’s Mightiest Heroes have to get help from Paste-Pot flipping Pete.

The super-dissolver works, and Cap comes up with a plan to stop Baron Zemo.  Said plan involves sending Rick/Replacement Bucky and the Teen Brigade to Zemo’s headquarters (because somehow he knows where that is now), have them tie up Zemo’s Nameless Lackey and replace all the barrels of Adhesive X with the super-dissolver.

Um.  Far be it from me to question the Sentinel of Liberty and everything, but how does sending teenage boys into danger constitute a good plan?  Okay, so Cap was training Replacement Bucky in the ways of the crime-fighter, but what about those other kids?  Do their parents know what they’re doing?  Does the term “child endangerment” mean nothing to you?

 

A: He seems pretty aware to me.

B: Why is he spraying the same area he already covered?

The Avengers defeat the Masters of Evil, while the Teen Brigade faces off against Zemo.  BECAUSE THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA.  It takes Zemo about two seconds to hypnotize the lot of them, but fortunately, Cap shows up to save them from the situation he got them into in the first place.  He beats up Zemo while giving a speech that wouldn’t sound out of place at a Tea Party rally—“I still remember how you sneered at democracy… how you called Americans soft… timid… too spoiled to fight for freedom!”—but is brought low by a bullet from Zemo’s Nameless Lackey. (Don’t worry, it only grazes him.)  See?  The Teen Brigade can’t even tie a dang knot properly!

Anyway, Giant-Man and Wasp come to Cap’s rescue.

 

That is like the third time Giant-Man has used that joke in this series.  It was barely funny the first time, guy.

With Nameless Lackey and the Masters of Evil out of commission, only Zemo remains to be defeated, but he escapes in his heli-hovercraft with a cylinder of what he thinks is the super-dissolver but has actually been replaced with tear gas.  We don’t see what happens with him, but we do see his craft plummeting out of the sky, at which point the Avengers say they’ll send the police to pick up him.  That seems a bit optimistic to me.  Personally, I think they should be sending a mortician with a spatula.  The end!

With Issue Five, the art and writing are as good as always, but the plot seems a bit slapdash.  On the other hand, it’s probably a little unfair to criticize, since this comic was published in 1964.  The goal of comic books back then was to entertain young people, not to create increasingly dark, more convoluted storylines and turn death into a revolving door to boost sales and pander to aging fanboys.  As long as the comic would look fun and at least somewhat comprehensible through a child’s eyes, you were good to go.  That doesn’t mean the creators were lazy (at least, Lee and Kirby weren’t); they just had different ideas of what made a good comic back then.

Now that I think about it, The Avengers may actually be a victim of its own high standards.  As I said in my first review, Issue One was so dense and so action-packed it easily could have been its own miniseries.  And in Issue Four, we saw the return of one of the greatest heroes of the Golden Age.  After all that, I guess anyone would be hard-pressed to measure up.

While Issue Six is a lot more imaginative, it too has its problems.  The timeline snafu, for instance, and the fact that I’m apparently supposed to take the Teen Brigade seriously as would-be sidekicks despite their complete lack of everything up to and including training, secret identities, personalities, and names.**

But now I’m probably giving you the impression that I thought these issues were bad.  They’re not.  They’re fun, and I don’t feel like I’ve wasted my time with them or anything.  Isn’t that what counts?

To read Avengerous Tales 1.4, go here!

Images from Avengers #5 and Avengers #6

*Yes I know his full name is Robert Bruce Banner, but the comics I’ve seen refer to him fairly consistently as Bruce (except that one time he was mistakenly identified as Don Blake), so why they suddenly switched to Bob is a mystery to me.

**I lied, one of them has a name: Tom.  Tom can stay.  The rest can go hide in their basements with their radio hams.  I don’t care because this comic has given me zero reasons to.