Avengerous Tales 1.5 - Avengers #9-#10

To read Avengerous Tales 1.4, go here!

No supplementary material necessary for these issues, so we can dive right in!

Issue Nine begins with Cap attacking Zemo, but of course, Zemo is stuck in another dimension right now (thanks, Thor) and poor Cap is merely hallucinating.  Yikes, can we get this guy to a psychiatrist already?  At least sit him down and give him a glass of water or something…

Speaking of Zemo, he manages to get back to Earth with the help of the Enchantress’s enchantments—why she didn’t just do that earlier, I don’t know—and comes up with another plot to “destroy the Avengers.”  Have you ever noticed how villains in these old comics never talk about killing the heroes, but destroying them?  That almost seems worse, somehow.

Zemo’s plan involves one Simon Williams, a disgraced inventor who got busted trying to steal some Stark patents. 

 

Because apparently the least believable part of that offer was the idea of traveling to a different continent.

Still, despite having to go to South America, Williams accepts.  They strip him to his little red skivvies and subject him to “ionic rays” that make him super-durable, as well as giving him the strength of Thor and Giant-Man, the flight capabilities of Iron Man (via belt-jets), and the, uh, pretty face of the Wasp, I guess?

But of course there’s a catch: the very ionic rays that gave Williams his powers will also kill him (how ionic!  Ha ha… ha) unless Zemo gives him a special injection once a week, thus ensuring Williams’ loyalty.

Cut to a few weeks later, when the Masters of Evil stage a bank robbery—which seems a little beneath Zemo, considering his first plan was basically The Lego Movie—so that Williams, now dubbed Wonder Man, can pretend to defeat them (and let them escape, of course).

 

“That is why my costume is green.  It lets me blend in with the leaves while I hunt tapirs.”

Wonder Man asks to join the Avengers and they agree, thus unwittingly beginning a long, LONG tradition of admitting criminals and ex-criminals into their ranks.  After Wonder Man we will get Hawkeye, Black Widow, the Swordsman, Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, the Vision, Jocasta…

Wonder Man (and yes, I do keep wanting to call him Wonder Woman, thanks) explains/lies through his teeth that he was captured by Zemo and forced into the experiment that gave him his powers.  Cap doesn’t buy it, so the Enchantress casts a spell to make them all believe Wonder Man is dying from a rare disease and needs the Avengers’ help finding a cure.  They are, of course, only too happy to help… well, most of them.

 

“Come ON, Hank!  Parties are way more important than saving a man’s life!  Ugh, you’re such a MAN.”

And then somewhere off-panel Wonder Man kidnaps the Wasp, brings her to Zemo, and calls the other Avengers claiming they’ve both been captured.  One by one, the other Avengers arrive to rescue them, and one by one they fall.  Thor in particular loses his grip on his hammer and falls into a pit, which Wonder Man then covers with a boulder.  The fact that he doesn’t have Mjolnir is important since a) it would help him get out of that pit, and b) back then, if Thor was separated from his hammer for sixty seconds, he would turn back into Don Blake.

If you’re thinking that’s a really dumb rule that can only hamper Thor’s ability to protect himself and the people around him… well, Thor’s probably thinking that too, since he can’t do much else while STUCK UNDER A BOULDER.  Also, you can thank Odin for that completely arbitrary rule.  Seriously, how is that guy not considered a villain?

The Avengers are soon defeated, but when Wonder Man learns that Zemo plans to kill them all, he has an abrupt change of heart.  (What did he think they were going to do with the Avengers?  Throw a tea party?)  Sadly, while he successfully buys the Avengers time to escape and/or regain consciousness—though of course our villains escape unharmed—Wonder Man cannot survive without Zemo’s injections.

 

Awww, how sad.  Just don’t bury him too deep, don’t want to make the inevitable resurrection any more difficult.

And that brings us to Issue Ten.  Ten whole issues!  I can’t believe I’ve made it this far!  Only several hundred more to go!  Woo!

We start with Cap fighting once again, but this time it’s the Avengers ganging up on him to see how long it takes them to pin him.  As it turns out, forty-seven seconds.

 

“Boys”?  Dude, Wasp is literally standing right in front of you.  Why don’t you just make a sign saying NO GIRLS ALLOWED and tape it to the front door while you’re at it?

Anyway, the Avengers have a meeting next, at which Iron Man suggests making Replacement Bucky an official team member.  Cap flips out and starts moping about Bucky again for what is the last time I will let him do so without calling him on it.  He’s been out of the ice for months at this point; I think it’s time he tried to move on a little.

Meanwhile, the Masters of Evil are having their own meeting, which is interrupted when the Enchantress feels a little tickle in her brain.  Said tickle turns out to be the arrival of Immortus, the ruler of limbo.  Whether this is the same limbo that the Space Phantom used, or the same limbo the Executioner trapped Jane Foster in, isn’t made clear, so I’m not sure if “limbo” is one place or if it’s just a term that got bandied about a lot in old-school comics with no real regard for its true meaning.

But that’s not important.  Immortus invites himself into the Masters of Evil, and Zemo allows him to join under one condition: he has to destroy one of the Avengers.  Immortus agrees, and Step One in his plan is… well, I’ll just show you.

 

On the one hand, this is kind of a clever jab at all of those ridiculous ads for x-ray specs and all the other scams people used to sell in the comic books.  It’s even kind of gutsy when you think about it, since this was 1964 and a good chunk of comic ads were sponsored by guys like this.

On the OTHER hand…

Okay, I accept that Immortus placed that ad to try to attract Replacement Bucky’s attention, since Immortus is capable of spying on Earth from his home in limbo, and he’s already said he’s used that power to spy on the Avengers.  It makes sense he’d know all of their interests, desires, weaknesses, etc.

What I DON’T accept is the fact that Immortus apparently knew that Replacement Bucky would be the first and only person to respond to the ad (as far as we know) AND that he would bypass the coupon and just show up.  Or was he willing to wait for Replacement Bucky to mail in the coupon before implementing his evil scheme?  Is that why it looks like Immortus is in bed when he shows up?  Because we get enough creepy subtext between Rick and Captain America.  I don’t need it with you too, pal.

Long story short, Immortus sics Attila the Hun on Replacement Bucky (he has the power to kidnap anyone from any time period and make them do his bidding) and then teleports his hostage to the Tower of London circa 1760.

Actually, I think this was really part of a plan to teach Replacement Bucky that if an offer is too good to be true, it probably is.  He will thank him one day.

Cap finds out about this whole mess and tracks down Immortus, who claims that the Avengers themselves delivered Replacement Bucky to him.  For some reason Cap believes the pantsless man on the giant yellow throne and runs off to kick some Avenger booty.  During said fight, Cap accuses his teammates of betraying Replacement Bucky because they didn’t want him becoming an Avenger… even though Iron Man was the one to suggest the kid’s membership and Captain America was the one to turn him down.  Do you suspect mind control yet?  Ehhh… maybe.  We’ll talk about that later.

To end the fight, the Avengers agree to go chat with Immortus, who says that he will return Replacement Bucky if each Avenger can defeat a specially selected foe in one-on-one combat: Giant-Man vs. Goliath (that’s biblical Goliath, not the hero name that several superheroes will take on in years to come), Iron Man vs. Merlin, Thor vs. Hercules…

 

…who looks almost nothing like the Hercules who will later join the Avengers.  I would really like for Thor and Hercules to sit down over tea and scones one day and discuss what happened to that purple diaper Herc is wearing.  And also why he never does that bear hug thing anymore.

With the Avengers triumphant (what about Wasp, you ask?  Uh… hey, look over there!  A basket of puppies!), Immortus whisks Captain America to 1760.  The Masters of Evil, who have been watching the televised version of all this I guess, see Cap vanish.  They decide to take advantage of his absence and attack the other Avengers, who are moping over the Captain’s loss back at the manor.

Speaking of Cap, he rescues Replacement Bucky off-panel and Immortus, being a respectable villain, returns him to the present so he can save his fellow Avengers.  Sensing they’re about to lose, Enchantress casts a spell to turn back time to the moment before Immortus showed up, leaving the Avengers with no memory of this adventure.  And this time, when Enchantress feels Immortus tickling her brain, she slams the door on his fingers.

 
And that leaves me with the same problem I had back when Kang was running around.  If you have the ability to time travel, unless someone kills you or damages your time machine beyond repair, it is pretty much impossible for you to lose a fight.  If Enchantress had this ability to go back in time and start again, why on Earth hasn’t she used it before?  She could undo all of the Avengers’ victories and even get herself un-banished from Asgard, and no one would know the difference.

As for Captain America’s rather odd behavior, we never actually get an explanation for that, so whether Immortus was exerting mind-control or if Cap was just so distraught at the idea of Replacement Bucky in trouble that he forgot to use his thinker thingy, who knows?  Later comics like Avengers #200, a.k.a. Carol Danvers and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Comic, make it clear that Immortus is in fact capable of influencing people, so it is entirely possible that he messed with Captain America’s brain just enough to make him believe the Avengers were involved in Replacement Bucky’s disappearance.

To read Avengerous Tales 1.6, go here!

Images from Avengers #9 and Avengers #10