Avengerous Tales 1.6 - Avengers #11-#12

To read Avengerous Tales 1.5, go here!

Once again, it’s backstory time!  See all this extra reading I do, just to flesh out these reviews?  That’s how much I love you.  And comic books.  But mostly you.

Okay, so leading up to Tales of Suspense #61, Iron Man’s heart condition took a bit of a nosedive (that’s why you don’t smoke, idiot), so he had to wear the entire armor all the time instead of just the chest plate.  Obviously Tony Stark couldn’t be seen wandering around in Iron Man’s armor, so Stark just kind of disappeared with no good explanation, leaving Iron Man as the prime suspect in his disappearance.  It all came to a head in Tales of Suspense #61, in which Tony stumbled on the idea of being sick and bedridden as an excuse for his absence.  Unfortunately, the Mandarin had to go and complicate things by destroying Tony’s house with a giant energy beam from space, making the world think everyone’s favorite playboy engineer is dead.  Iron Man runs off to find the source of the beam.

Which brings us to today’s tale.

The Avengers call an emergency meeting in response to Tony’s supposed death.  They are all very sad about it, and agree to grant Iron Man a leave of absence in absentia so that he has time to pursue Tony’s killer.

But the Avengers aren’t as alone as they think: Kang the Conqueror is spying on them from the year 3000.  Inspired by Zemo’s plan to use Wonder Man to destroy the Avengers and realizing that the human element was what doomed that plan, Kang decides to construct a robot to eliminate his arch-nemeses.  But not just ANY robot, mind you…

 

Originally I thought of making a joke about how this was the original start of the Clone Saga or something (it was even longer than you thought!), but I think I’ll just let you imagine your least favorite Spidey moment and pretend it was really the robot Spider-Man who was responsible for it, sorta like how every time Doom loses it turns out he was really a Doombot.  The robot’s fate is pretty ambiguous, as we’ll see.

Kang arranges for a bunch of other robots to attack Captain America, at which point Spider-bot swoops in to save him—and to ask permission to join the Avengers.  Cap brings him back to HQ to discuss the matter, at which point Spider-bot is told that “there are certain tests… and a period of trial” to go through before becoming an Avenger.  I assume all that was implemented in response to the Wonder Man debacle, because they seemed pretty willing to let him join up without any qualifications, even before the Enchantress brainwashed them all.

All such trials are forgotten, however, when Spidey claims he saw the Masters of Evil abducting Iron Man and yammering about a temple in Mexico.  Aw man, this is gonna turn into Teen Titans #1, isn’t it?

 

As you may have guessed, “Avengers assemble” hasn’t been introduced as a catchphrase yet.  In the meantime, please enjoy Captain America’s Superman impression.

They all fly down to Mexico and, as soon as they arrive at the temple, Spider-bot shows his true colors by attacking Giant-Man, the Wasp, and Thor.  When Cap shows up, Spidey shoves him off the temple, presumably to his doom.  Success!

OR IS IT?

Like a bad soap opera, the good twin reappears at the most dramatic moment.  I’m not exactly sure how he got there, but anyway, he’s not happy about Spider-bot impersonating him and expresses his feelings by creating wings with his webbing and engaging him in aerial combat.  Ultimately, the robot is sent hurtling to his demise in the jungle below, never to be seen or heard from again.

Well that’s.  Disturbing.  I know Spider-bot was, well, a robot, but he was clearly capable of emotions and independent thought.  He’s at least as sentient as the Vision will be, and we’d all be horrified if the Vision suddenly plummeted to his apparent death.  I know Spider-bot was a bad guy, but Spider-Man seems suspiciously cool with being responsible for the destruction of a sentient being.  Isn’t he supposed to angst about everything?

Cap witnesses the battle from a distance and somehow this enables him to figure out they’d been fighting a robot this whole time.  He explains all this to his fellow Avengers, and they agree that the only fellow they know with the technological capabilities to pull this off is Kang.

 

DON'T SWEAT
RELAX
LET LIFE ROLL OF YOUR BACKS
EXCEPT FOR DEATH AND PAYING TAXES
EVERYTHING IN LIFE
IS ONLY FOR NOW

Also, how is he even watching this?  I guess he must have set up video cameras in the temple in anticipation of his success.

This issue was… okay.  The Spidey vs. Spidey battle was kinda neat, but overall, this story just didn’t do it for me.  Maybe because it was so similar to the Wonder Man plot, or because it felt like they were just killing time until Iron Man got back to have a real adventure. 

Also, I don’t think they took full advantage of the fact that this story took place in an ancient Mesoamerican temple.  It may as well have been a cave with a couple drawings on the wall for all we saw.  Teen Titans #1 may have been silly, but at least it took advantage of the setting with fictional beast-gods, giant… robot conquistadors… casual racism… errrr…

The point is, why take the characters on a Mexican vacation if you don’t let them see Mexico?  I get that Spider-bot would want to lead the Avengers away from New York so they don’t risk running into the real Spider-Man (not that that worked), but still.  Use your location, people.

I don’t know.  Let’s see how now the next one goes.

 

For Pete’s sake, Jan, do you always have to be so… right.  Yeah, she’s absolutely right on this one.  Talking to ants is totally embarrassing, though why she’s suddenly feeling this way after twelve issues of The Avengers and however many of Tales to Astonish is a bit puzzling.  Oh well.  At least Ant-Man’s not the only one around here with embarrassing superpowers.

 

Would you believe this guy has the nerve to call Ant-Man’s ants stupid in the next scene?  THIS GUY.

Thor also thinks this whole thing is silly and leaves to take care of “more pressing matters” like… maybe he has an appointment at the hairdressers…?  As a result, Ant-Man throws a hissy fit and goes to investigate on his own.

As it turns out, the ants had it right—the villainous Mole Man and his henchmen, the subterraneans, survived their previous encounter with the Fantastic Four and now plan to take over the world by increasing the rate of the Earth’s rotation, gradually creating more and more destruction until humanity either dies off or surrenders to Mole Man’s rule.

Just how many underground civilizations does the Marvel universe have?  There’s the Lava Men, Mole Man and his subterraneans/moloids, the Savage Land… and I know a few more appeared in Avengers alone, though I can’t remember their names right now.  Marvel’s Earth must have a core like a Kinder egg to fit all these people.

Anyway, Ant-Man.

 

Why would you assume they’re all boys? Oh, right, because it’s the sixties and everything was horrible.

So the subterraneans take Ant-Man away Gulliver-style, while Mole Man’s plan slowly becomes obvious to the people on the surface: seismographs going nuts, toast bouncing off tables and landing butter side up, that sort of thing.  You can bet the Avengers are suddenly super sorry they picked on Ant-Man, and they effect a rescue.  Remember that image projector thing from Issue Three?  Wasp uses it now to follow Ant-Man’s trail, because apparently he left one of those, to the Mole Man’s location.

Now that our heroes have more of an idea of what’s going on, they plan to go after Mole Man, but the subterraneans beat them to the punch—literally—by coming to the surface and attacking them in their own HQ.  I’m not sure how they got into Avengers Mansion without anyone noticing.  You’d think they’d have learned their lesson after the Space Phantom entered like he owned the place, but I guess not.

 

BY GOD, A GAS ATTACK.  THIS IS A COMPLETELY NEW AND UNHEARD OF INVENTION.  WHAT WILL THEY THINK OF NEXT???

Once the subterraneans lose, they are enveloped and whisked away by a mysterious mist, leaving the Avengers exactly as they were before: planning a trip to the center of the Earth.  Well that sure was pointless.

Cap and Replacement Bucky leave to get some mechanical parts Iron Man will need to get them transportation.

I think a loaded gun has a wee bit more potency than your abstract values.  And for crying out loud, if you’re going to make Replacement Bucky your sidekick (and Cap does refer to him as such in the ensuing fight), get him a dang costume and a dang codename already.  I’m beginning to wonder if Cap is really ready for a new sidekick.  It’s like he wants Replacement Bucky around because he misses Bucky Barnes so much, but he’s also afraid of allowing Replacement Bucky—Rick Jones—to be a true sidekick in his own right because that would mean having to push aside Barnes’s memory in favor of the new kid.  This kind of has the potential to be interesting.  Let’s see what they do with it.

While Iron Man constructs a digging machine, Mole Man is wondering how the defeated subterraneans have gotten back so fast.  Yeah, that mysterious mist earlier?  It wasn’t him.  It was the Red Ghost, an ex-Soviet scientist (hence the “red”) who can make himself intangible (hence the “ghost”) and control the minds of lower primates, like apes and orangutans (…hence the stupid haircut?).  Red Ghost suggests a team-up because of reasons, and Mole Man, realizing that he’ll need help defeating the Avengers, suggests a trial run.

It does not end well.

So the Avengers prevail and rescue Giant-Man, Mole Man and Red Ghost are presumably trapped underground forever, and the Avengers agree to apologize to Giant-Man for teasing him earlier… though we never actually see them do it, so who knows.  We’ll get to this later rather than sooner, but these idiots don’t exactly have a good track record when it comes to how they treat Hank Pym.

Anyway, Issue Twelve is decent.  I like the Mole Man’s evil scheme, although the appearance of the Red Ghost seemed kind of pointless.  The characterization of the subterraneans is also a bit spotty—sometimes they’re called “sinister,” sometimes it’s implied they have very little ability to think for themselves and just do whatever Mole Man tells them to without understanding the consequences.  Who needs consistency, am I right?

To read Avengerous Tales 1.7, go here!

Images from Avengers #11 and Avengers #12