Avengerous Tales 1.19 - Avengers #37-#38

To read Avengerous Tales 1.18, go here!

In Tales of Suspense #88, Captain America received a distress call from someone who appeared to be his lost sidekick, Bucky (the original, not the wannabe).  Obviously he dashed off alone to the location “Bucky” gives him, even though it’s a foreboding-sounding island.  Cap was the only one surprised when it turned out that Red Skull had created a fake Robo-Bucky (RoBucky?) to reel him in.  But the rest of that adventure is irrelevant for the purposes of this review.  All you need to know is that Cap will be AWOL for a few issues starting with Avengers #38, but first, let’s jump straight into Issue Thirty-Seven.

So everyone’s in giant tubes except for Black Widow, who is taken someplace else.  See, since she’s not really an Avenger, they didn’t have a tube prepared for her.  If I were Ixar, I would have prepared a few extra tubes just in case, but hey, they’re just trying to conquer the galaxy, it’s not like it’s important or anything.

“HOW DARE YOU SLANDER GREAT MOTHER SPACE STORK.”

But of course, Ultrana, the female Ultroid who impersonated the Scarlet Witch in the last issue, takes the bait and regales them with the tale of mighty Ixar.  Ixar’s planet has been at war with another planet for untold millenia, a war which cost the lives of everyone on both worlds.  That left only the opposing leaders, who are apparently so determined to continue waging a war that started so long ago they probably don’t even remember why they’re fighting in the first place that they continue the battle with their respective ultroids.

During a particularly gruesome battle, Ixar was critically injured, so he ordered his ultroids to upload his intelligence into a special computer so that he may live forever.  That’s when he gets the idea to find a planet with superhumans so that they can steal their powers, etc., etc.

Wait, what?  They’re leaving already?  But you scanned Wanda’s mind!  That means you have to know about the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants at the very least—don’t you want their powers, too?

Speaking of mind-scans, Goliath gets an idea: because Wanda and Pietro left the team before he regained his ability to shrink, the tube he’s in wasn’t designed to compensate for that power.  With a little effort, he’s able to get out through an air tube, knock out the guard, and free his teammates.

The Ultroids (and Ultrana) surrender, but the Avengers aren’t done yet: they still have to stop Ixar, and rescue Black Widow and Burgermeister Meisterburger (shut up, you were thinking it too).  But of course it’s not that easy: Ixar has Meisterburger hooked up to an electric chair type thing, which puts a great big damper on the Avengers’ dreams of rebellion.

And then Ixar does this.

Awww, poor Ultroids, they only had two days left until retirement…

With the combined power of the Ultroids, Ixar gives himself a giant robot body with which to take down our heroes.

Wait, why does he have to fight them?  He already got them to stop by threatening Meisterburger, so all he had to do was have the Ultroids keep the guy at gunpoint while ordering the Avengers back to their tubes and boom, problem solved.

But no.  Instead we get a big long fight that the Avengers win, no thanks to their so-called teamwork, which largely consists of taking turns taking pot shots at Ixar, or the Scarlet Witch’s supposedly restored powers, which still don’t seem to be as strong as they were in her earliest appearances, but anyway.  Their victory is thanks to Hawkeye, who, while the others were unconscious, rescued Black Widow and figured out that Burgermeister Meisterburger is, in fact, Ixar.

Oh yeah, did I forget to mention?  The spaceship took off a while ago.  They’re in space now.  Oooh, Kirby dots, pretty…

Because Hawkeye is an Avenger, he can’t follow through on his threats to shoot Ixar, and Ixar knows it.  Because Black Widow is not an Avenger, she doesn’t play by the same rules and threatens to shoot him if he doesn’t return them to Earth and promise to leave them alone forever.  It works, but when the other Avengers wake up, Hawkeye fudges the details of their victory a little, afraid that the Black Widow’s ruthlessness will hurt her chances of joining the team.  Ixar, true to his word, leaves forever, off to find another world with superhumans to exploit.

So I haven’t really been judging the covers in this series, but I think that was a mistake, because I really want to give the title of Worst Cover Ever to Avengers #38.

Screw it, I’m doing it anyway.  Congrats, Thirty-Eight!  You suck!

(Except for Goliath’s face and Quicksilver’s hair.  They both look so shocked.)

Now that Pietro and Wanda are safe, Goliath and Hawkeye can go back to fighting over whether or not Black Widow deserves team membership, and that’s just how Issue Thirty-Eight begins.

Hank likes to top.

The Avengers agree to delay the meeting until Black Widow arrives.  Unfortunately, while on her way to the mansion, Black Widow is kidnapped by a couple of shadowy dudes with sleep gas and a “vacu-ray” that carries her up into their unidentified flying object. 

But more on that later.  For now, we’ll cut to a seemingly unrelated scene: Hercules fighting Ares in retaliation for that time Ares refused to help Hercules after he was stupid enough to sign a pact with Pluto in Thor #128.

Okay, I could rant about how this wrong all day, but for your benefit, I’ll only say it once and confine it to this paragraph: Hercules is the ROMAN name of Heracles, a GREEK demigod.  Ares is the GREEK name for Mars, the ROMAN god of war, and Pluto is the ROMAN name for Hades, the GREEK god of the underworld.  You can tell the difference because Heracles is named for Hera, a Greek goddess whom the Romans renamed Juno.  Therefore, Hercules should not be fighting Ares, he should be fighting Mars.  Or, if the creators wanted to keep the name Ares, he should be fighting Heracles, not Hercules, in which case he would have to fight Hades, not Pluto.  I don’t care how often people mess this up.  It still annoys me.

Anyway, before they can finish the battle, who should appear but our old friend the Enchantress, who offers the battling gods some refreshments.

The pellet with the poison’s in the flagon with the dragon, the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true!  Or, wait, is it the other way around?  Oh forget it, no one’s going to get that joke anyway.

Hercules knocks back Enchantress’s love potion like a chump, not realizing she and Ares are in league with each other.  With Hercules under Enchantress’s thumb, Ares runs off to tell Daddy Zeus that Hercules has renounced his godhood, and Enchantress commands Hercules to go to Earth and stomp the guy who slighted her, meaning Thor.

Meanwhile, back with the Black Widow, we finally meet her captor: good ol’ Nick Fury himself.  What does he want with Natasha, you ask?

So he doesn’t have time to send invitations, but he does have time to park the helicarrier above Avengers Mansion, send a couple of agents down to Earth, shoot a lady with sleeping gas, and yank her up to said helicarrier with what is probably very expensive technology?  Does the engraver just take a long time to boot up?

Anyway, Black Widow apparently contacted SHIELD in the hopes of securing a mission to prove she’s a true-blue American.  She has better luck than Steve did when he tried to contact Fury a few issues ago, and Fury agrees to send her on a mission we’ll find out about a little later.  But—of course—she is not allowed to tell anyone where she’s going or why.  Not even Hawkeye.

At the mansion, all the Avengers minus Cap got bored of waiting for the Black Widow and went out for burgers.  By the time they get back, Cap has disappeared and left a super-vague message that explains exactly nothing.  Actually, this is where Tales of Suspense #88 comes in, but all Hawkeye knows is that the others refuse to vote on Black Widow’s membership without Cap there, which he doesn’t take too well.

Then Natasha shows up and everything goes right to Hades.

“Bamboo Curtain”?  Is that an actual thing? *Wikipedia* Huh.  It is a thing.  So are the Iron Curtain, the Ice Curtain, and the Cactus Curtain.  Maybe instead of throwing curtains over everyone else, America should just hide behind a curtain of its own and be done with it.  We can call it the Burger Curtain, or the No Metric System Curtain or something.

So the Black Widow leaves, and Goliath tries to bring up some other bit of Avengers business, but the others are in no mood.  Hawkeye and the Wasp are so fed up that they storm out, supposedly forever, leaving the Avengers in a shambles yet again.

But lest we forget, Hercules and the Enchantress are still on their way to Earth.  They take their own sweet time in arriving, but arrive they do, and lovestruck Hercules is more than eager to hand the Avengers their behinds.

Why is Quicksilver so surprised that Hercules might be a real guy?  He hasn’t met Thor, but he should know who he is.  Is it easier to believe the Norse gods exist than that the Greek/Roman ones do?

The Scarlet Witch sends out a distress signal.  Clint and Jan receive the alert, but they assume it’s just an attempt to lure them back to headquarters and ignore it.  To be fair to them, though, they were eating dinner at a Chinese restaurant when they got the call, and if I had to choose between Chinese food and getting beat up, I’d probably make the same decision they did.

But it’s all irrelevant anyway, since they change their minds two pages later and come charging in like the proverbial cavalry.  Hawkeye shoots a sulfur arrow at Hercules, and wouldn’t you know it?  Sulfur/brimstone is the ONE THING that could break the Enchantress’s spell.  What an oddly specific flaw.

So Enchantress just leaves, and all seems well until Zeus shows up.  He is NOT happy about Hercules daytripping to Earth without permission.

That’s harsh, dude.  Hercules is a bit of a peabrain, but he was under a spell when he came to Earth.  Then again, between this and the whole signing-a-contract-with-Pluto thing, maybe Zeus just needs a break from babysitting his gullible spawn.

Also, again, why is Quicksilver so skeptical about this?  Thor, remember?

So anyway, Hercules is stuck on Earth and the Avengers offer him Thor’s old room.  Hercules accepts.  He’s not an Avenger yet, mind you, but he’s staying in their house, eating their food, and very probably getting into fights with Hawkeye, so close enough.

As for the Ixar storyline, I feel kind of the same about it as I did about the Living Laser and his Costa Verde coup.  It started out interesting, but then it started to meander; in Ixar’s case, the huge fight scene in Issue Thirty-Seven was completely unnecessary, as I’ve already explained.  I would have preferred seeing where the Ultroids took Black Widow, and how Hawkeye helped her escape.

Also, we never officially find out what happened to the original burgermeister, though I guess it’s implied he’s dead.

To read Avengerous Tales 1.20, go here!

Images from Avengers #37 and Avengers #38