Avengerous Tales 2.2 - Avengers #74-#75

To read Avengerous Tales 2.1, go here!

Hey look, John Buscema’s back!  And just in time for things to get extra stupid!

***The first half of this review contains depictions and discussions of racism and racially-motivated violence.  If you’d prefer to avoid all that, don’t start reading until it says “Whew…”

We begin with the Avengers watching a news report stating that the Black Panther has been attacking businesses owned by known Serpents supporters, and that if the Avengers don’t try to stop him, they’ll be considered guilty by association.  Obviously, our heroes don’t buy Panther’s guilt for a second.

As a bonus, the Supreme Serpent sent a video to the news station, and it ain’t an audition for American Idol.

 

They’re right, of course.  The real Panther is chained up in the Serpents’ serpent-shaped submarine (stealing ideas from the Penguin now, are we?).  At least they left him a TV!  They only let him watch The Dan Dunn Show, though, which is probably the Marvel equivalent of forcing liberals to watch Bill O’Reilly all day.

Despite Panther’s warning, Monica Lynne—along with Montague Hall—is yet again a guest on Dunn’s show, but she barely gets a word in edgewise as the men verbally duke it out.

 

Or not so verbally.

Meanwhile, the Avengers split up to find the Black Panther, dodging frightened bystanders (in Vision’s case), ardent admirers (in Yellowjacket’s case), and the fashion police (in Goliath’s case) as they comb the streets.  But the fake Panther isn’t exactly sitting on his hands waiting for them to show up, and the Wasp catches him in the middle of a jewel robbery.  She keeps him occupied long enough for the other Avengers to arrive.

 

“C’mon, man, who else is gonna eat that pizza with extra anchovies you made me order?!!”

Panther gets away by throwing gas grenades at the Avengers, which causes Goliath to fall off the roof of a very tall building.  Obviously he should be dead, but Vision does something technobabbley that somehow causes Goliath to defy the laws of gravity and live.

While they regroup at the mansion, Lynne comes to ream them for doing “nothing,” even though she doesn’t know what they’ve been doing and Goliath’s tumble probably should have made the local news, but anyway.  Speaking of news.

 

The Avengers trace the TV signal to an abandoned studio, where they merrily trounce several Serpents.  But are they in time to stop the Black Panther’s public unmasking?

Well, technically, yes they are, but they’re afraid that if this Panther is a fake, the Serpents will kill the real Panther in retaliation.  And so, while the Vision leaves to search the place, the other Avengers let the Supreme Serpent unmask a suspiciously green-eyed Black Panther, who “confesses” that he won’t rest “while a white American lives.”

The Vision, meanwhile, frees the real Panther, and then all hell breaks loose.

 

Hmm, two Supreme Serpents?  Whatever could this mean?  And please make the answer as stupendously insensitive and offensive as possible.

 

*rubs temples*

Yeeeaaaah, so turns out Hale never cared about civil rights and Dunn was never a racist.  They just wanted to rule the country or some garbage.  Monica Lynne is obviously disturbed by this, but she nonetheless vows to continue the fight for equal rights but I don’t care.  Do you care?  You shouldn’t care because these NIMRODS DID IT AGAIN.

THE EXACT SAME THING AS LAST TIME.

THEY DID IT AGAIN.

They took an issue as significant and inflammatory as racism, and instead of actually dealing with it, they take a ninety degree turn into cartoon villainy while leaving all the serious, real-world problems they were stupid enough to bring up lying on the table.

Dan Dunn wasn’t a problem because of his racism—racism was never the problem in and of itself.  It only became a problem when Dunn and Hale fanned the flames for their own purposes—and again, those purposes had nothing to do with hatred of other races or wanting to walk down the street without getting shot.  According to this comic, racism isn’t a problem.  It’s a tool to be leveraged to reach other goals.

The ONLY thing this storyline did better than the previous one is that they don’t show the Sons of the Serpent disbanding after its leaders are unmasked as frauds.  That’s pretty cold comfort, though, considering we never see them again.  I don’t know if the creators genuinely believed that there are an equal number of jackasses on both sides of the civil rights movement, or if they were just so afraid of offending their white readers that they felt the need to caveat all their race-based stories with “look, look, people of color can be evil too!”  Either way, they need to stop.

Last time, the comic placed the blame for racism on the shoulders of a person of color.  This time, the comic places the responsibility for racism on the shoulders of everyone, regardless of color.  Which, um, no.  Black people don’t make white people be racist or pass racist laws or join racist hate groups.  That is exclusively white people’s fault, and I don’t just mean people like the Serpents who go around beating up anyone whose skin tone they don’t like.  I also mean people like Janet van Dyne, who apparently believes that white people deserve respect no matter what comes out of their mouths.  And notice how no one ever argues against her, and she never learns her lesson in the end.

THEY are the problem, and so far, Marvel has steadfastly refused to acknowledge this.

Montague Hale should NEVER have been depicted as a villain, and the fact that Marvel is YET AGAIN shifting the blame away from the perpetrators and onto the victims boggles my mind so much that I almost forgot to be offended.  Almost.  I mean, Hale seemed like a reasonable if temperamental (after he’d been pushed around for three straight nights) civil rights leader up until the end, so is Marvel telling us that even the most collected of protestors are secret extremists and should be treated with distrust and suspicion?  What the hell?  You’re making things worse!

Whew.  We’re only three issues into the new decade and already we have a strong contender for the worst storyline of the 1970s.  Well… at least it can’t get much worse?

 

Uh-oh, someone’s breaking into Avengers Mansion.  Who’s fast enough to avoid every single one of the Avengers security measures?  Well, if you saw the cover, you know it’s our old frenemy Quicksilver.  He’s even got a new costume, presumably because he got tired of people singing Christmas carols every time someone saw him and Wanda together.

For some reason, despite the fact that Quicksilver was happy to join Magneto the last we heard, Jarvis trusts him enough to tell him that the Avengers are all down at Pier 12.  Specifically, they’re seeing off Hank and Jan, who are taking a leave of absence from the Avengers to go study the effects of oil drilling on Alaskan wildlife.  And Hank’s smoking a pipe for some reason, even though he’s never ever done that before.  I guess he figures that now that he’s on hiatus from crime-fighting, he can screw up his lungs as much as he wants.

There’s also this one weird panel where Hank and Cap are shaking hands and Hank says “An ant-sized Avenger wasn’t much of an asset” and no one bothers to refute him, instead just saying that they totally understand his decision.  Um, excuse you, this is a founding Avenger you’re talking to, and he’s saved your tails plenty of times.  Show some respect.

As soon as Hank and Jan are gone, Pietro arrives.

 

“And get your butt out of my face, man, seriously!”

After they subdue Quicksilver, the meteoric mutant explains just what happened after he, the Scarlet Witch and Toad escaped from Magneto’s sinking island.  They roamed Europe for a while, trying to find a way to restore Wanda’s hex powers—and Pietro was obnoxiously skeptical the entire time—until they came across an enchanted book that compelled Wanda to read a specific spell from it. 

Needless to say, it doesn’t end well.  Wanda ends up summoning a half-naked guy calling himself Arkon the Magnificent, and after spending however long trapped in a book, he’s got just one thing on his mind.

 
I love Wanda’s face here.  She’s just like, “Uh, didn’t I see this in a Care Bears movie?”

To stall for time, the Scarlet Witch gets Arkon talking about his secret origins.  Yes, this is a flashback inside of a flashback.  One more layer of flashbacks and we’ll probably get sucked into a black hole.

Arkon is the ruler of a warrior culture, and everything’s going bloody fantastic until the energy ring surrounding his planet, which provided them light in place of a sun, disintegrated.  His entire world plunged into darkness, and Arkon watched helplessly as his people starved and died of sickness.  Then, inexplicably, a new light source appeared…

 

Well, props for not even TRYING to explain this stuff, it just “somehow” works and that’s good enough for everybody.

Arkon sets up the scheme with the book, since his master scientist guy only has the power to send objects across universes, not people.  A mutant was needed to provide enough energy for Arkon himself to travel to Earth so he could get humans to set off an atomic explosion big enough to light Arkon’s world forever.

Quicksilver tries to stop him, but Arkon gets away with Wanda and Toad in tow.  That’s when Pietro ran off to find help.  Just in time, too, because guess who’s broken into a nuclear scientists’ convention.

 

Nice job staying calm and not creating a panic there, buddy.  A+ reporting.

So I guess we’re supposed to be ignoring the fact that Quicksilver teamed up with Magneto and effectively kidnapped his sister of his own free will?  I’m not saying they should never forgive him, but this was like super-quick.  It might just be because it’s an emergency and they really don’t have a lot of options here, though.

In any event, this issue is all set-up for the next one, but it’s interesting set-up.  I’m glad to see the Scarlet Witch back, and despite the wonky science, this is a neat idea that could go in a lot of interesting directions.  Let’s just hope Marvel doesn’t try to get philosophical about nuclear war or anything, because handling prickly real-world issues is clearly not their strong suit.

To read Avengerous Tales 2.3, go here!

Images from Avengers #74 and Avengers #75