Avengerous Tales 2.5 - Avengers #80-#81

To read Avengerous Tales 2.4, go here!

This review is brought to you buy the letter R.  R stands for many things, like ‘review,’ which is what this is; ‘Red Wolf,’ who is today’s guest hero; and ‘racism,’ which this comic has an abundance of.  Happy reading!  Oh, look, another R!  Remarkable!

***Needless to say, if you’re sensitive about misrepresentation of Native Americans in the media, this Avengerous Tale is not for you.

The comic begins with an old nursery rhyme.  You know the one: rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief; doctor, lawyer…

 

Great.  Four panels in and I’m already shaking my head.  That’s gotta be some kind of record.

So Fedora Man there is being chased by Red Wolf and an actual wolf for some reason.  They just happen to bump into the Vision, disguised as a regular person, during their chase, and our friendly neighborhood synthezoid decides to investigate.

Red Wolf throws Fedora Man into a construction pit, but the Vision is there to save him while lecturing Wolfie about how all life is precious, etc.  Red Wolf doesn’t take that well, and the Vision is forced to knock him out.

 

How do you know that?  And don’t tell me it’s because of his outfit.  Anybody can buy an outfit like that and parade around in it if he wants to—remember the Boston Tea Party? Or… or does he think that Native Americans just walk around dressed that way on a regular basis?  Because… because they don’t.  You know that, right?

Vision takes Red Wolf and the actual wolf—who somehow gets that Vision doesn’t want to hurt them and follows along—back to Avengers Mansion, where Iron Man is telling the others that the group of villains known as Zodiac is showing signs of getting back together.  Everyone agrees that they should make stopping Zodiac their priority… except Black Panther, who thinks they should focus on stopping local gangs and such.  That sounds suspiciously like what the Falcon got up to around this time, so I’m pretty sure the writers were trying to be topical by having their black heroes focus on “black problems.”

The Avengers are just starting to squabble about what to do when the Vision arrives.  When Red Wolf wakes up, he regales them with his secret origin story.  He grew up on a reservation out west, where he heard lots of stories about the Red Wolf, a mythical being who would supposedly come to the tribe’s rescue in their hour of greatest need.

 

That sure looks like ‘greatest need’ to me, and Red Wolf (or whatever his real name is—we don’t know yet) agreed, but the Red Wolf never showed.  Disillusioned, he fought in Vietnam and ended up working construction in New York for a while.  By the time he got back to the reservation, Van Lunt had returned and was trying to force Red Wolf’s father into selling his land.  Red Wolf chased him off, but Van Lunt’s flunkies returned later that night and shot up the house, killing his parents.

In despair, he puts on the ceremonial Red Wolf costume, climbs a nearby mountain, and does the Dance of the Red Wolf.  Unlike all the other million times this dance has been performed, this performance results in an actual appearance by The Red Wolf himself.

 

The news is too much for Red Wolf to take and he faints on the spot.  Or maybe that was the gunshot wound he mentioned earlier.  When he wakes up, he’s attacked by a wolf, which he kills.  He then finds the wolf’s pup and raises it, calling him Lobo because he has the creativity of a tapeworm.

Red Wolf worked his way back to New York, where Van Lunt and his lackeys—including Jason Birch, a.k.a. Fedora Man—live, and that brings us to today.  The Vision says he’ll be happy to help Red Wolf bring them to justice, and Goliath and Scarlet Witch volunteer to tag along.  Captain America, Quicksilver, Thor, and Iron Man all go after Zodiac, and Black Panther says it’d be best if he fought the gangs on his own because… um… I don’t know, because he’s black?

For some reason they treat their splitting up as a big deal though, like the Avengers have never done minor team-ups or solo adventures before.  Maybe they’re just getting paranoid because the last time they disagreed about which mission to take, Ant-Man got kidnapped by mole people.

 

I’m so glad all his angsting last issue wasn’t completely pointless.

Issue Eighty-One begins with more handwringing about how the Avengers may be splitting up for good, and Black Panther flies solo as promised.  He goes all the way to Daredevil #69 to do it, too, but we’ll talk about that next time.  Let’s just focus on the others for now.

 

Then why the heck did you accept their help last issue?  Fickle fellow, isn’t he?

Well, too late to turn back now. The Avengers arrive in the desert, where their airship is attacked by another airship with guns.  The quinjet has no weapons because they’re idiots—come on, they’re the AVENGERS, they have to know they’ll get attacked in that thing sooner or later—so Vision has to save their bacon by flitting to the enemy craft and kicking the butts of the robots that are controlling it.

 

 

Who wants to bet that three issues from now, the Avengers are gonna drag in Tony Stark to design weapons for their quinjets?  Not this specific quinjet, though.  This one’s gone down in a blaze of glory.

In retaliation, Vision increases his mass until the rocket he’s on also crashes, but not before a surviving robot could place a call to its… employer?  Creator?  Boss?  Whatever, it’s Cornelius Van Lunt, much to the Vision’s total lack of surprise.

Vizh goes looking for the other Avengers, but he only finds the Scarlet Witch before they’re surrounded by Jason Birch and his men and a whole lot of rifles.  Wanda’s still too weak to use her hex power on them, so they surrender and allow Birch to take them to Van Lunt’s hacienda.

 

When Vision refuses, Van Lunt takes Scarlet Witch hostage—well, even more hostage, since they were technically already hostages—until Vision agrees to be his bodyguard.

Back out in the desert, Goliath and Red Wolf also survived the crash and are hunting for the missing Avengers.  They crash-landed in a lake that was created by a dam Van Lunt built on land he stole from Red Wolf’s people.  Our two heroes (plus Lobo) go to see those people now, but they’re skeptical that Red Wolf truly is the Red Wolf of legend, or that he can do anything to stop Van Lunt.

 

 

Yep, Red Wolf’s real name is Will Talltrees.  And his own relatives can’t recognize him, even though his face is clearly visible under the wolf head he’s wearing.  Clark Kent Syndrome strikes again.

Van Lunt’s goons show up, guns a-blazing.  Goliath and Red Wolf stomp them, which proves to the other Native Americans that they’re legit, and they even agree to help them stop Van Lunt.  They all march right over to Van Lunt’s hacienda, where they encounter the Vision, who if you’ll recall, has agreed to protect Talltrees’s inhospitable neighbor.

But while Goliath and Vision engage in fisticuffs…

 

For reasons we have yet to discover, Van Lunt really really wanted to dam up this particular river, which used to provide water for the reservation.  My money’s on oil or gold.  Gold oil?

Regardless of motivation, Van Lunt takes some of his lackeys and the Scarlet Witch to a helicopter and flies them over to the dam, shooting and killing all but Red Wolf and Lobo.

Except it turns out the Red Wolf and company weren’t going to blow up the dam, they were just retreating so they didn’t have to watch Goliath get his butt kicked, which is a really stupid reason when you think about it for more than a second.  The Native Americans were all coming to Van Lunt’s house to make him give back their river.  Did they think they wouldn’t have to fight for it?  Were they just going to ask Van Lunt really, really nicely to dismantle the dam and hope it worked?  Why are they so squeamish all of a sudden?

The Scarlet Witch gets her powers back in time to blow up Van Lunt’s helicopter and (accidentally) destroy the dam, supposedly killing friend and foe alike.  But then…

 

Oh, sure, make it all about you.  Wait, where’s Lobo?  Is Lobo dead?!  DOES NO ONE CARE ABOUT LOBO?!!!

Whatever.  Will is reunited with his family and walks off into the sunset with them, thus ending the adventure of the first Native American hero in an Avengers comic.

The story was a little cliché—is there a law that says you can’t write a story with Native Americans unless it involves white people trying to kill them and steal their land?—but it’s Red Wolf’s portrayal, while nowhere near as bad as it could have been, that sticks in my craw.  His tribe is never explicitly stated, but I assumed he was Navajo until the internet told me he’s Cheyenne, which, er, I don’t know where that came from because…

1. A couple of tourists to the reservation mentioned Phoenix.  Okay, so they’re tourists, but Phoenix immediately makes me think of Arizona, where a good chunk of the Navajo Nation is.  The Cheyenne are largely concentrated in Oklahoma and Montana.

2. Red Wolf got his costume from a ceremonial hogan.  Hogans are traditional Navajo dwellings and are still used today for ceremonial purposes; the Cheyenne lived in teepees.

3. Red Wolf mentioned climbing “the people’s sacred mountain” before gaining his powers.  One of the more famous aspects of Navajo lore is the four sacred mountains.  Yes, FOUR, so I don’t know which one Red Wolf was climbing.  No, none of the mountains are associated with the color red or wolves.

4. It should go without saying that I couldn’t find any mention of “red wolf” stories in either Cheyenne or Navajo traditions.  Which is exactly what I’d expect to find, since Talltrees is from out west and red wolves are from the south and southeast.  However, this fellow here suggests Red Wolf’s story is loosely based on the NAVAJO legend of the Monster Slayer, with a major emphasis on the loosely.  And also, the Monster Slayer is automatically better because he gets lightning arrows instead of a bloody tomahawk.

TL;DR If you’re going to write about another culture, research it for X’hal’s sake.  Don’t just mash together whatever sounds good.  Haven’t we done enough to the Native Americans without smearing our greasy little hands all over their cultures?  Show some basic respect.

In any event, it’s obvious that the creators didn’t care about the wolf aspect so much as they cared about squeezing the word ‘red’ into the Native American guy’s name.  BECAUSE HE’S NATIVE AMERICAN AND NATIVE AMERICAN = RED, DO YOU GET IT???  It’s like that Asian villain named Yellow Claw, or all those black heroes with the word black in their name.  Are the writers afraid we’ll forget their ethnicity if we’re not reminded of it every time someone says their name?  YES.  WE SEE YOU PUT A MINORITY IN YOUR STORY.  WHAT DO YOU WANT, A COOKIE?

Red Wolf’s debut also reflects a big problem comics had when creating minority superheroes back in the day: they were all indeed Minority Superheroes, not Superheroes Who Happen to Be Minorities.  Every time a non-white hero showed up, all of their plots would inevitably revolve around their race.  Allow me to provide a few examples:

-Red Wolf wants to save his people’s land from Van Lunt

-Falcon wants to clean up Harlem

-Black Panther started out different, but seems to be sliding into Falcon-esque territory

-Sunfire, a Japanese hero, is proud of his heritage to the point of being prickish about it and was often shown resenting white heroes and the West in general

And that’s just from Marvel.  None of these guys are heroes for the sake of being heroes like the white guys are.  They’re MINORITY heroes here to CONTINUOUSLY REMIND YOU of their minority status either by bringing it up themselves or by being called “Uncle Toms” for daring to save a white guy once in a while.  And while there’s nothing wrong with a hero of color wanting to clean up his own backyard, when that’s the ONLY thing that EVERY hero of color wants to do, we’ve got problems.

To read Avengerous Tales 2.6, go here!

Images from Avengers #80 and Avengers #81