Avengerous Tales 2.7 - Avengers Annual #4, Avengers #84-#85

To read Avengerous Tales 2.6, go here!

Avengers Annual #4—a.k.a. Avengers Special #4 (the names of the annuals get a bit fuzzy after the first one)—is just like Avengers Annual/Special #3, in that there is not a single panel of new material in it.  It’s just back-to-back reprints of Avengers #5 and #6, so refer to Avengerous Tales 1.3 if you’d like to read my thoughts on them.  For now, let’s move on to the next regular issue of The Avengers, Issue Eighty-Four.

We begin in an unknown dimension with erstwhile Avenger the Black Knight.

 

You should see a doctor about that.

He arrives at the Well at the Center of Time, which I assume is a really creepy precursor to Milliway’s, and he tries to throw his sword, the Ebony Blade, into the well.  The sword, however, won’t let him, thus providing an answer to the Black Knight’s question: does he control the sword, or does the sword control him?

Breaking news: Men are controlled by their swords.

Before Black Knight can figure out what to do about this, he’s attacked by our old friend Arkon the Magnificent.  Arkon knocks him off his horse with a lightning bolt, sending our hero plummeting to his doom…

…and then Wanda wakes up.

 

Do the others just sleep in their clothes?  Why are they dressed while Wanda’s in a nightgown?

Taking Wanda’s concerns seriously, Pietro calls the home of Dane Whitman (a.k.a. the Black Knight) in London to make sure he’s okey-dokey.  A servant answers the phone and says he has no idea where Whitman is, sending the Avengers into high alert.  Black Panther goes out to track down Thor, whose hammer is the only way to travel to Arkon’s dimension.

Speaking of Arkon’s dimension, let’s return there.  As it turns out, Wanda’s dream was 100% true: Arkon is holding the Black Knight captive, and lookee who’s helping him do it.

 

It would appear that Wanda’s hex from last issue didn’t kill Enchantress so much as trap her in another dimension—a dimension where magic is rampant, which restores her own halved powers.  Now she’s more than happy to do whatever Arkon wants to get into his good graces, including making the Black Knight  “confess” he was there to spy on them for the Avengers.

One mind-control kiss later and Black Knight is singing his little heart out.  He says that a few hours ago, back in London, he very nearly murdered two jewel thieves—a ruthless act that he blames on his sword.  He summons his ancestor, a previous Black Knight, for advice.

“Well gee, gramps, thanks for WARNING me about this inherent evil all THOSE OTHER TIMES I’VE SUMMONED YOU FOR A CHAT.”

The elder Knight sends his progeny to Stonehenge (it’s always flipping Stonehenge), where an unnamed man in a cloak sends Whitman to the Well for unnamed reasons. 

Arkon the Magnificent doesn’t believe a word of this and, thanks to the Enchantress, he instead believes the Avengers will follow the Black Knight any second to invade his dimension.  Time to prep for battle!

Back on Earth, the Black Panther has found Thor.  They’re on their way back to Avengers Mansion when said mansion disappears, only to be replaced by Enchantress’s giant floating head.  She/it tells them they better stay on Earth if they know what’s good for them.

Meanwhile, Avengers Mansion has been transported to Arkon’s dimension, and Earth’s Mightiest Heroes are set upon by Arkon’s soldiers.  But something seems to be wrong…

 

A kitten being swarmed by ants.  There’s a mental image I never wanted, ever.

As you may have guessed, Enchantress futzed with everyone’s powers, allowing Arkon to place them inside energy cocoons designed to sap their free will.

After failing to make Wanda agree to be his queen (again), Arkon sends them all to the tower.  Of course there’s a tower.  And that’s where they are when Thor and Black Panther finally arrive.  Thor distracts the guards by punching them while Panther slips off to rescue his teammates.  By the time he finds them, the energy cocoons have done their work.

 

Deducing that the cocoons make the Avengers want to mindlessly obey any order regardless of who that order comes from, Panther tells them to free themselves.  It works.  Wow, that’s kind of a big design flaw, isn’t it?

Anyway, the Avengers are triumphant, Enchantress flees, and Black Knight finally dunks his sword in the Well, making it explode and proving to Arkon that he was telling the truth the whole time.  Arkon tries to apologize, but the Avengers have had enough of this soggy burrito of a person and go back to Earth.

Well, a few of them go back to Earth, anyway.

In Issue Eighty-Five, we see Thor whirling his hammer to transport the Avengers and their mansion to exactly where they were before all this dimension-hopping happened.  (Don’t want to dump a mansion in the middle of Central Park, after all.)  But, while Black Knight gets safely back to England and Thor, Panther, and the mansion get back to New York, everyone else is missing.

 

This wouldn’t have happened if you’d asked for directions.

Worse, Thor and Black Panther don’t even bother going to look for their missing comrades.  Their excuse? 

They promised to host a Toys for Tots event.

Yup.  That’s it.  No saving the Fantastic Four from Doctor Doom, or preventing Loki from turning New York into ice cream, or protecting the planet from some hostile alien race.  A Toys for Tots event.  Which, while certainly a worthy cause, should probably be a little lower on the to-do list than saving the teammates that you misplaced during interdimensional travel.  This is like going on a road trip with your buddies and realizing you left one of them behind at a gas station and then deciding not to go back for them, except worse because it’s a gas station in another freaking dimension.

 

Oh, and the gas station IS MELTING DOWN AROUND THEIR EARS JESUS CHRIST.

Fortunately, our heroes have remained intangible for some reason, so they are not affected as a super-heated sun literally melts the city around them.  The especially odd part is that they appear to have traveled a month into the future in addition to traveling to another dimension.  Scarlet Witch decides to unleash a hex sphere, because hey, what has anybody got to lose?

The sphere seems to transport them back to the right time and place, but when they get back to what should be Avengers Mansion, they find Nighthawk of the Squadron Sinister living there instead.  You might remember him and his pals—Hyperion, Dr. Spectrum, and the Whizzer (pfffft)—from a few issues back, but Nighthawk doesn’t seem to remember the Avengers at all.

 

Nighthawk flees deeper into the mansion, and the Avengers pursue, only to bump into the rest of the team, which in this universe includes American Eagle, who accuses them of being commies because patriotism; Lady Lark, who’s basically Black Canary but covered in feathers; Tom Thumb, who looks way the hell too much like Troll from Youngblood please make it stop; and a British archer named Hawkeye, which you can bet goes over real well with Goliath.

And then there’s Dr. Spectrum.

 

Spectrum, who’s there with Hyperion and Whizzer (OMG seriously), tells their team about the special solar rocket they’re about to launch, and that’s when it hits the Avengers: something will go wrong with the rocket, and that’s what will cause the Earth to get toasted a month from now.

Needless to say, the Squadron Supreme/Sinister doesn’t feel inclined to listen to our heroes, and they start another fight, this one featuring Goliath flailing melodramatically and almost killing some bystanders after being temporarily blinded.  Also, Stripper Wanda.

 

The Avengers knock everyone out, but now they have to figure out where Atomic City, the site of the rocket launch, is located so they can go stop it.  Nighthawk, who earlier expressed doubts about if the Avengers were really the bad guys, agrees to take them there, and that seems about the perfect place for a cliffhanger, don’t you agree?

Going back to Issue Eighty-Four for a moment, I’m wondering why Wanda had that dream about the Black Knight.  Did Enchantress arrange for that, too?  Was Wanda still magically connected to Arkon somehow?  Is her own magic now such that she can sense when teammates are in danger?  If it turns out to be a woman’s intuition thing, I am hiring Loki to throw someone out a window.

I’m also wondering what Marvel is planning on doing with Arkon, if anything.  At the end of his previous appearance, he kind of appeared to learn his lesson about forcing people to marry him, so I assume his asking Wanda to marry him again here was just some last stray hope of his, not an actual request that he was expecting an affirmative answer to.  He didn’t seem to learn anything about not fighting other people for no reason, however, and maybe that’s what this story did.  The last panel shows him standing over the destruction his rashness caused while Scarlet Witch says, basically, “Now you stand there and think about what you did.”

Have we seen the last of Arkon?  Has he finally learned the value of peace?  Guess that all depends on whether or not we ever see him again.  (I know we see him for like a page in JLA/Avengers, but without giving too much away, Arkon doesn’t get the chance to do much.)

As for Eighty-Five, Thor and Black Panther are currently tied for this decade’s Worst Avenger award.  I don’t even have words.  Just.  Holy crap.

I’m liking the main story, though. Alternate universes can be so much fun to play with.

To read Avengerous Tales 2.8, go here!

Images from Avengers Annual #4, Avengers #84 and Avengers #85