Avengerous Tales 2.9 - Avengers #88-#89

To read Avengerous Tales 2.8, go here!

You’ve probably noticed that we’ve been seeing Thor and Iron Man around more than we have for the past few years.  The comic never made an official announcement that these two were back to being full-time Avengers—they just started showing up on the regular all of a sudden.  I wonder how that played out in-universe, like did Thor’s socks just suddenly start appearing in the laundry while Iron Man left notes on the fridge complaining that they’re out of straws?

We’ve got a special treat for you today.  While the script is still by Roy Thomas and the art is still by Sal Buscema (as it has been for the past two issues, with an assist from Frank Giacoia in Issue Eighty-Seven), the story is by Harlan Ellison. 

If by some chance you have spent the better part of the last century in deep space with no access to earthly literature, Ellison is a famous sci-fi writer, responsible for (among many other works) the short story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, which I read in college and still have nightmares about, and The City on the Edge of Forever, widely regarded as the greatest Star Trek episode ever (except of course for Spock’s Brain).

Now that I’ve raised your expectations to astronomical heights, let’s see if Mr. Ellison can deliver.

 

That’s DR. Richards to you, punk.

So what are Charles Xavier and Reed Richards working on, you ask?  They’ve teamed up with the military to cage the Hulk with electricity, which is clearly causing him immense pain.  That seems like something a supervillain would do.  Especially Xavier, who you think would be able to scan Hulk’s mind and figure out he’s not a villain.  I’m trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, but the opening narration is all told from a second-person POV of the Hulk himself, like the writer was trying to make us sympathize with him.

Anyway, Tony Stark was helping them with this project, but he couldn’t attend the demonstration because, unbeknownst to Xavier and Richards, he’s busy being Iron Man on “a nameless atoll somewhere in the Pacific.”  To figure out why, we need to flashback to Captain America and his Black Best Friend Sam Wilson, a.k.a. the Falcon, who made his debut in Captain America #117 in September 1969, twenty months before Avengers #88 (May 1971).

Falc is worried about a Louisiana friend of his, who was supposed to come to New York for a visit but never showed.  Cap and Falcon hop the first flight to New Orleans to go looking for said friend and immediately stumble upon an allegedly voodoo ritual.

 

The only things I know about voodoo—specifically Louisiana voodoo—are from the Wikipedia article I just sped-read, but I feel 100% confident in saying that this comic’s portrayal of it is racist BS and we should all be deeply offended.  That’s strike one, Ellison.

So Hornhead up there senses the heroes’ presence and declares that they shall be sacrificed.  Cap and Falcon fight them all off, of course, and after the fight’s done, they find that one of the people attacking them is Falcon’s friend.  He appears to be in a trance and keeps muttering the same coordinates: twenty-seven south, ninety-seven west.

Cap and Falcon rush back to New York to tell the Avengers about this tentative clue, and Iron Man, Thor, and Goliath agree to accompany them on their quest.  Vision, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver stay behind on monitor duty, and Black Panther bids his team a permanent-ish goodbye as he leaves to rule Wakanda once more. 

And now we return you to your regularly scheduled Hulk torture.

 
Or, um, not.  How many flipping directions is this story going to go in?

So yeah.  Hulk is magically kidnapped by a guy called Psyklop, a member of a subterranean race that pissed off their gods for some unspecified reason and were put into suspended animation as punishment.  The gods then awoke only Psyklop so he could study the Hulk and feed his energies (gamma radiation, I assume) to his gods, in exchange for waking the rest of Psyklop’s race.

After exposition time is over, Psyklop notices the Avengers approaching his hideaway and sends a giant glue-spitting grasshopper to eliminate them.

 
Whoa, Mr. Mind has really let himself go.

Thor blasts the slug with his hammer.  This also has the convenient effect of blasting a hole in the ground and exposing a hidden cavern, which leads them right to Psyklop and Hulk.  Psyklop has already begun shrinking the Hulk—apparently this will make for easier study—but fighting the Avengers distracts him so he ends up losing track of how small Hulk gets and where he goes.

Annoyed now, Psyklop grabs a fancy gun and shoots all of the Avengers with it.  Did he shrink them down too?  Or did it send them to another dimension?  Ooh, maybe Psyklop sent them to meet his gods, who will happily punish our heroes for interfering in their feeding frenzy???

 

OH COME ON.

That’s right, folks, if you want the end of this story, you have to go to Incredible Hulk #140.  Since that’s obviously not an Avengers comic, I’m not going to review that issue.  However, it wouldn’t be very nice to leave you all hanging, and I don’t think I can provide a fair review of this story if I don’t know the second half of it, so here’s a brief synopsis for you all.

The Hulk continues to shrink until he lands on a subatomic world where everyone is just as green as he is.  After saving the inhabitants from giant pig-dogs, he falls in love with the grateful Empress Jarella, whose sorcerers are able to give him Bruce Banner’s mind while he’s still in Hulk form (and yet they can’t send him home).  After Hulk thwarts a murder attempt by Jarella’s power-mad cousin, Psyklop snatches him back to our world, where Banner’s consciousness is once more subsumed by the Hulk’s and he easily defeats Psyklop, who is then in turn snatched away by the gods he failed to feed a la Dr. Facilier.

What the actual hell.

Writers are human, ladies and gentlemen.  We have our good days and our bad days.  We write a brilliant paragraph only to follow it up with hackneyed clumsy trash.  We try to be sensitive but know we will inevitably screw up and write something tacky and offensive, and we can only hope that the problematic bits will be edited out before we publish.  And the same is surely true of Harlan Ellison.

To put it less kindly, this story is a mess.

Virtually everything about Avengers #88 is pointless.  Why did we need to see Hulk tortured by the military when Psyklop could have easily and more quickly snatched him from elsewhere or even off-panel?  Why did we bother with Sam or Sam’s friend?  Whatever happened to that friend, anyway?*  What happened to the murderous voodoo people, and the other people they entranced?  Why did we need to make a pit stop in New Orleans just to insert some bonus racism?  Heck, why did we bother with the Avengers at all?  Their only contribution was in distracting Psyklop long enough for Hulk to shrink too far, but even that could have been done by an earthquake or an ill-timed call from Psyklop’s gods or literally anything but an entire extraneous issue of this comic.

But even if you reduce the story to its bare bones—guy is shrunk to tiny size and becomes king of troubled tiny empire—it’s still cliché and ridiculous.  With a few more rewrites, it probably could have been interesting at least, but as it is… better luck next time, fellas.

Moving on to Avengers #89 (finally), we find Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch, and the Vision in Miami, confronting Captain Marvel.

 

“How do you know I shouldn’t eat a whole pizza right before bed?  YOU DON’T OWN ME!”

Convinced that the Avengers are here to hurt him for some reason, Marvel tries to make his escape but is felled by his own unofficial sidekick, Rick Jones.  It’s so hard to get reliable help these days…

They take the unconscious Mar-vell to a hospital at Cape Kennedy, where they promptly strap him to what looks like an electric chair and flip the switch.  While this is going on, a guilt-riddled Rick flashes back to how this mess began.

If you’ll remember from Avengers #72, Captain Marvel is stuck in the Negative Zone and can only come to the human world by trading places with Rick for three hours at a time.  During the last such switch, Marvel breaks into the Baxter Building.

 

Hey wait, that’s right.  The other Avengers knew about their teammates’ trip to New Orleans.  Aren’t they going to ask about that?  Aren’t they going to wonder about all the extra miles logged on the quinjet that represent their flight from Louisiana to the Pacific?  They’re going to figure out about the mindwipe eventually… or at least they should.

Also, are we still in Rick’s flashback?  How is he flashing back to Avengers Mansion when he wasn’t even there?

Anyway, Vision summons Wanda and Pietro.

 

Was Pietro playing chess with himself?

They rush to the Baxter Building, which has a lot of bright lights shooting out of it.  Inside, Captain Marvel is messing around with Reed Richards’ equipment in the hopes of opening a portal out of the Negative Zone, allowing Rick to leap through to freedom and ending their interdependence.  He succeeds, but the portal wasn’t exclusively Rick-shaped and allowed this cheerful fellow to come through.

 

Two pages later, Rick pushes a button that sucks Annihilus back into the Negative Zone, but that’s enough time for Captain Marvel to steal the Avengers’ quinjet and dash off.  AND there’s another problem: a geiger counter Marvel was standing next to has gone haywire, indicating that Marvel himself was infected with some kind of radiation during his stint in the Negative Zone.

Marvel, meanwhile, was trying to get to Cape Kennedy so he could build a rocket and go home to the Kree Galaxy, but the quinjet ran out of fuel and he ended up in Miami, which is where our story started.  (Even though Cape Kennedy is north of Miami, so that must have been one weird flight plan.)

Now, in the hospital, that electric chair is actually trying to siphon off the radiation Marvel absorbed, but the machinery isn’t powerful enough to get it all.  Desperate, they turn to another energy source to fuel the machine and save Marvel’s life: solar energy.

 

The gambit seems to succeed, but while both our heroes recover, trouble looms from the Kree galaxy itself: the leader of the Kree, the Supreme Intelligence, has been dethroned by Ronan the Accuser, who uses his magic hammer to revive the Kree Sentry, a robot being stored in the same area as Captain Marvel.  The robot’s only mission in life?  Kill Captain Marvel!

I’m not sure I get Captain Marvel’s plan here.  Why didn’t he just ask Rick to ask Reed Richards to use his own machinery to get him out of the Negative Zone?  Or does it not work that way?  Similarly, why did he feel the need to steal a quinjet when he could have just asked the Avengers for help in returning to his homeworld?  Maybe the radiation fried his brains.

As for Black Panther’s departure, I think it was the right decision for the character.  It’s been clear for a while now that, as great as he is as a superhero, he’s conflicted about what he truly wants, and neither teaching school nor kicking ass nor ignoring his teammates in times of need can fill the Wakanda-shaped hole in his heart.  So fare thee well, T’Challa son of T’Chaka, and I hope that by the time you return, you’ll have figured out what you want from life.

To read Avengerous Tales 2.10, go here!

Images from Avengers #88 and Avengers #89

*I seem to remember an issue of Captain America in which Falcon and Cap go chasing after one of Falcon’s missing friends, but I can’t find it at the moment, so I don’t know if it was the same friend or if that story was at all connected with this one or if Captain America writer Steve Englehart just liked Ellison’s idea so much that he decided to redo it.