Avengerous Tales 2.25 - Avengers #120-#121

To read Avengerous Tales 2.24, go here!

Grab your horoscopes, nerds and nerdlings, because today’s Avengerous Tale is all about the zodiac and they’ve got some very bad predictions for you.  And me.  And everybody in the world.

We begin with a sinister jailhouse conversation between Joshua Link, an incarcerated former member of the crime gang known as Zodiac, and the mysterious Taurus, the new head of Zodiac.

 

Joshua objects to this plan on the grounds that he and his brother Damian, a cop with whom he is spiritually connected (or linked, you might say—hahahahaha), are both Gemini, and Joshua’s not real keen on the idea of being murdered.  Taurus seems to have a plan to accommodate Joshua’s concern, but we don’t get to hear it right now.  Instead we cut to Avengers Mansion, where Officer Damian Link is visiting the Avengers on official business. 

Specifically, Link is serving as official police liaison to the Avengers in the matter of Captain America’s murder charge.  I won’t spoil too much here, but in Captain America #169, Cap appeared to murder a baddie named Tumbler in the middle of a fight.  Obviously it was a set-up, but nobody else knows that yet.  Also, we won’t be seeing Black Panther this issue because he’s in Wakanda building wings for Sam Wilson.  Yeah, you know those big red wings Falcon’s always flying around on?  T’Challa invented them.  Don’t let the MCU convince you otherwise.

 

In the middle of a sentence, Link staggers, nearly felled by “another one of those black-out spells” that’ve been troubling him lately.  This, as you may have guessed, is actually Joshua taking control of his brother’s body.  Mantis notices a change in Link’s “vibrations” and asks her boyfriend the Swordsman to keep an eye on him.  This pays off ten seconds later when Link, genius that he is, tries to swipe the Avengers’ secret weapons manual.

 

The Swordsman’s blade tears just enough of Link’s police uniform to reveal the Gemini costume underneath.  Apparently, Joshua always influenced Damian to put on the Gemini costume under his uniform every morning because… because?  I’m beginning to see why Zodiac didn’t try to bust him out of jail earlier.

Gemini gets his butt handed to him.  This displeases Taurus, who was watching the whole debacle through a telescope on a distant rooftop, and now calls up the rest of Zodiac to come help him fix things.

But what of the Swordsman?  Well, remember when that crazy American guy shot at him in Avengers #117?

 

Poor guy.  He tries so hard.

While the Avengers put the Swordsman to bed, Gemini, now restored to the Damian Link persona, wakes up and has no memory of what just happened.  To make matters worse, the intruder alarm goes off, though it’s a little redundant since Zodiac just melted the wall to slag.  Commence fight scene!

 

What

What is going on in this panel?  Normally I don’t mind Bob Brown’s work but right now he’s making Rob Liefeld’s grasp of anatomy look halfway logical.

The Avengers are defeated thanks to a super-powerful star-powered weapon called the Star Blazer.  Zodiac then takes off for reasons we’ll discover later, and Jarvis returns from grocery shopping to find all of his employers (minus Swordsman) unconscious on the floor.

Jarvis rouses the Avengers, who soon discover a tape recorder on the floor.  On it is a message from Taurus, who says that at midnight tonight a deluxe version of his Star Blazer will kill everyone in Manhattan born between May 22 and June 21—i.e. every Gemini, as he promised earlier.  After that he’ll be making demands of some sort.

That night, on top of the World Trade Center…

 

Gee what a relief I was so worried.

Just before midnight, the Avengers come swooping in to stop Taurus from firing the Deluxe Star Blazer.  Apparently they deduced the weapon’s location because, hey, New York is filled with smog, so where else would you try to use a star-powered weapon except somewhere really high up?

The Avengers make short work of Zodiac and damage the Deluxe Star Blazer, but the weapon has just enough just left in it to be used as a short-range weapon.  The Avengers assumed they were safe since none of their members are Gemini*, but since Mantis is an empath, she is affected by the pain of others.  (This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, since when Swordsman went down she seemed fine and even had the strength to carry him out of the room by herself, but anyway.)  So when Taurus blasts her with the Deluxe Star Blazer, she goes flying to the edge of the building.  All it’ll take is one little push to send her falling to her death—unless, of course, the Avengers agree to let Zodiac go free.

In the next issue (drawn by our old buddy John Buscema—Bob Brown comes back next time) we see the Avengers’ response to this generous offer.

 

Ehehehehehe

At the right moment, Vision dives to the side and Scarlet Witch hexes the Deluxe Star Blazer to pieces.  Still, the Avengers are outnumbered and in danger of being overrun when who else but Captain America comes charging to the rescue.  He’s still on the run from the law, but he couldn’t let his teammates get trampled, either.

Unfortunately, everybody except Aries seems to have forgotten about Mantis, and Aries ain’t exactly the gentlemanly type.  He hurls Mantis off the roof, but the Vision dives after her.

 

So now you know what to do if you ever get thrown off a building: spread-eagle your limbs and wait for your android ally to rescue you.

The Vision slows their fall by thrusting his diamond-hard arm into the side of the building, which enables them to survive but also splits the building in half.  Thor holds it up while Iron Man welds it whole again, which saves us from retroactive awkwardness since, if you will recall, they were on top of one of the World Trade Center buildings.

While the Avengers repair the building, Zodiac gets away in their starship because of course they have a starship.  Once the repair job is complete, Cap hurries away to clear his name while the Avengers take Mantis back to HQ to recover.

 

 

I guess Dr. Strange’s spell didn’t affect their memories after all.  Magic is so confusing.

The Avengers ask Swordsman to tell them more about Mantis’s origins, but he’s not much help.  All he can tell them is that they met while he was working for the South Vietnamese black market—more specifically, for a man named Monsieur Khruul, because if there’s one thing South Vietnamese black market kingpins believe in, it’s subtlety.

The Swordsman didn’t really like his work and took to drink—and, as required by comic book law, grew a Beard of Sorrow—at which point Mantis basically materialized out of nowhere like a Dickensian spirit to encourage him to get his act together.  Instead, he was shot on a job gone wrong, and Mantis found him and cared for him.  Swordsman never asked about her past and feels bad about it, like he’s failed her as a boyfriend, and vows to make it up to her by going after Zodiac.  But someone objects to this plan.

 

Yay, my favorite cat-themed Avenger is back!

The Swordsman and Mantis take a sick day while the others rush out to find Zodiac.  Zodiac, meanwhile, has taken to squabbling amongst themselves after their spectacular failure.  Aries wants to take over, but Taurus beats him up and intimidates him into shutting his mouth… for less than a minute.  After that he calls a meeting with the Zodiac members he thinks will be most amenable to staging a coup.  They are, for the most part.

 

The rebels are fine with that, so long as Libra STAYS neutral and doesn’t join Taurus’s side.

Aries implements his grand plan by calling up Cornelius Van Lunt who, as you may remember, is the moneybags behind Zodiac.  Aries asks to arrange a meeting, and Van Lunt tells him to meet him at one of his New Jersey warehouses at dawn.  Come morning, Aries steers the airship towards New Jersey, where he and his fellow rebels ask Van Lunt for more money so they can buy the weapons they need to successfully overthrow Taurus.

Thor, who was flying around in search of the ship, spies it moving towards Jersey and contacts his teammates.  Together they storm the warehouse and start whaling on Zodiac.  Van Lunt makes a break for it, and moments later, steel plates slam shut over the doors and windows, and Van Lunt contacts them via a very special video message.

 

Guess that’s a no on the new weapons, then, huh?

Van Lunt then presses a button which causes the entire warehouse to launch into space.  Because the warehouse is actually a rocket ship.  I love comics.

I really like the character development the Swordsman is going through here.  I reread my reviews of his earliest appearances, and right from the start, he had the potential to become a complex and interesting character: he wanted to be a hero but wasn’t quite sure how to make the transition from good guy to bad guy.  Now that he has Mantis’s help and positive influence, he’s finally completed that transition but still struggles with insecurities about his past deeds and how he is viewed because of them.  I hope he realizes that he’s already made amends and that he doesn’t have to keep killing himself to prove he’s sincere.

Now if only the writers would give him a name… 

To read Avengerous Tales 2.26, go here!

Images from Avengers #120 and Avengers #121

*Tony Stark’s birthday is supposed to be May 29, which would most definitely make him a Gemini, but that probably hadn’t been established at this point.  I do think it’s hilarious, though, that when later writers decided on a birthday for him, they just happened to pick one of the mere thirty days out of the whole year that would make this story wrong.