Avengerous Tales 2.27 - Avengers #124-#125

To read Avengerous Tales 2.26, go here!

We got ourselves some guest artists for today’s issues—John Buscema and Dave Cockrum.

Okay, so Monsieur Khruul (who is no longer orange) has suffered a horrible but well-deserved off-panel death at the hands of the mysterious Star-Stalker.  The Avengers search the temple, trying to figure out what the heck a Star-Stalker is.  They find out pretty quick.

 

I don’t think our heroes are in the mood to appreciate your puns, Mr. Narrator Sir.  Also, Star-Stalker is a bit unwieldy as a name.  I’m just gonna call him Smaug.  He looks like a tiny Smaug.

Despite his dragon-like appearance, Smaug speaks very good English and uses that skill to rail against humanity in general.  And to tell us his origin story.  Oh boy, HERE we go…

 

A small group of pacifistic Kree is exiled to a barren planet as punishment for their stupid ideas about being nice to people and so forth.  Then Smaug here showed up to conquer them and feed off the planet’s ionic energies, but the pacifists find a method to defeat him (though he’s smart enough not to tell the Avengers what that method is). 

The pacifists then get on the phone with the Intelligence Supreme, the leader of the rest of the Kree, to warn them about the threat Smaug presents.  The Kree don’t listen, but when the pacifists decide to split up into teams of two and spread throughout the galaxy to guard as many inhabited worlds as they can against Smaug, the Kree are more than happy to help get rid of them forever.

 

So long as the pacifistic Kree/Priests of Pama were around, Smaug couldn’t get his revenge, since they knew how to defeat him.  The second Monsieur Khruul killed them all, however, Earth was opened to attack.  All he has to do is spin a cocoon, take a nap inside it for a while, and emerge as a being capable of sucking all the ionic energies he needs.  Science!

While Smaug disappears into his magic death cocoon, Libra urges Mantis to remember the priests’ teachings, figuring that the key to defeating Smaug was among them.  Mantis only remembers “her happy childhood in Saigon,” which had nothing to do with mercenary fathers or orange ninja priests.

Black Panther gets the idea to radio the NYPD and asks to speak to the imprisoned Cornelius Van Lunt.  Panther wants to learn how to use Zodiac’s Star Blaster weapon—after all, what better way to defeat a star stalker than with a star blaster, right?  Van Lunt is surprisingly easy to convince.

 

Cool vase.

The Swordsman has a bit of a breakdown, berating himself for being such a loser and failing to live up to the heroic ideal Mantis so admires.  But we don’t have time for that right now—we’ve got a dragon to fry!

Vision and Mantis talk about how Libra’s story clashes with her own memories.  Apparently Mantis knows nothing about the Priests of Pama and instead believes she was an orphan who learned martial arts from her fellow street kids.  Not sure why she’d refer to such an upbringing as “her happy childhood in Saigon,” but okay.  Anyway, Vision (and, earlier, Libra) hypothesizes that the priests brainwashed her into forgetting them, which just makes them even creepier, but it seems plausible as Mantis knows her way around the temple suspiciously well for someone who’s never been there.

SHIELD soon arrives with the Star Blaster.  After Iron Man and Black Panther make some quick repairs (the Avengers damaged it in their earlier fight with Zodiac), Smaug emerges from his cocoon, and he’s hungry.  The Avengers shoot him with the Star Blaster, but it barely seems to faze him.  He plucks Thor and Iron Man right out of the air and saps their strength.

 

“NOW KISS!!!”

The others go down just as swiftly, all except Mantis, who realizes that only she can touch (and kick) Smaug without getting zapped.  She continues beating on him until she figures out his secret weakness: intense heat.  That’s why he only attacked a sunless prison planet and waited until nightfall to come out from the temple, and why he dies when Vision hits him with a dose of solar energy.

…

THE STAR-STALKER IS ALLERGIC TO STARS????  WHY IS HE CALLED THE STAR-STALKER THEN??????  I’m glad I renamed him Smaug.  Star-Stalker gets stupider the more we learn about him.

This whole incident has led Mantis to realize that, while she still doesn’t remember anything Libra told her about her past, she is clearly more than a random street kid who knows how to throw a punch.  What is she, then?  The answer lies in the next issue.

I wish they’d brought up Mantis’s memories earlier (or reminded us of them at the start of this arc, if they mentioned it earlier and I just forgot).  It would have given greater context to her hostile reaction to Libra.  At first I thought it was just because she objected to having a mercenary for a father, which wouldn’t make much sense since she was so kind toward the mercenary Swordsman.

Next issue begins with the heroes’ return to the states, where Libra is taken away for his part in Zodiac’s recent crimes.  He and Mantis part on good terms, though she’s still not quite convinced he’s her dad.  As Libra is taken away, Captain America returns, having cleared his name in the death of the Tumbler.

 

Why is Cap sad?  We’ll cover that in a future review.  For now, we have a mystery to confront: a young woman named Lou-Ann tries to get into Avengers Mansion using Rick Jones’ access card.  She faints in Cap’s arms, but not before she can warn them that Rick is heading into a trap and also something about somebody named Thanos.  I think most readers nowadays know who Thanos is—and Iron Man certainly does, as Thanos made his debut in Iron Man #55—but Captain America has never heard of him.

And here I need to take a break and explain some stuff that happened in another book so you don’t end up completely confused.  Specifically, we need to recap Captain Marvel #25-#32.

Since we last saw Rick Jones and Captain Marvel in Avengers #97, things haven’t improved for them much.  They still share a body, and only one can be on Earth at a time, while the other gets stuck in the Negative Zone.  On top of that, they’ve been dealing with Thanos, tyrant of the moon Titan, who has teamed up with a couple of Skrulls and a mind-controlling baddie named, well, the Controller in a bid to take over the world.

One of the people Controller controlled was Rick’s girlfriend Lou-Ann, who lured Rick into a trap that enabled Thanos to teleport him (and Captain Marvel) to Titan, where Thanos scoured Rick’s unconscious mind for the location of the Cosmic Cube.  (The last time the Avengers confronted the Cube’s power was here.)  Rick acquired this knowledge from the Intelligence Supreme, who put it there as a cautionary measure because of reasons.  THAT SURE WORKED OUT, DIDN’T IT?

It’s at this point that Lou-Ann fights off the mind control enough to go to Avengers Mansion in the scene we saw earlier.  Moments later, Captain Marvel arrives, and he and the Avengers spend the next few issues of Captain Marvel getting their butts kicked by Thanos’s goons and whatever the heck this thing is supposed to be.

 

The longer I look at this, the stupider it gets.

Eon, He of the Silly Haircuts, says that the only way Mar-Vell can defeat Thanos is by accepting his offer to dye his hair blond expand his powers and become “cosmically aware,” which seems to be like if he went into the Total Perspective Vortex and came out with the Prize from Highlander instead of a permanent case of the crazies, if that’s any help.  Anyway, even with his spiffy new powers, Captain Marvel can’t prevent Thanos from getting the Cosmic Cube, kidnapping those he considers his greatest enemies (his father Mentor, his brother Eros, Drax the Destroyer, Captain Marvel, Marvel’s friend Moon Dragon, and Iron Man), and turning himself into god of the universe.

They’re pretty entertaining issues, if you want to read them.  Just be prepared to wade through Rick Jones’s unbearable speech patterns.

 

I find it difficult to take the impending apocalypse seriously when you phrase it like that.

So now we finally return to Avengers #125, two days after Lou-Ann’s visit.  The Avengers learn that Thanos has sent a massive fleet of intergalactic criminals to attack the Earth.  With the quinjet and Zodiac’s old star cruiser, our heroes rush into space to fight them and put on such a good show of it that one of the attackers calls up Thanos to complain.

 

He sure knows how to rally the troops, don’t he?  And with this inspiring speech in mind, the fleet charges on to victory!

 

Kind of.

Wait a minute, is that movie theater playing Deep Throat??  As in the porno?????  Well I guess it’d be more likely to be the sequel, Deep Throat Part II, which came out the same year as this comic, but WOW, that is some A+ censorship flouting there.

The battle takes a strange turn when they come across a giant force field.  Vision wants to take Mantis, the Scarlet Witch, and the Swordsman out to investigate, but the Swordsman snaps at him and accuses him of trying to steal Mantis away from him.  Because this is totally the moment to be doing that.

The Vision tells him to shut it, but Scarlet Witch is clearly shaken by the accusation.  Still, she pulls herself together enough to hex their way through the force field.  Behind it is a massive ship, larger than anything that’s been hurled at Earth so far.  Immediately upon sneaking their way inside, the quartet is attacked by a bunch of aliens.

 

Is this the first time you’ve noticed that problem?  I thought you were smarter than that.  Though this time, we do actually get an explanation: there’s a machine onboard called a Universal Language Equalizer.  This allows Vision to find a lever labeled “force field,” and he uses it to turn it off.

Victory comes swiftly for the Avengers after that.  After the force field is down, the Avengers destroy the large ship within, as well as its all-important language equalizer.  Without it, none of Thanos’s lackeys can understand each other and they end up blowing themselves up instead of Earth.  So we’re done here, right?  Not quite…

 

Well, this was primarily Captain Marvel’s storyline, so it seems only fair we finish it in his own book.  In Captain Marvel #33, we learn that the whole attack-on-Earth thing was a distraction to get the Avengers off-world long enough for Thanos to move the planet into a slightly different place in the space/time continuum.  It’s a bit vague, but the end effect is that soon after the Avengers return, they disappear.  Fortunately, Mantis is with them.

 

I don’t think taking off your clothes to fight Thanos is a good idea, but hey, I’m not “at one with the universe” like some people, so what do I know.  Long story short, Captain Marvel destroys the Cosmic Cube and Thanos with it, returning the universe to normal.

I can’t really comment on the storyline as a whole, since this is Avengerous Tales and most of it took place in Captain Marvel.  As far as the Avengers are concerned, I’m not sure I like where they’re taking Mantis and Scarlet Witch’s relationship.  They started off on such a positive note, and now they seem set to become romantic rivals.

To read Avengerous Tales 2.28, go here!

Images from Avengers #124, Avengers #125, Captain Marvel #29, Captain Marvel #28 and Captain Marvel #33