Avengerous Tales 2.28 - Avengers #126-Giant-Size Avengers #1

To read Avengerous Tales 2.27, go here!

It's secret origins time!  Yippee!

Today’s tale begins with the Swordsman showing off for Mantis in the training room.

Yep, that’s the Vision she’s looking at.  Oh dear.

While the Vision feels nothing but platonic admiration for Mantis, the Scarlet Witch can only remember their recent spats over her opinions about humans, and how both Mantis and the Vision seem to share an “above-it-all” attitude that would make them perfect partners.  Instead of moping, however, she vows to fight for the man she loves.  Even though she’s in absolutely no danger of losing him, he told her so last issue, and I’m sure he would happily tell her so again if she just discussed it with him.  Yay, forced conflicts!

Meanwhile, Captain America’s got his own problems.

Clearly I need to explain some things.

First: Iron Man, what the hell.  For some utterly bizarre reason, back in the mid-70s, SOMEONE at Marvel (in the letters page of Iron Man #72, writer Mike Friedrich pinned the blame on Stan Lee) thought it would be a swell idea to slap a nose on the Iron Man armor.  Because it was utterly vital that we know Iron Man can smell, I guess?  It didn’t last long, thank Rao, and we fans have done our darnedest to forget it ever happened.

Second: it’s finally time to educate you on one of the weirdest Captain America stories of the seventies.  There be spoilers ahead, but I don’t think it’ll affect your enjoyment of the story if you decide to read it.  If anything, knowing the ending ahead of time might prevent you from reeling at the WTF ending.  If you REALLY don’t want to know, skip down to the paragraph that starts “For now, we have to go check…”

Like I said in an earlier review, Cap was framed for the murder of the Tumbler.  The guys doing the framing were a super-secret society called the Secret Empire, who did so as part of a scheme to take unilateral control of the country.  In Captain America #175, Cap unmasks Number One, the leader of the Secret Empire, who is heavily implied to be President Richard Nixon.  Yes, THE ACTUAL Richard Nixon, not an expy or an alien in a Nixon suit.  The actual Richard Nixon was running around in a black Klan outfit landing flying saucers on the White House lawn, and the actual Richard Nixon committed suicide in the Oval Office when Cap busted him.  It’s wild.

The actual Richard Nixon was also hilariously casual about offing himself.

If you noticed the year in which this story was published (1974) and know a bit of U.S. history, you’ll realize this reveal occurs around the same time as the Watergate scandal.  Cap’s discovery (which he kept secret for obvious reasons) led him to react much the same way everyone did in real life: with anger, disappointment, disillusionment, and the need to do some heavy thinking about a lot of heavy topics.  It’s uniquely bad for Cap since he is supposed to represent and serve America.  How can he do that when the president is a crook?  We’ll find out in an issue or two. 

For now, we have to go check on Black Panther, who is once again torn between remaining an Avenger and returning to his home country to rule.  His considerations are interrupted by an unexpected visitor: Ronald Pershing, the ambassador from South Africa Rudyarda, an African nation that once imprisoned T’Challa for being black not having the right ID card while tracking down an invention of his that somebody stole.  This happened a while ago, back in Fantastic Four #119 (1972), but T’Challa is still understandably annoyed when Pershing comes waltzing into Avengers Mansion like they owe him their services.

“Yes, we’ll investigate.  We won’t necessarily STOP them, but we’ll definitely investigate!”

All the Avengers except Cap, Thor, and Iron Man (who are still “in conference”) follow Pershing outside.  Seconds later, a loud “ZZAAPP” captures the attention of our three veteran Avengers, who rush outside to find all of their teammates (and Pershing) trapped in a bubble of pure sound.  Said bubble is the product of the Klaw, Black Panther’s old nemesis, and Klaw’s new ally Solarr, who can fry people to death with his sun-based powers.

So what do these jerks want?  Well, remember how I mentioned that in Fantastic Four #119 T’Challa went to Rudyarda to recover a stolen invention?  Klaw was the thief, and he was brutally ill-treated by the Rudyardan police after his arrest.  Now Klaw wants revenge on Rudyarda, but he doesn’t want to get punished for that too, so he demands that T’Challa make him ruler of Wakanda so he’ll have diplomatic immunity.

And Solarr… I don’t know why he’s here and neither does Marvel.  They actually held a contest to see which reader would come up with the best explanation for their team-up.  In the letters page four issues later, one epistle suggested that Klaw read about Solarr in an American newspaper while he was imprisoned in Rudyarda.  (Because they let him have an American paper in between beating the crud out of him, I guess?)  Deciding that Solarr would make a great ally to help him get revenge, he calls up an outside contact and arranges for Solarr to be released from jail.  Solarr is so grateful that he agrees to team up with the Klaw.

Sure, why not?

Anyway, Solarr zaps Ambassador Pershing and says he’ll start killing the Avengers too if Black Panther doesn’t do what Klaw’s giant sound-based hologram tells them to within the hour.  While the Scarlet Witch revives Pershing with her hex powers, the three Avengers outside try and fail to free their fellows.

Thanks to Tony’s audio-analects, the trio tracks down Klaw’s signal to an abandoned building near the U.N.  They only find a trap.  They quickly and easily dismantle said trap, of course, but Klaw is long gone and there’s only eighteen minutes left to save their friends.

Back at the bubble, things are getting tense.  Pershing keeps pressuring Black Panther to capitulate to Klaw’s demands, while the Scarlet Witch accuses the Vision of loving Mantis despite his numerous protestations to the contrary.  Isn’t it nice when couples can trust each other implicitly?  What a healthy relationship they have!

Iron Man, Cap and Thor return with the bad news about their failure.  Black Panther is aghast.  Surely he couldn’t have been wrong about the Klaw!  Surely he has to be SOMEWHERE within a twenty-block radius, and there’s just one place they haven’t looked…

Dun-dun-DUNNN!!!!

Black Panther crushes the Klaw’s suitcase, which was his power source, and the bubble immediately disappears.  Panther easily beats up both Klaw and Solarr… which proves to yet again be his “last” act as an Avenger, for this incident only served to remind him of the struggles Wakanda is going through and how much they need their king to be present.  And that’s not the only Avenger they are losing—though Cap doesn’t say so here, he plans to not just give up his place on the team, but his identity as Captain America as well.

There is a bit of a continuity hiccup in this issue.  Back in Fantastic Four #119, we saw Klaw’s sonic prosthetic hand/claw get crushed by the Thing, yet in the flashback sequences in Avengers #126, the claw is perfectly fine.  Between that and the whole ‘write your own team-up origin’ thing, this issue felt like a particularly lazy way to write Black Panther out of the book for a while.  Disappointing indeed: T’Challa deserves better than that.

The next issue I’m going to review is a special with a cover date of August 1974—Giant-Size Avengers #1.  The Giant-Size specials differ from the Annual specials in that they are called Giant-Size instead of Annual.  That’s really pretty much it.  This particular Giant-Size issue was written by our old pal and current editor Roy Thomas (hi, Roy!), and drawn by Rich Buckler.

We begin with Iron Man carrying an invisible box.

Don’t drop it!  You’ll break the invisible Christmas ornaments!

Actually, there’s a mysterious intruder in Avengers Mansion.  Said intruder wants the Avengers’ time capsule—I didn’t even know they had one—and, while he initially doesn’t want to hurt the Avengers, he quickly comes to the (erroneous) conclusion that Captain America isn’t really Captain America and attacks.

As he does so, his Mysterious Intruder Cloak^TM falls away revealing the costume of the Whizzer.  The last time we met someone with that name, it was just as stupid as it is now he was a member of the alternate universe superhero team called the Squadron Supreme. This (the Avengers’) universe’s version of the Whizzer, as we saw in Avengers #70, is a villain who named himself after what I thought was a fictional hero. 

According to Cap, however, this heroic Whizzer, a.k.a. Bob Frank, was very real.  He was a member of a late-1940s superhero team with the incredibly pompous name of the All-Winners Squad.  There was a Captain America on the team, but since Steve Rogers was on ice by this point, the All-Winners’ Cap was actually William Nasland and Jeff Mace—both government-sanctioned replacements for the deceased original.  The government covered up the deaths of Rogers and then Nasland.  Hence the Whizzer’s earlier insistence that the Avengers’ Captain America is a fake, though some of Cap’s comments after the fight soon set him straight about who was the replacement for whom.

But enough yapping.  Let’s see how the Avengers defeat their racing rival.

Thus beaten, the Whizzer whizzes through the All-Winners Squad “brief but proud history.”  Emphasis on the brief: they only had three adventures.  After their last outing, Whizzer married his teammate Madeline Joyce, a.k.a. Miss America, and together they worked as bodyguards for the government until they tried to stop a nuclear explosion in 1949.

The Avengers try to get the Whizzer to relax, since his pulse is still very fast and he’s sweating a lot, but Whizzer just skips ahead to something that happened last week.  A building came down and the Avengers rushed the rescue.  There, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes uncovered the time capsule the Whizzer claims is his.

Before the Avengers can decide if they believe the Whizzer, a glowing yellow figure bursts free of the capsule like a radioactive baby velociraptor.

And then he has a heart attack.  He’s got nice nail polish, though.

While the Scarlet Witch sends Jarvis for a doctor, the Avengers get knocked flat by Glowy Yellow Man.  By the time they wake up, he’s gone.

Through incredibly vague acts of science, the Avengers detect three areas in New York that are highly radioactive.  They split up into teams—Cap and Iron Man, Thor and Mantis, Vision by himself—to investigate each of these hotspots.  The Vision is the first to find their “nuclear nemesis,” or as our baddie himself puts it…

Aww, it’s like a bizarro version of Frosty the Snowman saying “happy birthday.”

Now we check in with Bob Frank, who has recovered enough to tell us a little more of his story.  At the time he and Madeline tried to stop that nuclear disaster, Madeline was pregnant.  All that radiation did nothing good for the fetus, and mere minutes after the boy’s birth, the doctors said he would soon begin to give off deadly radiation.  There was a 50% chance that the radiation would cease in twenty-five years, so for everyone’s safety, the government put the kid in suspended animation and locked him in the radiation-proof time capsule for the next quarter century.  Obviously that wasn’t quite long enough.

Back where the action is, the Vision is fighting the newly-named Nuklo… at the same time as Thor and Mantis encounter Nuklo tearing up some elevated railway tracks.  They appear to be connected somehow, as this Nuklo keep repeating “nu-klo nem-siss” just as the first one did.

Oh, and by the way, train.

While Thor and Mantis continue the fight, the Scarlet Witch continues to talk with the Whizzer.  After their son was locked away, Bob knocked up Madeline again.  They went to Europe and found a magical place called Wundagore.  I don’t remember if I’ve had the opportunity to discuss Wundagore before but, in brief, it’s a place run by the High Evolutionary, whose experiments resulted in a society of intelligent, bipedal animals called New-Men.  They have a midwife there who’s a cow, and she helps Madeline through labor.

This time, she gives birth to twins.

“But wait!” modern Marvelites may moan.  “I thought Magneto was Pietro and Wanda’s father!”  And to you I say: you don’t know much about Marvel family trees, do you?  They are the most perversely complicated things in the history of fiction.  Seriously, try to plot one out sometime.  You’ll run off to get drunk within the hour.

In other words, yes, Magneto is (or will eventually be) Pietro and Wanda’s father, regardless of what the MCU is trying to tell us.  But we’ll get to that later.  For now, enjoy your look back at a simpler time in Marvel history when it didn’t take you ten minutes to explain the origins of any given character.

Cue fight scene between Nuklo and Cap and Iron Man.  Blah blah blah, fight fight fight, back with Wanda and Bob.  Madeline died in childbirth, and Bob was apparently so distraught that he just wandered off and didn’t come back for years, by which point Wanda and Pietro had run away.  Well HE sure won’t be winning Father of the Year Award any time soon.  Wanda relates her and Pietro’s origin story, which convinces the Whizzer that they are indeed his lost children.

But what of his first child, Nuklo?  Each of the Avengers try to steer him back towards Avengers Mansion, which ends hilariously badly when the Nuklos re-merge into one super-powerful Nuklo that scatters them all just by clapping his hands.  He’s so noisy about it that Bob Frank immediately springs from his bed, claiming that he knows the only way to stop Nuklo.  No, it’s not the power of love, it’s a hex sphere.

I look forward to when Wanda’s origin is retconned in less than five years and this explanation no longer makes any sense.

Thor volunteers Tony Stark to build an even stronger capsule to bury Nuklo for another twenty-five years in the hopes that maybe by then they’ll be able to cure him.  Bob Frank will be okay too, thanks to an operation that Dr. Don Blake did on him.

This review is already running long, so I’ll try to keep my final thoughts short.  I’m not sure what the writer thought “suspended animation” meant, because I assumed it should have kept “Nuklo” as a baby all that time.  Yet here he appears as an adult, albeit it with the mind of a small child.  Was he born as a full grown man or what?

Aside from that, I thought it was a pretty auspicious beginning for the Giant-Size Avengers title.  It had action, nostalgia, mind-boggling reveals, and decently Kirby-esque artwork.  And don’t worry: we’ll be seeing more of Bob Frank and Wundagore in future issues.

To read Avengerous Tales 2.29, go here!

Images from Avengers #126, Captain America #175 and Giant-Size Avengers #1