Avengerous Tales 2.30 - Avengers #129-Giant-Size Avengers #2

To read Avengerous Tales 2.29, go here!

So, uh, remember at the end of my last review when I wanted Marvel to stop picking on the Swordsman?  Well, I think they took that request rather differently than I was hoping…
 

We start with Kang reiterating his plans to conquer the Earth, which our heroes obviously are not a fan of.  Not that Kang cares.

 

So all anyone has to do to defeat Kang is to not fight him?  Boy, the Avengers sure have been wasting their time trying to defeat this loser when apparently they could have just gone to the beach.

Actually, when I wrote that, I thought it was a joke but I’m actually not that far off.  Kang has brought a bunch of 41^st century robots to fight the Avengers, and these robots gain strength every time someone expends energy to try and defeat them, so the Avengers really WOULD have been better off taking a Me day.

Having soundly defeated the Avengers (and even Jarvis), Kang the Conqueror does what any self-respecting villain does after a victory: he monologues at their unconscious bodies about his evil scheme.  In this case, he says that the history books claim the star that appeared over Avengers Mansion signals “the completeness of the celestial Madonna,” a.k.a. the woman who will give birth to the future ruler of Earth.

 

Well that’s kinda creepy.  And by kinda I mean all.  All of the creepies.

With only three women in the mansion, obviously the celestial Madonna can only be Mantis, Scarlet Witch, or Agatha Harkness.  Kang also kidnaps the rest of the Avengers because He Has Plans… except for the Swordsman, who he deems useless and leaves behind.  And this from a guy who just got through bragging about how he’d learned not to underestimate his enemies.

Kang’s carelessness backfires almost instantaneously as Harkness uses her magic to mentally contact the Swordsman and tell him that Kang is keeping them prisoner in the pyramid of Rama-Tut.  (Rama-Tut, you may recall, is an old alias of Kang’s.)  The Swordsman, determined to prove his worth once and for all, hops in a quinjet and takes off for Egypt.

Inside the pyramid, Kang finds out what Harkness did and zaps her for it, but he doesn’t really care that the Swordsman is on his tail because what can that loser do anyway?  Then he monologues about his secret origins, which I already linked to in the last paragraph.  Basically, he got bored of the peaceful future he’d been born into and went back to ancient Egypt to be worshipped as a god.

 

Yeah no kidding your appearance is inexplicable.  Why are you white?  Why is EVERYONE white???  NO ONE IN ANCIENT EGYPT WAS WHITE.  If Kang ever makes it into the MCU, I hope they make him black.  That’d solve this problem AND offend a bunch of racist fanboys, and that’s always fun to watch.

Long story short, the Fantastic Four kicked his butt and Kang’s been getting his fanny handed to him by the Avengers ever since.

The Swordsman, meanwhile, has been keeping busy, breaking into the pyramid and accidentally feeding some Egyptian soldiers to a demon vampire before falling through a trap door.  Wow.  There’s being unlucky and then there’s being the Swordsman.  This poor, poor SOB.

Kang, unaware of the Swordsman’s escape, watches with glee as the soldiers all die and the demon vampire wanders outside into the sunlight, accidentally killing himself.  And I thought the Swordsman was incompetent.

 

Ceiling Swordsman is watching you.

But Swordsman is too late to stop Kang’s plans for Thor, Iron Man, and the Vision.  What are those plans?  Make sure they’re all completely paralyzed thanks to a paralyray and then put them inside his macrobots to serve as power sources.  With these nigh-unstoppable robots at his command, Kang will, well, conquer.

The Swordsman prepares to stop Kang by using his enhanced sword to strike a killing blow.  But just as he takes aim, he is stopped by…

 

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.  Given how often Kang bounces around the time stream, it was probably inevitable that he’d paradox himself into oblivion.

Okay, so the Giant-Size special takes us back to New York, where Hawkeye of all people is taking down a couple of crooks.  When the police come to arrest them (the crooks, not Hawkeye), an officer mentions to Hawkeye about how all the Avengers were just kidnapped by Kang the Conqueror.  Hawkeye immediately rushes to the mansion to see what he can do.

 

You were LITERALLY JUST TOLD the Avengers were kidnapped.  Who do you think is going to answer you exactly???  And don’t say Jarvis, because Jarvis actually comes to say hi and Hawkeye is clearly surprised to see him.

(BTW you’ll have to excuse the quality of these pictures.  Normally I take screencaps from the digital versions of the comics I review, but this issue isn’t available online so I had to scan pictures from my own, less-than-mint physical copy.)

Jarvis explains the situation to our bubble-brained bowman, and then the Swordsman enters with Rama-Tut in tow.  Hawkeye is understandably freaked out, since he knows Rama-Tut and Kang are the same person (though apparently Swordsman doesn’t).  But Jarvis previously told Hawkeye about the Swordsman’s recent spate of bad luck, so Hawkeye decides to play nice for a while and even praises Swordy on a job well done.  I’d be excited about Hawkeye having some character development, but I’ve been burned before, so.

So Rama-Tut puts on Generic Disguise Number #7—trenchcoat and hat (but somehow no pants)—and uses his powers of vagueness to whisk the avenging duo to the United Nations, where Kang has set the Vision-powered macrobot loose to kill the U.S. Secretary of State as the first step in his grand plan to take over the world.  While Swordsman and Hawkeye get clobbered, he reminisces about how he got here.

By “later in life” he means he is 60 years old here.  Holy crap, dude’s SIXTY?  I’ll have what he’s having.

Unlike most old white men who long for the simplicity and wholesomeness of “the good old days,” Kang actually has the power to go back in time and relive his happy youth as the Pharaoh Rama-Tut.  This time, Rama-Tut decides to be nice instead of being a dictator and his people love him, but Rama-Tut wants more than that.  He uses his future tech and ancient Egyptian magic to put himself in suspended animation until the 20^th century so that he can try to stop his past/future self from his “fruitless” attempt to take over the world via Celestial Madonna spawn.

Wow, guess we all know how this comic ends now.  TAG YOUR SPOILERS, JERKWEED.

In the present, Rama-Tut tells our heroes that the macrobot they’re fighting is powered by the Vision, who in turn is powered by the sun.  All Hawkeye has to do is shoot a… tar arrow, I guess?… and cover the macrobot’s eye holes, preventing sunlight from getting in, until the macrobot collapses and Vision’s paralysis wears off.

Kang, obviously annoyed by this, changes up his plan a bit.  He had been planning to attack Moscow next, but at the last minute he sends Iron Man to Peking instead in the hopes that this will throw the Avengers off his trail.  It does not.

 

He’s going to strip him into submission?

No, this ain’t fanfiction.  The Vision stuffs his intangible cloak into the Macrobot armor and then makes it tangible again.  Since two tangible objects can’t exist in the same space, the Macrobot explodes.  Because science.

So Iron Man is free and Kang is more annoyed than ever.  He abandons his plans to unleash the Thor Macrobot on Moscow and, after making the brilliant move of rendering his time sphere visible for everyone to see, sends him to beat up the Avengers instead.  All goes well until Thor tries to electrocute Iron Man.  Anyone who saw The Avengers (i.e. everyone) knows exactly how that will end.

 

IIIII HAAAAVE THE POWEEERRRRRR 

While Iron Man pounds on Thor, the Vision takes the opportunity to free the ladies from Kang’s prison capsules.  Agatha Harkness is still unconscious, so it’s up to the Avengers to stop Thor.  The Scarlet Witch unleashes her pent-up rage by redirecting a meteor at the Thor macrobot.  Let this be a warning to anyone careless enough to leave the toilet seat up in Avengers Mansion.  Wanda will WRECK YOU.

With Thor freed, Rama-Tut turns his attention to Kang, and them fighting themselves is so potent that it opens a bunch of rifts in the space-time continuum.  Images of the past, present and future swirl around them, inadvertently providing Kang with what he wanted all along: knowledge of who the Celestial Madonna is.

It’s Mantis, if you were curious, but it doesn’t matter now: Rama-Tut is from the future, and he can assure Kang that his search for the Celestial Madonna will end/has ended in failure.  Kang is so enraged by this news that he tries to shoot Mantis, and Rama-Tut is one second too slow to stop him.  Fortunately—for Mantis, anyway—the Swordsman is quicker...

I bet Iron Man’s regretting adding that nose to his armor now.  Barbecued European can’t smell very good.

Kang and Rama-Tut wrestle some more, accidentally hitting the “go” button on the time sphere and disappearing, for now, from our century once again.  The Swordsman has just enough life left in him to once more lament his status as perpetual failure while Mantis apologizes for her recent behavior.  The issue ends as he dies in her arms.

 

Actually, I should say the STORY ends with him dying in her arms.  The ISSUE continues with a reprint of an early Fantastic Four issue in which Kang made his first appearance, but since that is not an Avengers comic, we won’t be looking at that here.

Well the formula for extra-long issues has remained intact: just like almost every other time, the Avengers had to split up to fight three related baddies.  It’s not bad, just kind of predictable.

I’m also really not fond of the portrayal of Mantis and the Scarlet Witch here.  I glossed over these bits, but practically every time we stop by Kang’s time sphere, it’s to find them bickering over who the Vision “belongs” to or thinking nasty thoughts about each other.  Not only is this wildly inappropriate, since they should be thinking of ways to escape and help their teammates instead of their love lives, it’s also incredibly annoying that the only two women currently on the team (ish—Mantis still isn’t technically a member) went from potential friends to bitter rivals.

So yeah, while this was largely pretty average as far as the special comics go, I did like seeing current Kang vs. future Kang and speculating what could have happened to make Kang change so much.  And who doesn’t like seeing Wanda throw space rocks at people?

To read Avengerous Tales 2.31, go here!

Images from Avengers #129 and Giant-Size Avengers #2