Avengers 2.34 - Avengers #135-Giant-Size Avengers #4

To read Avengerous Tales 2.33, go here!

 

Dang, we’ve been having a lot of giant-size specials lately, haven’t we?  Also, instead of Sal Buscema and Joe Staton on artwork, we have our old friend George Tuska instead.  Hi, George!

So if you remember from last time, the Vision was still floating around space-time with Immortus’s talking stick to guide him through the original Human Torch’s—and his own—origin story.  In 1966, Torchie was killed and his body callously abandoned by the Fantastic Four, who are pricks.  This gives Ultron-5 the chance to come busting through the wall to take the dead android for his own purposes.  First, though, he has to contend with the Mad Thinker’s abandoned assistant...

 

Ultron decides now is a good time to regale us with his origin story, which we already covered in the halcyon days of Avengers #57, if you feel like reviewing them for yourself.  After he becomes sentient and kicks Hank Pym out of his house, Ultron visits the Mad Thinker, who is apparently a renowned android expert now.  Ultron demands that the Mad Thinker give him an android of his own to play with, and MT tells him to go take the Human Torch.  And again, I would like to remind you that this plan wouldn’t have worked if Reed Richards was not a tool.

So anyway, Quasimodo begs Ultron to take him instead, but Ultron just hypnotizes him into forgetting the whole incident and runs off with the Human Torch’s body.

Back in Vietnam, Mantis demands that Libra tell her what the eff is going on here, but he doesn’t get the chance before Moondragon shows up and oh great, more origin stories.

 

Heather survives the crash and is taken to safety by Mentor, Thanos’s dad and ruler of Titan.  On Titan, Moondragon’s fate seems to closely mirror Mantis’s—she is raised in a temple and taught martial arts.  Moondragon, however, also becomes a priestess and a geneticist.  She’s a bit of an overachiever.

Meanwhile, in 1968...

 

Neutrons is my new favorite fictional swear word, right behind “nut bunnies” and “Belgium.”  Also, Ultron sure did build himself an unnecessarily shapely behind there, didn’t he?

Ultron decides that the only way he’ll be able to fix the Human Torch for his purposes is to kidnap Torchie’s inventor, Phineas T. Horton.  (I assume that the T stands for Tim.)  Horton’s career tanked after the Human Torch’s escape, and he’s been sitting around repairing TVs and drinking ever since.  He’s not real thrilled about coming face to face with his greatest failure again after so many years, but Ultron doesn’t care.  After months of work, their Vision is realized (ahar).

We sojourn briefly to Vietnam, where Immortus shows up with a mysterious shiny box, and then to Avengers Mansion, where Jarvis hears evil male laughter coming from Wanda’s room and tries to break in, only to find the room empty.  Now back to your regularly scheduled origin story, where the newly revamped Human Torch is waking up.

 

Horton pays for his deceit with his life, as you might expect, and while the Human Torch doesn’t exactly have warm fuzzy feelings for his creator, he’s not happy that he’s dead, either.  Torchie and Ultron duke it out, but it’s a short-lived battle.  Ultron knocks out Human Torch and, while he’s unconscious, replaces his brain patterns with those of the deceased Wonder Man (if you want the details on that, go here).

Well that about wraps it up for the Vision’s origins.  Can we go home now?

 

...Guess not.

Our story picks up in Giant-Size Avengers #4, but first, I gotta say, I have a thousand questions about this cover.  Why is Hawkeye the only one who looks happy about this wedding?  Why is Immortus officiating?  Just because he’s the ruler of limbo doesn’t give him the power to marry people on Earth, does it?  Why would they even WANT him to officiate when he’s tried to murder them, both actively and inactively?  How is Mantis marrying a ghost?  Is that legal in the Marvel universe?  And how comes nobody notices Dormammu sneaking up on them?  Is he breaking that mountain really, really quietly?

Also, our artist du jour is Don Heck, which normally I’d be cool with.  But the inker, John Tartag, kind of makes everything look weird at times.

 

So yeah, Vision has stumbled upon Dormammu’s domain, and apparently so did the Scarlet Witch.  The Vision announces his intention to fight for Wanda’s life, and Dormammu laughs in his face.  Rude.

Returning to Vietnam, the Swordsman’s swordy-sense is tingling, which prompts Immortus to leave and figure out where the heck the Vision got to.  While he is gone, the Swordsman finally—FINALLY!!—tells us how Mantis came to be the Celestial Madonna.

 

They must have some weird kind of definition of perfect.  Or are we expected to forget that Mantis dumped Swordsman in the cruelest way possible and repeatedly pursued the Vision despite knowing that a) he was not interested in her that way, and b) he was seeing someone else?  Also, according to the next panel which compares Mantis and Heather Douglas, it looks like Mantis’s real name IS ACTUALLY Mantis.  Well, it’s less bizarre than some Hollywood baby names I could think of...

The priests that raised Moondragon, like the Priests of Pama, were descended from the pacifist Kree that fled Hala.  Once they got done training Moondragon and Mantis to be as awesome as they could be, they got all creepy and erased their memories of said training because of reasons.  By that time, the priests had decided that Mantis was a more perfect human than Moondragon—which makes sense since Mantis was actually raised ON EARTH (seriously, how did you think that would turn out?)—so Mantis gets to be the Celestial Madonna.

Hawkeye gets bored with all the exposition and wanders off, only to stumble upon the battered bodies of Radioactive Man, the Crimson Dynamo, and Titanium Man, who we last saw in Avengers #130 when they politely invited the Avengers to leave Vietnam immediately and to not come back ever again.  Who could possibly beat up the Titanic Three so badly?

 

Clearly that lesson Immortus tried to teach him a couple issues ago really sunk in.

Back with the Vision, he defeats Dormammu’s monster lackeys only to have to face the Scarlet Witch, who in case you hadn’t guessed has been under Dormammu’s control for the past two issues.  You’d think Agatha Harkness would have freaking noticed that, or was she under his control too?  Hey, where IS Agatha Harkness, anyway?

The Swordsman continues his story, telling how the Priests of Pama dumped Mantis in Saigon with false memories when she turned 18 because they’re a bunch of creepy a-holes, at which point she was immediately snatched up by Monsieur Khruul, who put her to work as a sex worker in a bar frequented by American GIs.  It was there she met the Swordsman, and we’ve already seen this story before.  Next scene!

Hawkeye, Iron Man and Thor split up to find Kang.  Thor finds him and, still mightily annoyed about the whole ‘you tried to kill us’ thing, knocks him unconscious.  But who’s this Hawkeye has just encountered?

 

Didn’t we do this plot twist already with Nuklo?  Man, don’t tell me Nuklo is yet another iteration of Kang...

Anyway, thanks to Harkness’s training, Scarlet Witch can now do a lot more than just shoot hex spheres.  She has learned how to control all of nature, basically, which really sucks for the Vision since he’s powered by the sun.  Wanda zaps all the solar power from the jewel in his forehead, and it’s only when the Vision is begging her to remember who she is while falling over (complete with hilarious “SLUMP!” sound effect) that the Scarlet Witch snaps out of it.

She is displeased, as you may imagine, and distracts Dormammu by removing the source of his own power—a lava pit—while restoring both the Vision’s powers and freeing Agatha Harkness from Dormammu’s... clutches?  Control?  Yeah, apparently Dormammu’s had Harkness around this whole time and just wasn’t doing anything with her.  Given how powerful she is, you’d think he’d have made her do his bidding just like he did with Wanda, but no...

So Dormammu cries uncle and lets our heroes return home, pinky-promising that he’ll leave the Earth alone from now own.  The comic makes it a point to tell us that he breaks his word in the next issue of Doctor Strange, though I’m pretty sure we all could have guessed that even without the helpful footnote.

For now, though, the trio is transported back to Avengers Mansion, where Miss Harkness announces that she has nothing left to teach the Scarlet Witch.

Back with the Avengers, Hawkeye and Thor and Iron Man finally realize they’d somehow been duped by the three Kangs, and Mantis gets some surprising news from the Swordsman.

 

Why do I get the feeling that this is one of those situations where context isn’t going to help?

Well, let’s take a look at the context anyway: Mr. Tree wants to marry Mantis for some unexplained reason and so he reanimated the Swordsman’s corpse as a wedding present.  Yeah.  That wasn’t the Swordsman’s ghost walking around—that was his dead body being controlled by a damn alien tree who decided to get Mantis the world’s ickiest wedding present BEFORE asking her to marry him.

Mantis, who is suspiciously not creeped out by this, communes with the tree’s spirit or something and agrees to the marriage.  I don’t even WANT to know how she becomes the Celestial Madonna as a result of this arrangement.

There’s a much sweeter scene at Avengers Mansion where the Vision tells Wanda all about how they’ve both grown as people recently and how he finally realizes that he doesn’t ever want to live without her.  It’s really very nice to see these two people, who have both gone through so much development and learning to get where they are, finally be happy together.

But of course we can’t focus on that.  We have to focus on this weirdness with Mantis and the creepy-ass Cotati... and Kang, of course.

 

FINALLY someone’s making some real good use of the fact that Kang is a time traveler.  I’d give the writer points for this, but that Cotati is still freaking me out.

Kang kidnaps Mantis and Thor makes to go after them, but Immortus stops him.  Why?  Well, you all remember the Space Phantom, right?  He’s shown up a couple of times.  Turns out he’s basically Immortus’s lackey (which makes no sense given the context of his first appearance, but whatever), and Immortus made him swap places with Mantis as soon as Kang had kidnapped her.  Mantis is safely in the temple, while Kang just got a Some Like It Hot-style surprise.

But of course Kang doesn’t use his time travel powers to try to fix this situation, and we more or less get to see the scene on the cover with Immortus officiating at two weddings (he conveniently teleported Vision and Scarlet Witch over to Vietnam for no reason a couple pages back).  The Avengers elect to make Mantis a true-blue Avenger at last, which she is very happy about. 

Then Mantis, her new husband (?) and the dead body being controlled by her new husband’s mental powers become beings of pure energy and shoot off into the cosmos.  So that’s where Star Trek: The Motion Picture got that idea.  Give Star Trek points, though: they at least eliminated the creepy tree man.

I really don’t know what to tell you, folks.  I think this giant-size issue made much better use of the extra space than previous ones, what with the multiple plotlines going on, and I did honestly enjoy seeing the Vision and Wanda finally find some happiness together.

But.

And this is a big but.

Tree Man is scary and I want my mommy.  Is no one going to object to this final indignity against the Swordsman???  Roy Thomas, I love you, but seriously what the hell.

To read Avengerous Tales 2.35, go here!

Images from Avengers #135 and Giant-Size Avengers #4