We’ve got an underwhelming payoff, a chance for Kurt to just go full ham on Marvel deep cuts, a guy with big shoes to fill and a different guy who has a different kind of big shoes to fill in…
To Challenge a Champion.
Also, as this is one of the few issues that Perez didn’t work on. Instead we have Carlos Pacheko, who I not overly familiar with, but he does good work. But... well... here he's working in contrast to George Perez so... umm... he comes up as second-best. It was also co-written by Len Kaminski, who was the lead Iron Man writer for the early-mid 90s. Which might also explain why the story is, generally, not up to Kurt Busiek snuff.
Anyhow, we're opening up on the two NEW Avengers who didn't show up in the last couple of issues; the requisite Kurt Busiek stand-in Vance Astro, and Cartoon Immigrant Firestar, who are currently perusing the Avengers trophy room, with Vance just overcome by the sheer enormity of the legacy he's just become a part of. Which largely takes the form of him just going on and on about how cool *
Hank Pym* is; which is how you can tell how deep in the weeds of unabashed Avengers fandom Vance actually is.
I *think* it's actually a statue of Scott Lang, but to be fair, his and Hanks Ant-Man costumes are pretty similar, so I'm not willing to verify that one way or the other.
Anyway, while Vance is just head-over-heals to actually have made it to the Big Leagues of superheroics, Firestar is less enthusiastic; this is partly because she's had a rough time with super-teams in the past (her comic introduction involved Emma Frost telepathically convincing her she burned down his family home and incinerated a pony), and partly because she didn't even want to be an Avenger; she just wanted to be supportive of her boyfriends passions.
At no point do either of them acknowledge the giant marionettes of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch in the trophy room.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Avengers are in a training session; mainly in order to open up the issue with an action scene to show off what each of the heroes is capable of. Which I guess would be helpful in case there were any readers who came in to this Annual who were only reading Squadron Supreme and have no idea who or what the Avengers are.
Not technically impossible, I suppose.
Anyway, besides a quick montage of various superpowers (and Vision reminding us he is technically a ghost, and that Wanda can summon her dead boyfriend like a Pokemon when in distress); we also get a
kind of acknowledgement of why Vance and Firestar weren't in the last few issues; they've made the transition from Reserve to Full Time Avengers, and presumably, given the just
ludicrous amount of rules in the Avengers Charter, and the amount of bureaucratic oversight the team is subject to, I can only assume they spent the last couple of days filling out paper-work to make it official.
Anyway, the training session is cut short, partly because Vance missed the summary of what the testing was for and wound up destroying the training room on accident, and partly because the ghostly image of Moonglow from the Squadron suddenly appeared in the middle of the chamber desperately asking the Avengers to help them.
And everyone sighs, because they
just dealt with those guys.
Anyway, figuring that the Squad got hypnotized
again, the Avengers jump into the Quinjet and head back to the Project Pegasus base; and along the way, everyone explains for Vances benefit (as he was sitting out the last couple of issues) what the Squadrons deal is, and why everyone is so annoyed at having to go save them. And we get another quick summary of their whole deal, with Hawkeye taking great pains to point out just the
ridiculous number of times the Squad wind up getting hypnotized into being evil. Up to and including the previous weekend.
...and then Dr. Spectrum shoots the Quinjet out of the sky, because the Squad saw them coming and they are prepared to THROW DOWN.
For... like... half a page when Moonglow remembers she didn't actually tell any of her team-mates that she asked the Avengers to come and help them.
Well, she was having a busy day, you tend to forget little details like that.
It seems that shortly after the Avengers left at the end of the last issue, the Squad was, INDEED brainwashed again... but, luckily, that's happened to them so often by this point they've finally acclimated to it and now have developed a natural resistance to being hypnotized. This also works as an explanation for why the team was mind-controlled so very, very, very, very often in the past; hypnosis just isn't that much of a
thing outside of the 616; between all the Serpent Crowns and Overminds, and Ringmasters, everyone in that universe is just... used to mind-control.
Anyway, while the Squad was able to shake off the the brain-whammy that had targeted them, it still lasted long enough for Moonglow to try to bring the Avengers to them, but nobody knows why. But Dr. Spectrum was able to figure out where the hypnotic ray came from; a small forested area outside of San Fransisco; so the two teams decide to let bygones be bygones, and head off to figure who, exactly was making such a damn nuisance of themselves.
It doesn't take them long to figure out where to go, as the forest has a strange techno-tower, surrounded by an electro magnetic barrier right smack dab in the middle of it, and just outside of where the teams land is the master-mind behind the several most recent attempts to mind-control the Squad;
IMUS CHAMPION!
The worlds (fifth) Richest Man, Consummate Perfectionist and Jerk. He's obsessed with his own self improvement to an incredible degree and has taught himself to be a master at any skill he put his mind to; which he mainly uses as part of... bafflingly complicated death-traps. If the Squadron Supreme is a stand-in for the Justice League, Imus is a stand in for Bruce Wayne, except evil.
Furthermore, he's also, like, ten feet tall. That's weird but never really gets elaborated on.
Anyway, Imus decided he's bored of mastering, Spelling Bees and Juggling, and figured he'd like to take a whack at fighting a superhero team. And because he's the kind of person who figures that anything worth doing is worth over-doing, he's going to fight
two superhero teams. And if he's going to do
that it might as well be the single most effective superhero team on the planet and also the Squadron Supreme.
The Avengers and Squad don't really...
want to... fight him. You know... on general principle; but Imus really wants to fight too many superheroes and explains that he planted a denotator in the middle of that techno-fortress that will trigger poison gas bombs he'd secretly planted in every major city across the country. All the Avengers and Squad has to do is stop him from reaching the middle of the forest to save hundreds of lives.
Then he says "Okay GO!" and the race is on!
For the record, he just sent a hologram to talk to them, he started somewhere else in the forest. Also, to discourage cheating; if anyone tried to radio for help outside the dome, or leave the forest, the bombs would automatically trigger. Also he admits to being the guy who was attempting to steal from the crashed spaceship back in issue #5, but doesn't elaborate on any part of that otherwise.
Anyway, this is a superhero team-up story, so, naturally, everyone splits into teams to track down and beat Imus before he can reach the detonator.
And... umm... it doesn't go great for our heroes.
Imus is just a regular (albeit inexplicably tall) guy who buys his way out of his problems, but he's also a guy with more money than God, so he can buy a lot of solutions to a lot of problems, and it turns out he's either commissioned other, better super-villains to supply him with their tech, or else just bought weapons at auction. Or else stole them. Whichever was more expedient.
To that end, between the Wingless Wizards Wonder Glove (and also some of his Gravity Pucks), Eternal BRAIN BOMBS, concealed plastic-bombs, Dr. Stranges Wand of Watoomb, Zodiacs Astro-Blaster (which Imus admits looks and sounds really stupid), Setts Serpent Staff, and the fact that he's just a naturally talented close-range fighter, he manages to defeat every single hero that comes against him.
He just chucks a rock at Scarlet Witches head
Imus is... pretty understandably underwhelmed by the performance of the worlds foremost super-team (and also the Squadron), and admits that killing millions of innocent people may have been a bit
extreme of a consequence, given the actual challenge he was up against, but, well... at least their lives wouldn't have been a waste; he got a pretty fun afternoon out of it, and in the end, isn't a multi-billionaire avoiding boredom the important thing.
Imus sure thinks so, so he detonates all his bombs...
And nothing happens.
Turns out that before the gauntlet started; Firestar remembered the Official Marvel Handbook entry on Ant-Man that her boyfriend subjected her to at the start of the issue; and figured that while the barrier that would keep the heroes inside, it wouldn't do squat to the local wild-life; so she told an SOS to an ant, which communicated the message to Hank Pym; who was able to sneak in to the forest undetected pretty easily (how he got from New York to San Francisco is anybodys guess) and was able to completely disable the trigger mechanism before Imus arrived.
And all the Avengers and Squad recovered from their whuppins and decided that fighting Imus one on one was a bad call, so they should probably just all rush him at once, and then haul him off to jail for... y'know... attempted mass-murder. So that's a great win for everyone. Except Imus I guess; since he's about to go to jail.
And also for the Squad since, whether or not they've just saved the country from a deranged billionaire, they still have to live in a hole in the ground because they get brain-washed so very, very easily...
LUCKILY, Iron Man has the idea that, well, since Imus is definitely going to jail, and all the stuff he commisioned/bought/stole was going into an evidence impound anyway; why not see what he has and see if he can make use of it;
And wouldn't you know it? Imus had a replica of the Nth Wave Projector that brought the Squadron Supreme to the 616 in the first place! And with a little technical expertise courtesy of Tony STark and Hank Pym, they're able to get it up and running again and make it able to send the Squad back to their home reality, where they're much less likely to be hypnotized into being evil!
Now it actually IS a happy ending for everyone!
Oh, Haywire decides to stay in the 616, as his entire family was dead in his own world. And to ensure that there's plenty more fantastic adventures for Haywire, courtesy of the Marvel House of Ideas.
NEXT TIME: Get Busy Kreeing or Get Busy Dying