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A Day Unlike Any Other; Let’s Read… Kurt Busieks Avengers!
- Thread starter Octopus Prime
- Start date
I think due to Busiek's sensibilities as a writer (deep respect for continuity and trying to be sure that he leaves the toys on the board for whoever comes next), given the task of doing a soft-reboot with a largely classic team following the failed alternate reality reboot of Heroes Reborn, his instincts for what to do with the many members not on the roster lead him to touch base with literally everyone and explain that they all have their own lives going on, rather than treating them as also rans not worth mentioning at all, or jokes no one could possibly care about, or fodder to be killed off in a shakeup event, as is so common in situations like this. He's acknowledging the past and giving them all a respectful sendoff.
Note also that over the course of the run he's going to at times check in with this extended cast, either for roster shakeups as people rotate in and out of the cast, one-off appearances, or big moments where the core team is desperate for as much help as they can get. This setup over issues #1-4 establishes a status quo so that these characters (many of whom aren't otherwise appearing regularly or at all in other books—like Stingray, Firebird, The Living Lightning, and at the time even Monica Rambeau) have some baseline day to day reality and they need to be pulled away from, rather than just being easter egg style fanservice. It's necessary cleanup work to reestablish a baseline after Onslaught and Heroes Reborn caused such a mess.
Everyone gets reintroduced with some degree of dignity, as a character who still exists and has their own story to deal with, even if you're not going to see them every issue.
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Yeah, even D-Man got a respectful send off.
Johnny Unusual
(He/Him)
Is it just me or does Perez's Black Widow look like Marina Sirtis?
Well it was just you
Just because Octo doesn’t do research, that doesn’t mean he has nothing to teach you
After this arc and an appearance in JLA/Avengers (also by Busiek/Perez, and which you should totally cover if you're not averse to reading a comic online through grey means, because no one's selling it since they can't work out the rights issues to keep it in print), no one uses the character again until Bendis thinks to bring him back as part of the Extremely Dark and Twisted washed up D-list superheroes milieu going on in his Jessica Jones stories.
Well... possibly next year, I guess; the Busiek run was over 50 issues long, but I ain't gonna.
They've fallen out of fashion in recent years, in favor of much briefer one-shots (still good, though), but for a good chunk of the mid-to-late aughts, Marvel put out an extra long anthology issue every year around the holidays; collecting various stories that were either stand-alone holiday themed stories, or reprints of old ones, and 2005 had what was easily one of my favorites of the lot.
The 2005 Holiday Special was also entirely Christmas themed, and two thirds of the stories prominently featured Ben Grimm, and barely acknowledged Hanukah, so that was kind of weird...
ANYWAY, the one I'm here to recap is the NON Ben Grimm one; Yes Virginia: There IS a Santron (written by Jeff Parker, with art by Reilly Brown and Pat Davidson, none of whom I am especially familiar with).
Anyway, the cold-open to this tale of Holiday Hijinx is of an overalls-clad engineer putting the finishing touches on an unseen (but very jolly looking) robot. Her name is Virginia, and BOY, does she love Santa. To a pathological degree; full on psychological breakdown when someone had the temerity to imply that, perhaps there is some degree of implausibility to the existence of a magical toy-making elf.
First off; she lives in comic books; "Magical Toy-Making Elf" is nothing. War of the Realms had armies of them marching all over the planet and nobody cared!
Second; if Santa wasn't visiting every house in a single night, then who was eating the milk and cookies?
CHECK AND MATE, ATHEISTS!
Anyhow; the key thing here is that she's going to PROVE there is such a thing as Santa, and to that end, she's built her own mecha-Claus out of some stray robot-bits she managed to scrounge up. Well... I'm sure that has no bearing on the Avengers, or their holiday plans.
WELP!
As for the Avengers themselves (as well as a handful of other non-avengeful Superheroes, like Wolverine and Spider-Man), it's Christmas Eve, so they're attending the annual Holiday party; which, this year, is at Dr. Stranges Sanctum Santorum!
And about half of the rest of the story is Holiday Party Hijinx;
She-Hulk gets into a fist-fight with Stranges Christmas tree ((it's snetient and carnivorous)
Spider-Man is constantly freaking out because everything in the Sanctum is very dangerous and his Spidey-Sense won't shut-up
Mary Jane is flirting with every eligible bachelor in the party
Tony is using remote-control mistletoe in order to trick Spider-Woman into smooching everyone (This, Tony... this is why everyone tries to kill you)
Strange went the extra mile to make sure every room in his house represents different holidays
And, of course, Luke Cage has a Sweet Christmas Sweater
Oh, and the blue guy is Gravity; he has a hard time getting in to the party because nobody else has any idea who he is either. I'm guessing he's one of the New Warriors.
Anyway, interspersing the tomfoolery, is Santron, who is, Terminator style, gradually narrowing down his search to hunt down and murder the Avengers;
We don't know WHY he's trying to murder them, but, well, he's goal driven.
Eventually, the party reaches what is probably the point everyone is going to cease talking to each other for months (Jessica learns WHY she constantly finds herself under mistletoe, and is on the verge of blasting Tony to pieces with her Venom Blasts), when, up upon the roof there arises such a clatter.
A heavy metal Santa; shooting deadly beams of anti-matter!
Santron immediately judges all the Avengers to be on the Naughty List and blasts them with a psionic weapon, knocking them all out; except for Gravity, as Santron also has no idea who he is and so, he escapes the judgement leveled against all those with Naughtiness in their soul. As per his name; Gravity increases the weight of Santrons weapons to the point they fall into the basement to keep Santron from wielding them, and giving the rest of the heroes a chance to recover.
Wolverine gets up first and does what he does best (things which are not pretty); and slices the Santa robot clean in half... which just reveals what, exactly, Virginia built him out of;
It's frickin' Ultron
We'll get to Ultron properly, later (he has a pretty significant arc in the Busiek run); but the short version is that he's a killer robot who keeps spare bodies to download his consciousness into. And this one, for some reason, is also convinced it's Santa Claus.
Everyone assembled tries their hand at stopping Santron, but has a hard time since, well, Ultrons are really hard to kill, and there's a good chunk of non-powered people in the party too, acting as Plus Ones for the Avengers (oddly, one of them is Jessica Jones who, you know, COULD lend a hand here)
Eventually, Spider-Man and Hank Pym realize that Santron is just as much Santa as it is Ultron, so it has certain rules it needs to follow that supercede it's desire to kill the Avengers and eradicate all organic life;
The Dude is Santa, and therefore he needs to eat milk and cookies in order to establish that he was there.
Regardless of whether or not those cookies were actually disguised EMP grenades.
Back at her warehouse Lab, Virginia decides to turn herself in to the police for inadvertently creating a deadly mechanical threat (I'm sure there's a police code for that), when the Avengers show up; she THINKS to arrest her personally... but nope!
They managed to get a crash-course on her complete life-story from the de-activated Santrons memory drive and learn that she just wanted to make an actual Santa Claus for kids to believe in, and had no idea that the chassis she dug out of a junkyard was a malevolent AI that still harbored murderous intent. And it was also hypnotizing her just a little bit so she wouldn't notice that she was also building it with forcefields or electrocution gauntlets or neural disruptors or anything.
Helpful side-effect of which being that the l'il bit of hypnosis also undid the psychological breakdown she suffered when someone questioned her for believing in Santa. So... y'know... net positive for everyone
Anyway, Virginia still feels bad about almost murdering the Avengers because she believed in Santa too strongly, and Cap sets her straight;
Aww, Merry Squishmas everyone
Even Peter Parker knows when to delegate when you need an inspiring speech and you have Cap right there
We’ve got some Primo Comic Book Soap Operatics, some real super friends, Lots of Punches and the ghosts of boyfriends past in… Accusations Most Foul
We’re picking up not terribly long after the new Avengers line-up was revealed to the public, and, crime fighting wise, there’s been a bit of a dry spell since then. So the first little bit of the issue is mainly getting everyone up to speed on each characters respective arcs;
Thors been busy trying to track down the missing Asgardian people and magical super weapons scattered by both Heroes Reborn and Morgan La Feys sticky fingers (partial success; he found the Casket of Ancient Winters in a Minnesota landfill)
Jarvis the Butler got a letter from Costa Verde, the fictional South American country whose chief economic export is “Turmoil”, and is quick to change the subject when someone asks him about it.
Hawkeye is feeling kind of on the outs with the team since he had to audition for a place on line-up and demanded two new people join
Carol is trying to hide the fact that she can’t access her Binary form anymore, fearing it would jeopardize her place on the team (as would her functioning alcoholism)
Vision is still recovering from having been blown in half, but he’s a hologram within Avengers mansion now so… he’s fine.
And Wanda is coping with the fact that she resurrected her ex boyfriend as a ghost only to watch him sacrifice himself almost immediately after, while blowing her ex-husband in half, and aforesaid ex husband is currently literally haunting the mansion as electronic ghost (they… do not make sympathy cards for this situation).
Everyone else is either contentedly in their element (Cap is running training drills, Tony is trying to repair Vision) or else not appearing in this comic (Firestar and Vance Astro are barely mentioned)
Anyway, after a half dozen or so of George Perez drawing the most dramatically composed pages of dramatic pathos, low scale and high, the plot kicks off after an emergency call from the Worlds Friendliest Bureaucrat; Duane Freeman
Sidebar; but I honestly love Duane and how earnestly friendly he is. I really hope he doesn’t wind up being a Skrull or something.
Seems that somethings come up that seems to require more of a Superheroic Intervention to Save Innocent Lives than Punching Space Villains in order to avenge people. And coincidentally the Avengers popping in to save the day would also avoid giving the government a black eye for being involved in a pretty major scandal.
Seems that a crashed spaceship was found off the New York harbour (this is a comic written by Kurt Busiek and edited by Tom Brevoort, so of course they can specify precisely which spaceship it was, from which specific comic, years earlier), and the Government wanted to send some specialists in to study it. And “for security reasons” they put all those specialists on the same civilian airplane… where I guess the scientists were just going to discreetly jump off it midway during the flight… except the plane was shot down by a mystery assailant and the rescue workers were having a hard time reaching the survivors before they all drown.
This news brings some more division between Clint and Steve, as Hawkeye is aghast that the government would be so cavalier about endangering innocent lives and then expecting the Avengers to bail them out, while Cap is really prioritizing saving the people whose lives are in imminent danger and pointing blame afterward.
They butt heads again when they arrive at the crash site and Cap makes some questionable calls for dividing up the team to best effect a rescue that Clint calls him out on (mainly that he’s giving Hawkeye the rookie-level tasks than the difficult ones he’s better suited for), and they almost come to blows when someone else decides to come to blows first…
THE SQUADRON SUPREME!
The Squadron is a long running sometimes-rivals and sometimes-enemies of the Avengers. They’d consider themselves Distinguished Competition, we’ll say. They’re usually the most prominent superhero team from another timeline, but sometimes they’re from the good ol’ 616, and sometimes they’re evil instead (known as the Squadron Sinister), and are often tricked into opposing the Avengers. Like… very often.
At a certain point you question how culpable they are for being tricked. Clockwise from the top, we have
Skylark who is equally Hawk and girl, and possesses the powers of Wings and Punches
Shape who is like a man made of elongated plastic
Haywire who… I have no idea who this is…
Power Princess who is the matriarch of a tribe of female warriors who travelled to the world of guys in order to teach them her peoples ways.
Hyperion is the last son of a dying world, who was so empowered by Earths sun that he became some manner of a super man
The Whizzer is the fastest man alive and is also named after pee-pee
Moonglow has magical powers and I've also never heard of her
Dr. Spectrum found a strange alien artifact that lets him create any object he can imagine out of solid colour! No evil escapes this guys sight, regardless of time of day.
As you can tell, they're some real original characters.
Anyhow, as soon as the Squadron shows up they start... umm... accusing the Avengers of not being the Avengers. Based largely on such incontrovertible evidence as "Firestar and Vance Astro aren't Avengers" and "Everyone watched the Avengers die when Onslaught exploded!".
I mean... those facts are accurate... but it's not like watching someone die actually means anything in comic books.
Anyway, Cap says "Hey! Nobody questions my veracity!" and then a big ol' comic book fight breaks out. And nominally it's to show off what the SS can do for new readers, and partly it's because George Perez was very patient and didn't draw any ludicrously elaborate action scenes or complicated panel compositions for 12 whole pages.
And look... I considered Perez to be one of my all time favorite artists all along, but if this series has shown me nothing else, it's that I've been selling him short.
LOOK AT THIS DAMN LAYOUT!
We've got Hawkeye being slammed into the side of the plane after Whizzer decks him (as per the previous page), then Power-Princess decking Iron-Man straight down WHICH IS INTEGRATED INTO THE NEXT SEQUENCE OF PANELS!
GEORGE!
GEORGE, YOU'VE VERY GOOD AT COMIC BOOKS!
Anyhow, the fight is generally inconclusive as to which team is superior, but a few noteworthy things happen during it; first off when Iron Man is sucker-punched into the ocean by Power Princess, he sees a second team of divers head to the spaceship that this entire ruckus was started over, but can't really take the time to investigate farther since Hawkeye was on the brink of death and needed immediate help, and Wanda noticed that her magic has been behaving strangely ever since the fight against Morgan La Fey a few issues ago, which comes to a head when she inadvertently summons Simons ghost, again and chucks him like a Hadouken; knocking out Moonglow.
At around this point, Hyperion says "See? We TOLD YOU you were imposters! Everyone knows Wonder Man is dead, so if he's on your team, that proves you didn't do any research!" also, because the Avengers immediately ran off to fight the Squadron rather than save the STILL IN PERIL people on the crashed plane, and once the passengers are all safe, he and the rest of the Squad fly off.
Cap can't really refute that he had a good point on that second thing. Mea culpa.
Anyway, the whole encounter was televised, and between Hyperions accusations, and the fact that the public is now pretty distrustful of superheroes in general thanks to the Thunderbolts being revealed as villains all along (check out T-Bolts #10, True Believers), so The Worlds Nicest Functionary, Duane, has to breake some bad news to the team; he can buy them 48 hours to find out why the Squadron was denigrating their name, or else the Government is going to force the Avengers to disband.
Meanwhile, in a spooky shadowy lab, a mysterious goateed man who is apparently the mastermind behind all this is pretty content with how things have worked out for him.
Legit not sure who this could be; no shortage of Evil Goatee Guys in Marvel, especially in the 90s...
NEXT TIME: CHALLENGE OF THE AVENGEFUL FRIENDS
According to the Marvel Comics wiki, he's the only Squadron member without a Diametrical Counterpart.
I'm not interested in a Squadron that doesn't include Nighthawk
He does help to distinguish the Squadron from teams of Different Characters.
He dresses in dark colours and looks like a knight, but secretly, he's also a very public wealthy figure.
He's such an original character!
He's such an original character!
Plz read my Inspectors Illustrated Presents: Adventures of Gargoyle-Dude, original character do not steal
Well dang it, now I want to read that.
We’ve got some quickly resolved tension, some unconfronted tension, some violent outbursts (literal and metaphorical) and zero out of twelve steps taken in… Earths Mightiest Frauds
Coming down from last issue, where an attempted sea-rescue went badly because Marvels most mindcontrolled team; The Squadron Supreme, showed up and declared the Avengers fakes, which everyone in America immediately accepted as fact.
I mean, the Squadron is constantly mislead or manipulated into being in the wrong so it stands to reason they’re overdue to being right about something.
Anyway, taking the fickleness of the American public pretty personally is Thor, who is doing what he always does when he’s having a trying day, making a sudden violent thunderstorm appear around him while shouting vengeance in his fathers name (solid gag; the next page shows he’s doing this in Tony Starks living room) while all the other Avengers keep us updated on their respective character arcs;
Wanda is still having a hard time coping with the fact that her still genuinely affectionate deceased boyfriend is able to reappear whenever she wants like a Ghost Type Pokemon, while her most recent boyfriend is technically a ghost and is emotionally distant (as he’s a robot who was only recently given emotions again).
Hawkeye confronts Steve about how he feels like Caps been bossing him around too much, and Cap explains that teams really only function if one person is the leader but he’d happily step down if Clint wants to be the leader (Hawkeye is mollified and realizes that nobody could ever be giving Captain America orders, so he lets the situation drop)
Carol has advanced to day-drinking, and heavily, and Wanda catches her in the middle of it. She makes a couple of weak excuses and tries to pass them off as jokes, but the implications definitely don’t escape Wanda’s notice (full credit here to Kurt, Carols closeted alcoholism is treated incredibly authentically, especially for a comic book where the main thrust of the story is “We have to prove we aren’t evil clones to the government”)
And Firestar and Vance aren’t in this story either.
Anyway, while most of the team thinks they should head to Washington to prove to the President that they’re definitely really the Avengers; Cap vetos that since, well, the population of the Marvel Universe is incredibly fickle and public opinion will go right back to considering them social paragons by the time the next issue rolls around. And besides; the Squadron is probably being mind-controlled, since those guys can’t go two weeks without Ringster or Mesmero or someone hypnotizing them. So if they can figure who is controlling them and break that control, you know, problem solved.
To that end, the team saddles up in the Quinjet and heads to the Squadrons home base; the underground lab installation of Project PEGASUS.
Like SHIELD, or SWORD, or AIM, or MODOK (but, surprisingly, not HYDRA), Project PEGASUS is one of those Marvel organizations who’s name is a clumsy acronym where the words are chosen just so they’d spell something cool; in this case Potential Energy Group Alternate Sources United States. Which loosely implies that they’re a mad science organization that studies weird science crap.
If you have a box that fell from outer space and it emits a Strange Ray of some kind, that’s P.E.G.A.S.U.S.’ bailiwick. And there’s a 99% chance they will either lose control of it, or they’ll get robbed by, I don’t know, Count Nefaria or someone.
Anyway, the Squadron Supreme came from another dimension, and most of them emit strange rays, so that’s why they live at the Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S. base.
Along the way, Cap tries to ask Carol why, exactly, she didn’t bother going to Binary Mode in the last issue, or at all since they put her on the team, which she interprets as Cap asking about any other personal issues she may be experiencing so she deflects and starts screaming about how Cap is mansplaining Kree born Cosmic superpowers to her.
It’s… subtle…
Anyway at the Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S. base (and autocorrect is filling that in now I’m happy to report), the Avengers are begrudgingly let in, and the current acting director of the base (whose name I forgot to write down but he’s a guy with a mustache… Hoffman or Hauptmann or something like that) is scrambling to find plausible excuses to deny them entry. Since the public is now pretty sure the Avengers are all actually evil duplicates and P.E.G.A.S.U.S. gets broken into by Supervillains a lot; they’d like to be over cautious this time.
Luckily, as Cap points out, they still have high ranking security clearance so he technically outranks the director when there’s cause to suspect P.E.G.A.S.U.S. might be involved in comic book-style chicanery.
Furthermore, Carol apparently met one of the guards before and related a pretty inconspicuous memory of it and the director has to admit that even if they were fakes there’s no way they’d have known to corroborate a story like that before.
The text implies Carol is threatening the guard but the art looks like she’s flirting with him. But I’ve read enough Captain Marvel comics to know that violence is Carols love language.
Inside the base, the team splits up to investigate the Squadron to see if there’s any hints to why they’re insisting the Avengers are imposters (Hawkeye sees Whizzers room, with a framed photo of his family and realizes that since he’s from an alternate timeline, if his family still did exist in the 616, they’d be strangers to him. Carol finds Dr. Spectrums room and insults his taste in pornography and beer) while Cap checks P.E.G.A.S.U.S.s superhuman records to see if any known mind-controlly guys are at large at the moment.
I friggin’ love that most of the records are mugshots, but Ringmaster poses. This isn’t a mugshot it’s a headshot.
Anyway, shortly thereafter, the Squadron comes home, and realizes that the guys they're PRETTY SURE are LMDs or Skrulls, or Ben Reillys or something barged into their house and started making fun of their home decor and decide to start a fight over it. Which, all things considered, is pretty much the most justified reason for a fight to break out between superhero teams I've ever read.
And, why yes, the George Perez fight scene is spectacular to behold.
Wanda summons Simons ghost again, and notices it's getting easier each time (Simon is pretty casual about the fact that he's effectively a Pokemon, and only slightly annoyed that he keeps getting summoned for superhero fights).
Anyway, the fight is generally much more in the Avengers' favor this time around, and abruptly ends when Hawkeye turns away from the Squaddies he's fighting and instead shoots the P.E.G.A.S.U.S. director right in the chest... which surprises everyone by passing straight through him and hitting the solid air behind him!
It turns out the director wasn't ever even real; he was a realistic hologram designed to help hide the actual guy who was brainwashing the Squadron all along; The Corruptor!
The Corrupter is... erm... gimme a sec here...
<several moments of hasty googling>
He's a Nova and Thor bad guy and he has hypnotic sweat. He immediately started a criminal organization when he got his Hypno-Sweat powers from a pharmacy fire and left his wife and children to pursue Crime professionally.
Of course Kurt knew who he was and was just waiting to spring him on Marvel comics readers in 1998.
Anyway, with Corruptor having been hit by a couple of arrows, breaking the image inducer that disguised his otherwise pretty conspicuous appearance, his hypnotic hold over the Squadron disappears, and they all realize they'd received YET ANOTHER brain-whammy that convinced them they were actually bad guys, but a mental-failsafe given to Corruptor wiped his own mind before anyone could interrogate him; as very little of this whole arc seemed to be in whic particular wheelhouse and he was clearly taking orders from someone.
Hyperion says "Gee, must be nice to have your name cleared so you can go on living as shining examples for all of the world to aspire to, as opposed to living in a literal hole in the ground in an alternate universe" and Cap responds "Well, maybe work on not getting hypnotized into being evil so often and maybe people will be able to stand being around you more often."
Outside the P.E.G.A.S.U.S. Base, Carol makes a snide remark about Cap needing a hypnotic booster like Corruptor had so people will listen to him, which leads Cap to respond that, once again, she didn't go Binary when she needed to, so clearly she can't do that anymore and, as team leader he really needs to know what her super-powers are now if she's going to be ona superhero team.
And, because she's a closet alcoholic, she immediately goes on the defensive when questioned about anything and flies off in a huff screaming that "this isn't working!"
Iron Man sees this and says "Oh... yeah... I'm pretty familiar with this kind of thing..."
MEANWHILE, the mysterious goatee-man from the previous issue is informed that his secret plan involving hypnotizing the Squadron, and discrediting the Avengers, and stealing from a crashed spaceship is proceeding nicely. And we see his office, which includes a bunch of historical Marvel universe ephemera; like a severed Ultron head being used as an ashtray, and that weird eyeball fish that Namor used, like, once, way back in the 60s.
And we also get his name, which is Imus Champion, and I have no idea who that is. But I guess we're going to find out next issue:
NEXT TIME: The Terrible Secret of Imus Champion!
I wonder if this was before or after Perez drew that other room full of Marvel memorabilia...
My gut says this came after; IIRC, Future Imperfect was a mid 90s story, not a Late 90s.
Also, kind of weird how haphazardly the photo of Mar-Vell is in that room; you’d think Rick would have A stronger association with him than he did with most other heroes
Also, kind of weird how haphazardly the photo of Mar-Vell is in that room; you’d think Rick would have A stronger association with him than he did with most other heroes
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
In the opening story of Mark Waid's Heroes Return Captain America (like Busiek's Avengers and Iron Man, another back to basics soft reboot), he loses his shield for ~2 years of comics. It's shattered by Hydra and he has to recover the pieces. At some point he gets like a laser/solid hologram (or whatever, don't remember) round shield replacement before restoring the original round shield, which will also show up here.
Yeah Caps complained a few times about not being able to frisbee it around anymore
We’ve got a recap, an intervention, a trial all at the same time) and an abrupt WHOLE WHACK of space lasers in… Live Kree or Die: The Court Martial of Carol Danvers Full disclosure I was kind of dreading this as it was the culmination of a story woven through multiple books which I wasn’t reading, and those are *rarely* comprehensible. But, well, it’s a comic written by Kurt Busiek so I was in good hands.
Anyhow, we start, as all the best stories do, with a giant brain hidden inside the moon.
This is the Kree Supreme Intelligence (or Supremor, depending on how formal you wish to be); the absolute ruler of the alien Kree. A race that somehow manages to *not* be the worst aliens in the Marvel universe, despite being a eugenics obsessed expansionist militant regime. Though, to be fair, a lot of that militant expansionism and eugenics comes from the Supremor itself, or its loyalists. The average Kree on the street is much less fascist.
Anyway, the relevant parts here is that the Krees obsession with perfecting their own DNA wound up backfiring pretty severely over the years and as a result they suffer species-wide genetic damage, which the Supremor tried to fix by blasting his own people with a Nega-Bomb, nearly wiping out the species, with the hope of jumpstarting their stagnant genes. He’s also of the mind that somehow humanity has the means to fix that as humans and Kree are *pretty similar* except that humans have far more potential for development, and also Kree generally have baby-blue skin.
That lead him to the Moon (actually a long abandoned research outpost for the Kree) where he could study the unknowing humans. Unfortunately, Supremors most loyal, least competent followers, *The Lunatic Legion* found him, and vowed to aide him to their dying breath.
...So they got the ever loving crap kicked out of them over the course of four interconnected but otherwise unrelated books that month. Managing to barely eke out just enough of a win each time to get the pieces they need to create the ultimate Kree Weapon; an Omni Wave Projector that has the potential to mutate every single human being into a perfect replica of the ideal Kree (or else kill them); which would, of course, be the members of the Lunatic Legion because they’re pretty sure that undying support of the Supremor with severe genetic problems is basically all a Kree needs to make it big, and they're the only local source of pure Kree DNA at the moment.
They also don’t listen to all the times Supremor tells them that’s the exact opposite of what he wants because they’re *pretty sure* he’s just testing their loyalty.
Largely unaware of all that is The Avengers, as they have their own major concern; specifically that it’s now clear to everyone that Carol is an alcoholic and has been showing up to Avenge while blindly drunk. This whole scene is half recap of the other parts of the crossover (Carol stumbles in to a bunch of Kree realigious zealots doing things that fall under the category of “generally evil”, and then doing a 6/10 job thwarting them owing to the fact that she was presently sloshed), partly a tribunal to vote if Carol is fit for active service, and partly a crisis intervention.
While the Avengers admit that, yes, Carols actions did alert them to the Lunatic Legions presence and ill intent, she also caused more problems than she solved because of her drinking, and also her Defense consisted of ranting that everyone was against her from the start and if not for her we'd all be speaking Kree right now, and *so what* if she’s had a drink or two in her life and also was hiding the fact that she’s lost roughly half her power level? Like *you're* so perfect!
Naturally that Defense didn’t work as she’d hoped and is unanimously voted to be taken off the Active Avenger roster, and asked to get help.
Once again, weirdly believable and realistic depiction of closeted alcoholism in a superhero comic invoking space men on the moon called “The Lunatic Legion”.
This decision also hits Wanda pretty hard, as she remembers the circumstances of the last time Carol left the Avengers (one of the rare times The Story We Don’t Talk About is referenced), and Kurt sliiiiightly retcons the circumstances so they’re still *appalling* but less harsh, and a huge black mark against the Avengers as an organization (she says that Carol was “hypnotized for days into falling in love with a monster before anyone realized something was wrong”). And then Wonderman suddenly materializes; which is surprising as he’d only manifested when Wanda was in physical danger, but apparently he does it when she’s sufficiently emotionally distraught too.
Simon himself doesn’t seem to understand what’s happening to him any more than anyone else does, but he’s happy to be any kind of support Wanda needs.
Anyway, amidst a tearful plea from Wanda to Carol asking her to seek help for her alcoholism, we get the single most completely *bonkers ass, bugnuts* abrupt tone shift I’ve ever seen in the entire comic book medium.
There are some lines of dialogue that immediately become part of the collective conscious in comics books. "With great power must come great respoibility" "I did it 35 Minutes Ago", "Welcome to the X-Men, I hope you survive the experience", "I am the Tiger Force at the Heart of All Things" "I don't want to cure cancer, I want to turn people into DINOSAURS".
And "A communication has just come from the moon; THE LUNATIC LEGION IS STILL A THREAT!" beats them all.
This is the most blunt way George Perez could possibly say “I’m done drawing gripping drama of people talking; I want to draw *SPACE LASERS ON THE MOON*” And what kind of comic writer would Kurt be if he didn’t oblige?
So the Avengers get into a Quinjet fit for moon travel to defeat the Lunatic Legion once and for all, and Carol *insists* they reinstate her because they *need* a flying brick to save the entire planet… and they turn her down. The rest of this arc has proven time and again that she’s a liability in the field.
Carol is insistent on proving to herself more than anyone else that she’s *fine* and everyone else is just overacting to her drinking (after all, Thor drinks mead and Clint drinks beer, and Tony is famous for having an entire demon in a bottle), but she can’t even manage to break Earth Orbit under her own power let alone reaching the moon, so the rest of her role in this issue is the story cutting back to her failing to go “straight up” correctly.
Anyway, on the Moon (which Vance is *so excited* by; the rest of the team has gone to the moon a *lot*) we get what Perez was itching for since the issue began; a kick ass superpower space fight against militant outer space religious zealots.
As expected; it’s a delight.
Luckily, the Lunatic Legion is pretty… middlin’ as far as interplanetary threats are concerned; they couldn’t stand up to individual Avengers supported by a sloppy-drunk, let alone the fully Assembled team, and get torn apart in record time.
Unluckily, the Avengers didn’t realize what kind of zealots they were.
As soon as each legionnaire is knocked out, they disappear in a cloud of Krackle, and the Avengers realize that the legion was just there to delay them, and they were planning on sacrificing themselves, turning their bodies into pure energy to power the Omni Projector, which is now gassed up to activate and permanently mutate the entire human race into more fanatical Kree clones. Or else kill them. Theyre not too fussy as to which but they’re pretty sure it’s the former.
Both are pretty bad.
Anyway, once again it’s the newbies who are willing to think outside the box enough to save the day; Vance is well versed enough in the Official Handbook to know that, among the myriad things that happens when Thor spins his hammer is that it can create a miniature Bifrost to teleport things across space; so all he has to do is give that hammer a sufficient twirl to get a big space-hole opened, and then chuck the Wave Projector in before it can fire. A plan which is solid and would likely have worked perfectly, except that the last remining member of the Lunatic Legion, armed with Ronan the Accusers Universe Weapon, started whacking him in the head. After a bit of prodding from Vance, Firestar uses her microwave powers to bolster and enlarge the space portal before it can fade, and is eventually able to make it big enough for Vance and Iron Man to shove it through.
And I'm realizing as I recap this, and not as I was reading it, that while Firestars hesitance sounds to the Avengers, and at first glance, to be like just a lack of confidence in her own abilities to save the day, she also shows genuine reluctance to use them that way; even if it means the extinction of the human race. Which implies there might be something else keeping her from using them, and really throws a new light on how little she wants to be an Avenger.
Anyway, since you, reading this, were not turned into a clone of a Kree religious zealot, courtesy of a moon-ray, the plan works, and the Avengers are celebrated as heroes, again. And we get ourselves a twofer epilogue;
Captain America confronts the Supreme Intelligence in the aftermath; and points out that there's a two people who live on the moon could have sent the SOS that let the Avengers know the Lunatic Legion was about to attack, and one of them has a pretty strict policy about not interfering. To which the Supreme Intelligence says "Why would I possibly want to stop my own people from doing something. C'mon... I totally love the Kree, there's no way I would ever operate in a way that would hinder them!" and besides, what would he have to gain by getting rid of the Lunatic Legion, just as groups of SHIELD and Starcore technicians come in to the Kree base to maintain and monitor all of the Supremors necessary functions and give him access to the best and brightest of humanity to study.
And on Earth, Carol is in a dive bar, overcome with the knowledge that the Avengers straight up did not need her, even slightly, to help with dealing with full on Captain Marvel bad guys, in her main element; and she realizes that she really can not rely on her strength as a superhero to make them come to her, she has to earn her place on the team again, with the issue ending on her staring at an untouched glass of booze unsure of whether or not she's going to take it.
Again, a really gripping bit of personal drama. Wonder how they're going to follow that up
NEXT TIME: THE TRIATHALON MAN!