ACT FIVE: Origins and journeys outside time! Original Vision The Swordsman is dead...soon to be buried. The woman he loved, martial arts mistress Mantis, questions her decisions, regretfully, and asks to take his body to Viet Nam for burial. The Avengers, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, kindly, supportively join her. While the Scarlet Witch needs to stay and study with her mentor, Thor asks her love, the synthezoid known as the Vision---to her dismay; “no, Vision, please don’t go with that man-trap---no matter HOW sorry she seems!” she thinks. He declines; three times now, including their recent battle with Kang the Conqueror, he has frozen in battle and is “no longer a credit to the Avengers.” On this account, however, Iron Man and the rest insist he is wrong. Thor points out Wanda will be sequestered; he will be alone. In solidarity with his team mates, he reluctantly agrees, without realizing his love Wanda’s fears. The Swordsman’s funeral is held in the g...

Pyramids, high adventure, and bittersweet romance! DEATH OF A SWORDSMAN! Sponsored by Integr8d Soul Productions. Order "Devils and Angels" or "Puzzle Girl" in black ($13 plus shipping) or white ($11 plus shipping) by sending money and message (size, color, design) to luelyron@gmail.com for PayPal, or write there for the address if you want to send a check! Devils and Angels is the cover to D'n'A: The Mountain, our b & w comic! It's only $3.25. New issue is on the drawing board now! So, Mantis, the mystic martial arts mistress, has turned to the Vision, the cerebral synthezoid heart of Earth's Mightiest Heroes, the Avengers. She suggests their situations are exactly alike: they each have questions about the truth of their natures, and almost complete control and attunement with their bodies. While hex casting mutant the Scarlet Witch secretly battles for her life under the tutelage of Agatha Harkness, Mantis tells Vision the...

Sponsored by Integr8d Soul Productions. Order "Devils and Angels" or "Puzzle Girl" in black ($13 plus shipping) or white ($11 plus shipping) by sending money and message (size, color, design) to luelyron@gmail.com for PayPal, or write there for the address if you want to send a check! Devils and Angels is the cover to D'n'A: The Mountain, our b & w comic! It's only $3.25. Act the Fourth: Death of a Swordsman by Lue Lyron By AVENGERS #128, it’s apparent that everyone feels they need someone else. Scarlet Witch: needs this new teacher to take over her life, risk her life, challenge her powers and her fundamental doubts in her abilities to recharge between hexes more quickly, and establish a relationship with nature (at the same time that her science spawned boyfriend seems to flake). Vision: this android---this man---needs to tell Scarlet Witch, Wanda, he loves her, and needs to tell Mantis he admires her, and needs some as...

When he joins the call for ‘every Avenger that ever was’ in the anniversary #100, before he returns with Mantis in AVENGERS #114, the Swordsman is still openly considered a criminal. Captain America asks, “last I heard, weren’t you in prison?” “A technicality.” He admits how he got call, along with his typical bluster: he stole one of their planes, he says, and overheard the call on the radio. Nonetheless, Thor invites him to fight for Earth, anyway. Since the beginning, there’s been a similarity to his student Hawkeye, the Archer, in skill set with a weapon and proving himself to others. Hawkeye learned the bow and arrow at the Swordsman’s side, and was the first to find out he was a rotten crook, stealing the box office for their carnival and then cutting a tightrope with Hawkeye on it, escaping, leaving him to fall. In fact, we find out Hawkeye’s real name, Clint Barton, in AVENGERS #65, when his brother returns---so ashamed is he of the crimes committed in the f...

I'll have a new piece together quickly, but in this space, I'm going to simply say I came to see Englehart's romantic quadrangle storyline in the form of a five act play. The first act begins with the Human Bombs attempting to assassinate the Vision, inflaming Wanda's mistrust of human kind and increasing her sense of isolation and identification with the Vision. Then the Swordsman and Mantis are introduced through the next scenes, earning their place in the Avengers. The second act centers around Mantis' identity mystery and sets up the rupture in existing relationships and possibility of a new one. The third act embodies the conflict as it rears its head. Wanda also begins a new, deep, and isolated relationship: with her new mentor, Agatha Harkness. This is where my next piece picks up. The fourth act features a tragedy. The fifth act resolves like a traditional comedy: with marriage! After these next three pieces, I'll be lucky to keep...

Sponsored by Integr8d Soul Productions. Order "Devils and Angels" or "Puzzle Girl" in black ($13 plus shipping) or white ($11 plus shipping) by sending money and message (size, color, design) to luelyron@gmail.com for PayPal, or write there for the address if you want to send a check! Devils and Angels is the cover to D'n'A: The Mountain, our b & w modern supernatural comic! It's only $3.25. 4-way Street So, as the team returns in #119 from a battle they had almost no chance to win (see Scarlet Witch’s post, Avengers/ Defenders War), Mantis senses Swordsman’s pain, but he makes light of it with bluster. Black Panther’s questions about Mantis turn out to be based on his respect for her training, but she says her past is nothing of note. Suddenly she pitches forward—her “Mantis Sense”?---warning of mystic vibrations of great danger in Rutland, Vermont. So quickly, the team is off to what becomes a costumed parade/ party / battle w...

Who goes from the dregs of society to the Earth's Mightiest Heroes? Fundamentally, if the leap is made, a man can raise his spirit even in poverty, but if he is a cynic along the lines of Jacques DuFresne, a.k.a. the Swordsman, the leap just seems like a never-ending fall. I probably found myself discussing these lesser-known characters because of curiosity to finally read Steve Englehart's entire Avengers run, and because blogger Colin Smith captured the pathos of the desperate Swordsman that runs almost too quietly through the outrageous fortunes and cosmic entanglements that become the saga of the Celestial Madonna. http://toobusythinkingboutcomics.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Swordsman Sword of Discernment Let’s prepare to dispense with the comic books themselves to tell you how uncomfortably life-like is the Swordsman, under the pen of Steve Englehart. See, in comic book terms, this character---never given a real name until some writer thought abou...

The original movie (1980) adaptation was co-written by Roy Thomas, the associate editor and writer who convinced Marvel to secure publishing rights to Robert E. Howard's works, for the purpose of creating sword and sorcery comics. Fantasy characters were not selling nearly as well as the psuedo-scientific super heroes and their modern trappings. The fantasy characters were written into the Marvel and DC Universes, but it had been years since titles set in archaic times had sold well. English teacher Thomas took the attractive mood and poetry of the stories into the comic book idiom. His partner was a somewhat untried British artist of 19, Barry Smith, whose adventures related to his visa were as trying as those of his comic book cohort---with less swordplay, of course. Thomas was soon to leave Marvel after working on that script. After taking the baton from Stan Lee and caretaking Marvel Comics Group, the creative end of the company, and adapting Conan to g...

Drawn by Neal Adams Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the very first issue of the X-Men in 1963, the Scarlet Witch and her protective older brother Quicksilver found themselves dealing with the margins of society. Perhaps they owe their lives and direction to the older, persuasive Magneto, but upon recurring encounters we find actual malicious harm is not to their tastes, and after a few stories they recant their orthodoxy as his minions. Surprisingly, they reappear shortly afterwards---now, along with reformed adventurer Hawkeye the Marksman, these three, all of whom were introduced as pawns in battle with heroes, join the legendary Captain America to become the core of Marvel's answer to the Justice League. Where Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, Giant Man and the Wasp had gathered, stars from early Marvel's other strips, now the Avengers was the story of revived Captain America forging these other misfits into team. They learn so much about each other and overcome dis...