I've been known to romanticize weird little corners of Marvel like the title Nova. or Machine Man. But I do know a good superhero epic mega-blockbuster, and after a busy summer, I thought I'd relax with Comics and, for the first time in months, write about them. AVENGERS ANNUAL #7 of 1977 and its sequel is, at least, in the Top 7 Stories of the Seventies that ever assembled Avengers. Now, I loved the scope of Marvel-Two-In-One Annual #2 -I wondered if it wasn't the best Spider-Man stories of the 1970s. But it MIGHT be the two-part summer epic that best epitomizes stories of the Avengers, too. The others? I propose, chronologically: Kree-Skrull War from #89-98. Then, the jaunt of ever Avenger to Olympus in 99-100. The Serpent Crown encounter that brought us Squadron Sinister and Hellcat, 141-144 and 147, was it- there's another. Between Grim Reaper and Ultron's machinations next around #159-162 proves, this title hardly let up. #167 -177 compri...

Your husband gets separated from you on a time-travel adventure. You don't know if you'll ever see him again or make it home, but you make a friend- who drugs and rapes you. He fights you later, and slips off a cliff. Do you help him live? Well, here's some additional context: So, you and your secret agent-trained wife (or, you and your swashbuckling husband and AVenger team leader) get separated while traveling through time. Just as you've given up hope, you find her again. Stranded with only faith that her team will find her, she was betrayed, drugged and raped by a vigilante in the Old West. He was stupid enough to fight with her afterwards, fell off a cliff, and she let him dangle there and die. And then the two of you break up because she let an enemy die whom she could've saved? Apparently, you split off into two factions on different sides of an ethical dilemma. But I mean.. after all that, you break up? First, I've got to give it up for ...

The mystery woman known only as Mantis traces the steps to places in her memories, asking questions and attempting to find people she remembers, throughout the Vietnamese capitol of Saigon. To her increasing despair, she is told she could not have been at one house when she thought; it was built but two years ago. No one in her past can be found. What future, then, awaits this woman, if everything before her now-deceased lover was a lie? Hawkeye the Archer asks the Vision about her story even while helping Thor and Iron Man in their support of her quest. He tells of the finely-attuned, mystically-aware, aloof adventuress who came here, swearing angrily that the Libra of the Zodiac crime-lords is not her father, while he told her of the Priests of Pama, who he found while blindly staggering away with her in his arms after her mother’s murder by her uncle. The mystery of the Star Stalker and the arrival of Kang the Conqueror both further suggest she is someone...

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...

This Marvel character probably needs and deserves an introduction. His costume design, in patterns of perfect order, symbolizes his logical nature, while his colors utilize all the primaries save blue, which is always present in the costume of some Avengers team mate, among whom he has lived his publishing life mostly, in ensemble. He's probably the most iconic Avenger who's never had his own ongoing series or cartoon, which makes the Avengers comic title the home of most of his personal story. His demeanor is frankly spooky for a superhero. He's very much the thinking person's character, though. You might be pleasantly surprised so outlandish an appearance masks a very human story, in a satisfying speculative fiction way. Creation Did an evil robot create the Vision? Well, I wouldn't call Roy Thomas or John Buscema malevolent mechanoids, but that is how they told the story of Ultron-5's son in Avengers #57. His strange origin is important for the reason ...

1974: By this point in the Marvel comic book title The Avengers, we now have four of my favorite b-list and c-list characters interacting with one another, with fairly interesting depictions of the core favorites, Captain America, Iron Man, and the Mighty Thor. With this chapter to kick us off, I plan to cast about for six b and c list characters (really there will be four Western characters in our study, but we learn the most about a single one). Avengers readers of the early 1970's, if you were to talk to one, would have pretty strong opinions about these characters, who were never the main sort of super heroes who inspired (bad) movies and cartoons, but were part of the mental diet of the very different sort of Marvel Comics reader growing up in the Baby Boom, fans who often read other science fiction and literature and came to appreciate the sort of characters one would never find in comics before. I'll present: 1. the synthentic android who ponders the existence of his s...

I enjoyed a discussion, following along afterwards, about the legacy of darker visions of heroes, often spun out of inspiration for Alan Moore's Watchmen. Watchmen is indeed written with the quality of a serious book, but its treatment of heroes takes them further away from certainities of even the squabbling, emotional Lee/Kirby/Ditko superheroes popularized by Marvel in the mid 1960s. Super-Dickery examples abound, but DC comics heroes, which outsold everything but Archie in the same time period, were written specifically to save the day. To this day, the older generation remembers comics as they were frozen in this time. It's the rare superhero book, like FX, listed in this month's blogs on the side bar, that dares to evoke the fresh faces of those by-gone adventures. http://ceaseill.blogspot.com/2011/03/much-more-than-bird-or-plane-fx-by.html Has Moore, then, developed a sad legacy? Is it indeed fair to say, as my friends concur, that Moore just didn't understa...