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 ...

Captain (Ms.) Marvel - Thanos - Avengers! Best Spider-Man Team Ups, 1977 So, the game goes, team-ups with Spider-Man during the year 1977. Imagine if Spider-Man could’ve even once met the Superfriends, or just apppeared with Batman, drawn by Steve Ditko and Alex Toth. Ah well, when you’re a kid, publishing universes are yours to blend like phonics. 1977. How'd that go...“Night Fever,” Three’s Company….come and knock on our door, dun-na-nuh-na-nuh-na-here we go! Marvel Team-Up #56 I guess 1st true 1977 calendar date releases. MTU probably shipped first in the rotation of new books? See, by that year, a different Spider-Man comic book series from Marvel published a new issue each week. Marvel Team-Up, Amazing Spider-Man, Peter Parker(bear w/ me it’s long), The Spectacular Spider-Man, and Marvel Tales. Marvel Tales settled into a groove of reprinting Amazing Spider-Man stories in order from about five years before, and remained so until 1982, the year the ti...

From the start, The Avengers, the Marvel Comic, was created to bring together as many of the company’s big solo stars as possible. His appearance in Captain America: Civil War marked the untangling of difficulties with rights-holder Sony, to allow a Spider-Man to come flipping onto that Berlin battlefield and snatch the shield of no less than Cap himself! A complicated circumstance under which to join any form of Avengers, but a logical one: Stark took a chance on the mystery teen and masterminded his recruitment. His non-adventures afterwards are the set-up to Spider-Man: Homecoming. I love the personally-filmed documentary of Pete’s Berlin mission and even the selfies going into that fight- what better way to reflect how star-struck and still immature Parker still was? With daily texts back to liason Happy Hogan, Pete yearns to break the bonds of his successful but comparatively uneventful scholastic life at Midtown High school. His tendency towards barging in without consult...

Here’s Seven Stern moments I’ll never forget, from the early part of Uncle Rog’s Avengers run: #230 Hank Pym’s defense of Hawkeye/ his goodbye words to the Wasp “I never expected to speak before you again. And now, I can think of no finer final statement than this: it has been my sincere pleasure to have known Hawkeye’s fellowship, as it has been to know yours.” His quote of Mark Twain as he commends the ashes of Egghead’s just another great moment in #230. #232 Code Name: Star Fox Wasp: Frankly, the President was hesitant to approve anyone named “Eros.” He would rather you were called something less provocative in public. You’re a pretty foxy guy…and you’ve been out among the stars---how about Starfox?” Captain America: “Well, it would makes things easier---and you’d still be Eros to your friends! After all, Captain America’s not MY real name!” Starfox: “It isn’t?” #235 The Wasp figures out how to re-assign her teammates to do the most good. #236 Spider-Man’s very spideriness: ...

I love writing these things from memory, so I can emphasize the most memorable parts and keep emphasis on the characters, rather than plot summary. It IS good to check back when I have the issue on hand (thanks, Joe Braband and David Holt, again!)---that way, we don’t miss bits like “Mechano-Marauder.” We could make this small role a spotlight, too; after all, he re-appears in #221 in the middle of the membership drive! I don’t think Assistant Editor’s Month would’ve been complete without him, either; it’s there we discover he’s an inventor who won the lottery. Here, he attacks Avengers Mansion in his exo-skeleton. Iron Man casually engages him in combat while the Wasp, Captain America, and Thor arrive! (It’s this meeting where the returned Wasp nominates herself as chairperson in “an election that’s long overdue.”) Shellhead greets them each in turn while addressing the ranting would-be…what IS he trying to accomplish, anyway? So if he beats an Avenger, he will get a rep? I ...

Now, the remaining two in our quartet both made their comic book names with molecules; the founding blocks of any chemical identity, smaller than the eye can see, yet a part of all things! In these stories, both are quite psychologically troubled, as well. It’s no accident Jim Shooter suggests therapy strongly in the sagas of both Hank Pym, a.k.a. Yellowjacket and Owen Reece, a.k.a. the Molecule Man. Both suffer from mental illnesses exacerbated by their fantastic powers. Their contrast is extremely instructive: despite their similar alienation and the soft science fiction basis of their powers, one, Hank, feels he is not truly powerful enough, while Owen’s driven crazy by the nearly unlimited abilities! By the end of these stories, one’s on his way to hope, while the other, in trying to do the right thing under duress, falls deep into the belly of the beast---an accused traitor to the United States Tigra’s the star of the first pages of #215, with her misadventures at the bank and...

Courtesy the Tigra Picture Page http://www.thetigrapicturepage.com/ FALLEN ANGELS Tigra the Cat Woman, demon hero Ghost Rider, emotionally-backwards Molecule Man, and Hank Pym, hero no more: these four center our next discussion of Jim Shooter’s 1980’s run on THE MIGHTY AVENGERS by Marvel Comics Group. Specifically, we’re examining these four in light of issues #214-217, published in 1981. First: the Ghost Rider. Johnny Blaze is so emotionally troubled at this point, he’s brooding out in the desert, homeless, aimless, hopeless. It’s no accident we meet him on the heels of Hank Pym’s breakdown chronicled over the two months before. Shooter really nails this character: in his despair, his envy over the speeding playboy with the girl and the two hundred mph beautiful auto sparks anger at the injustice of his now- nowhere life. So, he unleashes the Ghost Rider, flame-skull vigilante now virtually free of human influence. He still has Blaze’s champion rider skills and uses them to f...

Tragic Linnea. Quirky Tigra. Emotionally stunted Molecule Man. Troubled Ghost Rider. Comical Stankowitz. Imperious Moon Dragon. One volatile mix of core Avengers, set against the perils of Pym. Shake well with renderings by Bob Hall, Alan Weiss, and embellish it with Brett Breeding. Drink in Jim Shooter’s 1980’s Avengers. I found an absorbing depiction of Pyrrhic victory in the guest-filled Michael Korvac saga, but when Shooter returned three years later, working with sub-plots and strong characterization, the stops were truly pulled out! I haven’t made it through every issue of the late 1970’s incarnation of AVENGERS---I found the entirety of the 1980 issues sadly unreadable, with art that looked like its figures are melting and one fill-in writer after the next. Mr. Shooter himself has detailed the end of Gene Colan’s run, coinciding with the membership shake-up that began a year of Jim Shooter’s Avengers. Everything fundamentally funky 70’s about the title starts to vanish...

You can say that again, Cap. CONCLUSIONS (AND CONTUSIONS AND CLEARED-UP CONFUSIONS) Roger Stern had a knack around ’83 for writing one-word titles for his AMAZING SPIDER-MAN stories. So, my little tribute to that: “Conclusions!” Er, I probably ought to read #277 again real quick. Or go on to bed. FIRST: It's really the ideal third or fourth AVENGERS movie, imho. Maybe, with some re-"Vision" even a template to the sequel of the one coming out next summer! I would love to write that treatment...all credit to this team for inspiring me so. Write absent Tony Stark/ Iron Man into absent Namor's place and it starts writing itself. As a kid, one thing I LOVED was pretending to be the different scenes of a fight, heroes versus villains, crossing right over into each other's way. Here, you have Thor on one hand, cursed with brittle bones, fighting the ever-growing Goliath, and on the other, the Wrecker, now with the power of all the Wrecking Crew channeled back i...

Is this, like, Part 20? Part 21? LOL JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: 1980S Avengers by Marvel Comics Group 2:37 am, on the last morning (for now, at least) I have to give to this series about the great Roger Stern-written comic books. Let’s see. Time to flip open a couple of comic books again! (I actually prefer to write from whatever inspired me enough to remember, and keep reading them separate from writing so I don't just end up with a plot summary, which is achingly boring to do.) I need to stop a moment and mention how I like the head shots with no back ground that Buscema/Palmer use once or twice an issue. They’re really consummate story tellers, and they serve the story selflessly with competency. The faces are busy telling the story and giving you a sense of the tone of voice; you know where everything occurs; there’s a certain classically-minded aesthetic. These pro illustrators never lose the enthusiasm of Roger’s story, so filled with incidence that nonetheless carries...