Last week, I called for you to send me who you wanted to see featured in the final edition of the Avengers Guide and you responded; I did my best to get to as many as I could, but if I missed your choice, I apologize; e-mail me and I’ll probably find time to give you at least two or three sentences on anybody I didn’t cover.
(thanks one final time to Micro Heroes for my cute li’l visual aids”¦seriously, if you’re bored and want to kill an hour in an enjoyable way, visit this site)
THE INVISIBLE WOMAN
Lots of people point to Walt Simonson’s addition of Fantastic Four stalwarts Reed & Sue Richards (aka Mr. Fantastic & The Invisible Woman) to his short-lived team of Avengers (the lineup debuted in issue #300 and also included Captain America in his Captain persona, Thor and Gilgamesh; within five or six issues, Cap and Thor remained, but the other three were gone) as one of the worst mistakes in the history of the Avengers; I disagree. Adding Reed Richards to the team may have been a mistake, but not Sue.
Reed Richards is a complete control freak; read any big Marvel crossover and you’ll see that Reed is almost always the guy that summons all the heroes together and tells the X-Men to do this and Alpha Flight to do that (the sole exception being Secret Wars, but in that case it made sense to defer to Captain America, as it was war, one big fight, not a situation in which there was an opportunity to sit back and strategize). He’s wicked smart and thinks at a pace the rest of us (and even super-smart folks like Tony Stark and Bruce Banner) can’t even imagine, so asking him to follow somebody else’s plan is like trying to get an ADD kid to sit still for ten minutes. However, this same way of thinking that makes Reed so smart also makes it impossible for him to lead a professional team like the Avengers because he doesn’t have the patience to take the time to clue the rest of his teammates in and allow them to function his team; leading the Fantastic Four is different because they’re family, meaning they both tolerate him and have learned to read him.
The whole point of putting Reed in the Avengers was to show that he couldn’t defer to Captain America and to prove, again, that only Cap can lead the Avengers. It was a very short-term storyline and it made sense to resolve it in only a few issues and send Reed back to the FF; had it gone on much longer, it would have just been annoying.
But what about Sue?
Sue has been the leader of the Fantastic Four in the past when Reed was indisposed (thought to be dead at the hands of Dr. Doom”¦really he got hidden somewhere in the timestream by Hyperstorm, a warped future version of his son Franklin) and demonstrated the ability to lead without being as overbearing or difficult to follow as her husband. She listened to teammates and allies but was still able to put her foot down and flex her considerable powers (she did beat The Hulk once, you know) when necessary.
Doesn’t that sound like somebody the Avengers could use?
The criticism that the Marvel Universe lacks an abundance of strong female characters is a common one. She-Hulk is really the only female character to carry a longstanding Marvel solo series and while the Avengers have experimented with trying to spotlight many female characters, they always seem to come back to The Wasp and The Scarlet Witch in the end. Bringing Sue into the Avengers on a regular basis would have been a nice showcase for her outside of the Fantastic Four, where the nature of the title more or less necessitates an equal spotlight for all four members of the team. It would have been interesting to how Sue would function under Cap’s leadership and what kind of friendships she would have formed. Sue has often been called the mother figure of the Marvel Universe, and how often have the Avengers needed a mother (who could kick some serious tail)?
Wouldn’t it have been cool to see Sue consoling Wanda over the Vision (and thus perhaps preventing Disassembled)? Taking the ale away from Thor & Hercules (and Iron Man)? Waiting up late for She-Hulk and then scolding her for being a skank? Baking Cap apple pie?
Ok, maybe I’m taking the mother thing a bit too far, but still, Sue could have been to the Fantastic Four what Beast was to the X-Men: a classic Avenger.
Or maybe I’m wrong; maybe the nature of the Fantastic Four, the very strong dynamic between Reed, Sue, Ben & Johnny, precludes any of them from really lasting too long on another team.
We’ll probably never know.
JACK OF HEARTS
It may surprise you all, given that I am a big fan of both Geoff Johns and the Avengers, that I didn’t really enjoy Geoff’s run on Avengers. However, Geoff did do one thing (well, he did a few things, but this to me was the biggest): he actually made Jack of Hearts an interesting character.
Before Geoff worked his magic, Jack was (and admittedly I’m basing this on only having read a few appearances of his prior to Geoff’s tenure on Avengers) just some guy with generic energy powers and one of the most elaborate and thus hideous costumes in the history of comics (I can literally picture artists breaking into hives and being forced into insane asylums screaming “oh god”¦all those card symbols”¦WHY?!” when writers told them Jack of Hearts was scheduled for a guest appearance).
Geoff took a long hard at look at Jack’s situation: that he had to wear aforementioned ugly containment suit in order not to explode and kill everybody around him and then, to boot, had to spend days in complete isolation with not even a TV or a book to keep him busy (because the room he was isolated in would incinerate them) also to prevent that pesky explosion.
Read that last sentence back to you, get past the crappy costume, and think long and hard about having to spend days of your life sitting alone in a room with nothing to do.
Would you be a little pissed off? Would you be a complete jerk?
Damn right you would be.
So Geoff made Jack of Hearts into an insufferable prick that couldn’t get along with anybody. But, in the single best issue of his run, Geoff took half an issue (the other half was devoted to Ant-Man) to explain to us exactly why Jack’s life sucked so bad and why he acted the way he did”¦and suddenly, this character you either didn’t care about or hated, you felt sorry for.
Then the next issue he went back to being an ass and you hated him again”¦but it was still in the back of your mind.
The one thing that was never formally resolved in Geoff’s run was Ant-Man’s question to Jack during the Red Zone arc: why be a hero? Ant-Man did it for his daughter, but Jack had no answer.
In the end, Jack sacrificed his own life to kill a child molester by dragging him off into space and then finally blowing up. He knew he was going to die or spend half of his life in complete boring isolation, so he decided to do something right on the way out.
He never did answer that question, but I think that’s because he never really found his answer. We’re not all born to be heroes; Jack of Hearts certainly wasn’t, he was just a guy with really crappy life circumstances and did the hero thing most likely because he had powers, a lame costume, and because it was that or be a villain.
Jack didn’t really have the makings of a hero, but he didn’t want to be a villain either.
Sometimes, that’s enough.
(on a sidenote I’m going to put in parentheses because I don’t want it intruding on what I just wrote, the only Jack of Hearts appearance I own prior to his Avengers membership is a Silver Surfer Annual where he is hanging out on some other planet making time with a hot naked girl named Ganymede. Nowhere in Jack’s run as an Avenger does he or either writer who handled him mention what became of his relationship with Ganymede; my hearty thanks to any reader who can provide me with that information).
QUASAR
Anybody realize that Quasar was Kyle Rayner ten or so years before Kyle Rayner? I mean, no he wasn’t a hip and happening graphic artist who lived in Soho (or wherever Kyle lived), he was a nerdy research guy who lived in a mountain”¦named Wendell.
Ok, let me start over.
Just as Kyle Rayner emerged from nowhere to replace Hal Jordan as Green Lantern, so did Wendell “Quasar” Vaughn (my lord”¦that’s as if the kid with the absolute nerdiest name in the world got saddled with the absolute nerdiest nickname in the world”¦it’s worse than James “Black Nebula Liver” Hatton III”¦you’re a cruel man, Mr. Gruenwald) replace another Silver Age icon/space cop named Captain Marvel as “Protector of the Universe,” inheriting CM’s quantum bands and a swanky variation of his old red, blue and yellow costume.
Yet where was your moral outrage over Quasar, H.E.A.T. members? Did you not love Captain Marvel as you did Hal? Who are you not to love Captain Marvel?! After all he did for you”¦WHO ARE YOU?!?!
Anyhow, as Tim Stevens no doubt wanted me to say when he requested me to do a Quasar bio, my main problem with Quasar these days is the fact that he has become a horrible walking continuity contradictory disaster. Back in the last big Marvel-wide crossover, Maximum Security, the resolution came when Quasar absorbed the essence of Ego the Living Planet into himself, thus ending the villain’s threat to overtake the Earth. The one stipulation and sole fallout of Maximum Security was that Quasar could not return to Earth on penalty of Ego emerging and the Earth being destroyed. It both added a new depth to Quasa’s character and gave writers an excuse to never use him.
Yet he showed up with no explanation during Avengers Disassembled”¦on Earth.
Ok, well, Disassembled had a lot going on and it was just a splash page, so we’ll let it go.
Last week, Quasar showed up in Fantastic Four”¦on Earth.
Ok, I love Mark Waid, and its cool he’s using Quasar as opposed to a more obvious choice like Silver Surfer (I do actually quite like Quasar), but”¦dammit, as much as I’d like to pretend I’m above getting annoyed by stupid little continuity glitches like this, I’m just a man.
THE SCARLET WITCH
I suspect if you sat Brian Michael Bendis and me down in a room and asked to speak about Avengers Disassembled, there are a great many things we would disagree on, but there is one thing, one major thing, over which I am in the same camp as Mr. Bendis: The Scarlet Witch was destined to become a tragic figure.
You look at her early appearances and it seems like Wanda was always unhappy, and who can blame her. She had an idyllic if strange childhood that was shattered when her family was seemingly killed and her salvation came in the form of a madman: Magneto. Quicksilver has always been the fiery and hot-tempered of the Maximoff twins, Wanda the more rational and level-headed: Pietro might have believed in Magneto on some level in those early days, but no doubt Wanda always knew what he believed in and what she was doing in his name was wrong. But this was a girl with nothing but a brother who loved her fiercely and a man, even if he was a villain, who had saved her from death: she did not like what she was doing, but she suffered through it rather than lose them.
When the twins left the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and joined the Avengers, fame and the love of the masses that once hated them followed, but did any of this make Wanda truly happy? I’d argue that it’s impossible to know; Wanda expressed little emotion in those early days as an Avenger outside of a love for and devotion to her brother. Wanda never aspired to be a hero any more than she aspired to be a villain; any decision over her role in life was taken out of her hands long before she was old enough or had seen enough of the world to know what she was skilled at and what she was passionate about doing (one could argue she lost control over her destiny from birth due to her being a mutant). Wanda was a ship helplessly adrift in the sea from childhood, Pietro the only thing even resembling a rudder.
Her romance with The Vision was probably the first thing Wanda truly owned in all her life. I’ve said it here before that I loved the Scarlet Witch-Vision romance; I thought it was beautiful. I thought it was two people, two life forces, so strongly drawn to one another that nothing to do with their exterior beings could stop that love; it was a true testament to the power of love. I don’t agree with the “popular” opinion of many writers these days that it was so simple as “she was in love with a vacuum cleaner with brains”¦that’s creepy” (and I’m so glad that Mr. Bendis included their marriage as one of the highpoints of Avengers history, appropriately noted by Wonder Man and beautifully painted by David Mack, in Avengers Finale).
Still, while her love of The Vision may have finally given her something in her life she cared about and could call her own, it drove a wedge between her and Pietro that to this day has never fully been removed. Considering what Pietro meant to her and how influential he and his opinion were over the tabula rasa that was Wanda Maximoff, it can’t be underscored how devastating the rift between siblings was, regardless of the cause and how much Wanda believed in it.
I don’t think I’ve read any story ever featuring the Scarlet Witch in which she was more content than when she was living in suburbia with The Vision and her children. It was here that we saw Wanda finally aspiring to a life that she and she alone wanted, not one thrust on her by Magneto or Quicksilver, not as a hero or a villain, but as a wife and a mother. I believe Wanda was fundamentally a good person, but I don’t think any amount of strangers’ lives she saved as an Avenger warmed her heart as much as holding her children or kissing her husband; that doesn’t make her a bad person, it makes her refreshingly normal.
Thus, it’s not hard to see Mr. Bendis’ point when you consider that after years of drifting without purpose, after finally finding peace and happiness, Wanda had it ripped from her abruptly and painfully.
First became the revelations of her past and chief among them the fact that Magneto was her father. Though Magneto was considered a hero at the time, it still could not have been easy for Wanda to accept into her life and her heart a man who had caused her such pain and in many ways robbed her of a childhood. To learn that what small memories she had of the childhood she did experience were in many ways a lie was also no doubt devastating. Also around this time, Pietro went insane and betrayed the Avengers, becoming a villain; I own particularly creepy issue of West Coast Avengers in which Quicksilver, once blindly loyal to his sister and fiercely protective, places her in a deathtrap with the other Avengers with no remorse whatsoever; there is no way this image could not have haunted Wanda every night, even after Pietro regained his wits and rejoined the side of angels.
Yet still, through all of this personal trauma and even through a return to her and her husband risking their lives once more as active Avengers, Wanda had her family to anchor her, to keep her fulfilled, and the character was probably at its peak.
This would not last.
Any fans of the Scarlet Witch and anybody who read Avengers Disassembled knows what happened next, so I’ll try and keep it brief, but for the sake of those who may not know, I will cover the events nonetheless (though it honestly makes me sad to even write them, as Wanda is one of those characters, like Hawkeye, I’ve almost come to think of as a real person over the years and I feel as though I’m retelling the hardest personal tragedies of a lost friend).
It was revealed that Wanda’s miraculous children (after all, she had them with an android) were not real, that they were magical constructs created by Mephisto and Master Pandemonium to torture her. Suddenly Wanda’s perfect life, the happiness she waited years for, was uprooted violently. The only person who could share her pain was her husband, The Vision”¦and within weeks he too was gone, unwittingly delivered to the U.S. government by Wanda’s “friend” and fellow Avenger, Mockingbird, and then dismantled as he was deemed a threat to national security. If the site of her husband, the man she loved, the first thing she had ever felt passion for of her own volition, laid out as nothing more than a series of circuits and wires was not enough to break her, his reconstruction as soulless creature unable to feel emotion, and the betrayal of another supposed friend, Wonder Man, upon whose brain patterns the Vision’s own were based and that he refused to allow to be used again because he had designs of his own on Wanda, was more than sufficient.
Wanda snapped, giving herself over entirely to the dark side, aligning with her once more villainous father and trying to kill the Avengers, the people she blamed for the nightmare her dream life had quickly become.
Then”¦she regained her senses. She turned against Magneto, returning to the Avengers, once more becoming a force for good. She was hardened, but not broken, able to continue as a hero.
As much as I wish that were plausible”¦it just wasn’t. This was a woman who had never shown much passion for heroism returning to an existence of risking her life for people she didn’t even know after everything she’d ever valued in life had been torn from her.
If it were me, I would have curled up into a ball and cried every night or lashed out against the world, or done both. I realize that in comic books characters often endure personal and emotional crises of this magnitude and continue to endure as heroes, but many of those characters are born heroes (Captain America, Hawkeye, Superman, Hal Jordan); Wanda was not. The only other characters I can think to compare Wanda to in the “why doesn’t he just screw it all, he’s suffered so much” category are Spider-Man and Batman, but both continue on out of a loyalty to memories of loved ones who have fallen; again, no such excuse for Wanda.
Of all her incarnations following the loss of her family, the Wanda that made the most sense was also the one the least well received: the way she was as leader of Force Works. She was driven, completely focused on her job and shutting out any notion of a personal life and being quick to unleash a temper she was not previously known for. This was not the meek and innocent Scarlet Witch fans had grown up with, so they rejected her and she was done away with.
It’s ironic; the Scarlet Witch stories I enjoyed the most and through which I fell in love with the character were the ones told by Kurt Busiek, but I realize now having done this analysis and having read past stories, the Scarlet Witch I loved really shouldn’t have ever existed. I don’t think Mr. Busiek was wrong to return Wanda to a happier state (and to his credit, he did reference very early on how directionless she felt as an Avenger without the ties to Pietro or The Vision and had her focus on business as deputy leader, both of which showing me that Mr. Busiek may have gotten the character better than just about any other writer), it was what the readers wanted and he told wonderful stories with her and had she remained in that state I would have been happy to ignore past stories and just enjoy the current; had he been pressed to explain why Wanda continued to act as a hero and an Avenger after all she had been through, I’m confident Mr. Busiek would have come up with a great explanation.
However, the point of this little essay remains: as much as readers may not have wanted to read it, as painful as it was emotionally, the story Mr. Bendis told with Wanda had precedent and ultimately it made sense. I don’t agree with everything he did (revealing chaos magic to be a lie, having the whole thing be caused by Wasp making a stupid comment when he didn’t even really need that excuse and it made the characters look dumb), but in the end, the core story was the natural evolution of the character.
Honestly, I wish all those horrible things had never happened to Wanda, that her children had been real and The Vision still loved her”¦but they did happen. Some writers chose to ignore them, others wrote around them, but Mr. Bendis acknowledged them, and for this I can’t fault him.
It’s a sad tale, but a very real one (and one of the threads from Disassembled I am honestly emotionally invested in following). Often in comics we do see characters endure tremendous hardship and emerge with renewed strength as a force for good, but just as in real life, it can’t always be the case.
STINGRAY
Everybody says the same thing about Stingray: damn, he has a cool costume, why don’t they use him more.
Why not? Honestly, what are his powers? I’ve read at least half a dozen Stingray stories and I have no clue what his capabilities are. It’s like an artist drew up a sketch and a writer said “ooh, cool” without bothering to come up with a backstory (to be fair to whoever created Stingray, his occupation as an oceanographer and his motivation as just wanting to protect the environment are actually quite cool and it’s entirely possible he or she were very distinct in what Stingray can do and other writers have just not bothered to use his origin as reference).
All I’ve ever seen Stingray used for are recon and as a hostage for the bad guys.
Whatever; conclusively define what the suit can do, then retire Walter Newell to being an oceanographer 24/7 and give the suit to Rick Jones, lord knows the poor kid has earned it.
THE SWORDSMAN
Uh”¦damn”¦I knew this would happen, I knew somebody would request a bio on one of the few Avengers I don’t really have much of an opinion on. I mean, I know the history of The Swordsman (as I will shortly display), but the only appearances of his I actually own and have read have him as a zombie member of The Grim Reape’s Legion of the Unliving or as a faux demon version in that Thunderbolts Annual where Hawkeye travels to “hell.”
Jacques Duquesne, as far as I know, emerged from the womb with a cheesy pencil thin moustache and desire to be a hired thug. Several years later, probably after dropping out of college (do they have college in France?), Jacques joined a circus and was Hawkeye’s mentor in”¦stuff. During his downtime, Swordsman committed bank robberies and stuff with fellow circus loser Trickshot (another Hawkeye mentor, he can really pick ‘em) and on his own. One day, young Clint Barton (Hawkeye, for those of you wondering) caught Swordsman as he was coming back from one of these nefarious deeds, so Swordsman tossed him off a trapeze, breaking his leg. Jacques took off from the circus after this, committing himself totally to crime.
Oh, I neglected to mention that Jacques’ primary skill set was the ability to use a sword”¦I figure that was kind of self explanatory, but in case it wasn’t, there you go.
So anyhow, Swordsman turned up years later claiming to have reformed and used his old connection to Hawkeye to guilt the kid into helping him join the Avengers; in fact, Swordsman was acting as a flunky to The Mandarin and kidnapped Captain America, hoping to draw out Mandy’s archenemy Iron Man, but instead the other Avengers whooped him and threw him in jail, his employer leaving him to rot.
Swordsman showed up a couple more times as a flunky (never acting on his own) and then disappeared for a bit. When he returned, he had Vietnamese martial artist with antennae hottie (did I just type that?) Mantis by his side. Apparently, Swordsman hit rock bottom while working as a mercenary out East (see me I would have considered working with a fat guy with a bow and arrow named Trickshot rock bottom, but it’s all about standards), started questioning what he’d done with his life and began drinking heavily until Mantis inspired him to try harder to be somebody. This led the duo back to the U.S. where both petitioned to join the Avengers, and because heroes have to be kinda dumb in order to advance the plot, they got to.
Not long after that, Swordsman heroically sacrificed his life to save Mantis from Kang. The story was not quite over as a sentient plant being took on Swordsman’s form and he and Mantis got married.
I can’t make this stuff up.
Oh, I forgot, I do own one other Swordsman appearance: the Avengers/Defenders War, which occurred during his brief Avengers stint. He duels with the Valkyrie, ultimately defeating her because she’s distracted by his lame pickup lines (this occurred while he was with Mantis”¦once a sleaze, always a sleaze).
Not only did Marvel feel this character was so successful he deserved a second incarnation (one from a parallel Earth), but there will apparently be a third Swordsman showing up in the pages of Thunderbolts in a few months (many of us are praying it’s really Hawkeye). Again I remind you that all the man can do is use a sword.
The moral of the Swordsman story: creepy French guys with pencil moustaches never amount to much unless they are actually plants.
TIGRA
Last week in Who’s Who In The DCU, I referred to Grodd as a “niche character,” a character that writers will quickly resort to when they have a story that requires a certain archetype (in Grodd’s case the scary inhuman monster) because that character is recognizable and credible in that role. In Tigra’s case, she did not start out as a niche character, but because she wasn’t of any particular use in her original incarnation, she was later transformed into one.
Greer Nelson began as The Cat, another failed Marvel attempt to create a strong female character with staying power (she debuted around the same time as Spider-Woman and She-Hulk). The Cat was a pretty generic character, a woman with a suit that gave her powers like (say it with me) a cat and a fairly bland personality. The only appearance of The Cat I own is in Essential Marvel Team-Up Volume 1 and it’s nothing to write home about.
So The Cat’s series was cancelled and she was deemed unnecessary by Marvel creators.
However, something Marvel (and the Avengers) did need was a token shameless flirty sexpot (again: niche character) to shake things up, so rather than create one, they modified a pre-existing character: The Cat.
It did have some precedent: feline-based characters have always been portrayed in pop culture as being overly sexy and flirtatious (see: Catwoman), so if Marvel wanted to use somebody already in their stable of characters for this purpose, The Cat was a sensible choice (and she had virtually no fan following to offend).
So The Cat’s husband was killed off (to make her available) and a ritual involving The Night People (I think”¦or was that D-Man’s cult of homeless people? Were there two groups of Night People?) transformed Greer into a sort of human cat hybrid with tiger stripes. Gone was the bodysuit and in was a skimpy black bikini; gone was the bland persona and in was a wild girl who hit on every male in sight; gone was The Cat and in was Tigra.
Tigra had a quick stint on the main Avengers roster but became better known during a long stint with the West Coast Avengers. She came onto Wonder Man, Moon Knight and some other bizarre choices and succeeded in injecting some fun and unpredictability into a group of characters that could have easily become morose and depressing (never a good idea to stick Simon Williams and Hank Pym in the same room together with Marc Spector there to “liven things up” for too long).
Sadly, the problem with this particular niche character is that after she’s hit on every guy and been rejected, either the roster of the team she’s on needs to change or she needs to go; people were pretty happy with the basic WCA roster, so that meant it was time for Tigra to find the cat flap.
I believe it was John Byrne (or possibly his successor) that had Tigra gradually become more feline and wild (and sexually aggressive) to the point where she had to leave the team and go have a vision quest or whatever to regain her humanity. She showed back up during the big Avengers reunion at the beginning of volume three and then hitched a ride with Quasar into outer space afterwards and had some adventures with the Avengers Infinity team (how did she breath out there? Good question). A couple years back, Tigra was one of only two Avengers (the other being The Vision) to receive an “Icons” limited series; it had beautiful Mike Deodato art, but I didn’t buy it so I honestly couldn’t tell you what it was about.
THOR
Earlier in this guide I said that the reason The Hulk could never last as a member of the Avengers is because he’s just too darn powerful. A lot of people took me to task saying that if this is my line of reasoning for Hulk, Thor is also too powerful to be a long term Avenger, and they’ve got a point.
I’ll supplement my argument for The Hulk by saying he’s too hard to control as well as too powerful; Thor has only gone nuts and had to have been taken down by other heroes once that I know of (Blood & Thunder), so he’s a big gun, but one the Avengers can aim and fire.
Still, it’s true: Thor just isn’t a great Avenger because he’s too powerful. He can handle problems by himself that the rest of the team probably couldn’t handle; back in the 70s and 80s this was a major plot point as Thor left the team many times because he didn’t feel comfortable with this. Even back during the Kang War at the end of Busiek’s run, Thor felt uncomfortable getting attached to teammates who he felt he’d ultimately outlive (this was the precursor to Thor: King of Asgard and all that as well as Thor leaving the Avengers for what may be a long while).
Yet despite all this, Thor is a character always associated with the Avengers and he’s spent more time with the team than most other members. Why?
Well, the most obvious reason was that he was a founding member. At the time the Avengers came into being, Marvel banded their most popular characters together, and since Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four weren’t considered fair game, that was somewhat slim pickings, so regardless of power levels, anybody sustaining a series made the cut. Since Thor stuck around longer than The Hulk (again, by necessity, until the series was popular enough on its own), he became ingrained as a part of the Avengers and writers and fans expected him to be a member of the team more often than not.
There were many ways writers dealt with having such a powerful individual player on the team, the aforementioned crises of faith being one of them. Another way is that he’s often been the deus ex machina; Thor will not be among the Avengers at the beginning of a mission (usually he’s “off in Asgard”) and then shows up at the end to save the day.
But as often as he’s been on the team, Thor has also probably left the Avengers more than any other member because the power questions inevitably becomes one writers don’t want to tackle. It’s interesting that Superman is still able to function fairly well as a member of the JLA even past the Silver Age “every villain has Kryptonite” era while Thor hasn’t been a regular member of the Avengers for a few years now and I’d be surprised to see him play much of a role in Brian Bendis’ New Avengers. The difference is that Superman is a born leader, whereas Thor is a warrior; Supes probably could swoop in and deal with every JLA case by himself, but he recognizes that if he does that, there are little details he could miss that could end up blowing up in his face. Superman prefers to lead the team, delegating responsibility and having everybody play to their strengths, thus ensuring minimal margin for error. Thor is just a giant bomb that Captain America needs to aim and fire at the target; realistically, those two could be the only two guys on the Avengers roster.
Still, all this doesn’t mean I’m opposed to Thor as an Avenger, I just think he works best in small doses or as an ally to the team. The coolest Thor as an Avengers moments to me are the ones where he shows up out of nowhere and kicks butt, rallying the rest of the team to get off the ground and do the same; there’s nothing quite like a nutso dude with long blond hair swinging a hammer and firing off lightning bolts to get you fired up. Great examples of this can be found in Busiek’s “Ultron Unlimited” story or Johns’ first Avengers arc. Still, you can’t have these moments every issues, so I think it’s best to save Thor for when the time is right.
THUNDERSTRIKE
I think it’s unfair that Thunderstrike so often gets lumped in with his fellow “big three clones” War Machine and USAgent (though to be fair I like all three characters); yes, all three were temporary replacements for their respective counterparts (Thor, Iron Man and Captain America) in their titles then were given edgier costumes and their own titles during the 90s glut (USAgent actually only got a mini-series, but he also got longer membership in the Avengers than the other two and is the only one who remains a regularly featured character in the pages of New Invaders), but scratch the surface and there are worlds of difference here. Jim Rhodes was a longtime sidekick to Tony Stark as well as an accomplished tough guy before he became Iron Man and then War Machine while John Walker was a villain with superpowers out to supplant Captain America before he did for real as Super Patriot; Eric Masterson was just a guy working construction who happened to get bonded to Thor because Odin was having another one of his moods (you know the ones).
So whereas Rhodes and Walker were somewhat prepared for the mantles they assumed, Masterson was totally thrust into his, with the power of a freaking god to boot. But he rose to the occasion, serving alongside the Avengers and doing his best not to let anybody know he wasn’t the real Thor because he recognized the need for Thor and what he represented; Eric had the heart of a true hero.
Incidentally, Eric as “Thor II” was one of the few times Thor actually worked as a member of the Avengers; without the real Tho’s eons of experience and with Masterson’s mortal doubts and fears about the very big shoes he was filling, Thor finally had that “Kryptonite” necessary to make him a workable character within a team structure.
After Eric’s tenure as Thor proper ended, I’m sure many fans were happy to see him get a hammer of his own and saw him as thoroughly deserving. Unfortunately, the adventures of a mortal playing as a god didn’t work as well when said god was back in circulation to create an aura of redundancy, and despite writer Tom DeFalco’s boundless enthusiasm, Thunderstrike did not last long as a regular series.
I’m not going to blame the failure of Thunderstrike entirely on his costume, but one must admit that Tho’s basic costume streamlined by a sleeveless leather jacket, a pony tail and a thunder bolt earring reeks pretty badly of the 90s (and I am a huge hypocrite as were I to become a superhero there is little doubt a sleeveless leather jacket and earring of some sort would be part of my costume).
I do wish more people had supported Thunderstrike (again, a hypocrite am I as I never bought a single issue) as I think it was a cool idea. If nothing else, I wish DeFalco hadn’t killed him off at the end of said series (though I understand why Tom did what he did as Eric was a very personal creation to him and the cancellation of the series probably hit him hard) because he made a good Avenger, a much better one than Thor in my humble opinion.
THE WASP
Go back and read any of the very early issues of Avengers, pretty much the first one hundred issues or so (but especially the first dozen) and you will find The Wasp, aka millionaire heiress/airhead Janet Van Dyne, to be the most annoying character in the history of comics. Honestly, she was like every relentlessly vapid superhero girlfriend and every agonizingly perky teen sidekick, the two worst Golden/early Silver Age clichés, smooshed into one incredibly irritating package. She would spend all her time flittering around and getting captured by the Avengers enemies then getting saved and mooning over Tho’s golden locks or Giant Man’s beautiful blue eyes with lines that would have set women’s lib back decades of the civil rights movement rise and fell based on issues of Avengers.
So how from these beyond humble beginnings did one of the greatest, most unique and most likable Marvel heroines of all time emerge? Simple: writers wouldn’t admit how annoying Wasp was and start over from square one (except during The Crossing”¦ugh”¦), they’d persist in keeping her original personality intact but simply adding more layers until finally readers would relent and like her”¦and they did.
The simple fact of it is that not every smart or successful person you know also happens to wake up each morning thinking of how to bring about World peace; some of these people are incredibly shallow”¦it doesn’t make them any less intelligent or impressive, people just have many sides to them, this is a fact of life.
Janet Van Dyne has many sides to her character, far more than most of her Silver Age contemporaries and perhaps more than any other Marvel heroine.
On the surface is a shallow heiress who thinks only about shopping and men and who is more concerned with what costume she is wearing that how she’s going to beat Whirlwind. But scratch the surface and The Wasp is a clever and dedicated person, a woman smart and creative enough to create her own fashion empire and driven enough to do so though she had no financial need. She is a woman strong-willed enough that she was able to endure physical abuse at the hands of her husband, divorce and the public shame and imprisonment of that same husband, yet she persevered not only to stand by him, but lead the Avengers through some of their most troubled periods.
Janet Van Dyne is interesting because she is a dichotomy, and that makes her real. Both Marvel and DC have tried so hard to create female characters that resonate with female readers that they create the perfect role model who also happens to be an impossible one, not to mention bland and boring. Wasp is flawed and thus interesting, she has many sides and is thus real, one of us. Most Avengers found her to be a likable and competent leader because she made the effort to hear the opinions of others (she is a socialite remember) and was respectful and mindful of her teammates, always paying a compliment. But there were others, like Hercules, who didn’t take her seriously because she was too nice and thus she lost her cool; this is where interesting stories come from, not from Wonder Woman leading a team just because she’s Wonder Woman and everybody respects her.
The Wasp was without a doubt at her best as chairperson of the Avengers, in particular during the classic Under Siege storyline (probably my personal favorite Avengers story). The Masters of Evil have taken over the Mansion, put Hercules in a coma, beaten Jarvis to a pulp and are holding The Black Knight hostage”¦seems like a perfect time for Captain America to give one of his trademark inspirational speeches and rally the troops, right? Yeah, sure would be”¦except he rushed in early and got captured too. No, it’s The Wasp who must lead the Avengers through their darkest hour. We see sides of Janet we’ve never seen before: doubt that she is fit to lead (until this point she had always been the model of confidence) and signs that she is ready to give up”¦but she does not. She assembles the ragtag team of Thor, Ant-Man II and Dr. Druid and goes against all odds to free her friends and save the day. The team is devastated when the story ends, and none more so than The Wasp, but she won’t let her teammates see that, they have to see her smiling so that they still believe, no matter how much she is hurting inside (incidentally: buy Avengers: Under Siege as soon as you possibly can! You will not regret it).
Recent writers like Chuck Austen and Brian Michael Bendis have missed the target with The Wasp by focusing only on the surface layer, that annoying character from the first twelve issues, having her start a reckless affair with Hawkeye (this is the woman who refused to be with Iron Man even right after Hank had just hit her) and being enough of an airhead to blab to Wanda about her kids thus kicking off the most horrific tragedy in Avengers history (this is the woman who was smart and competent enough to lead the Avengers through THEIR DARKEST HOUR”¦and she forgets that she’s not supposed to mention the one thing that will hurt her mentally unstable friend more than anything else? And don’t get me started on “I gotta pee. You gotta pee? I gotta pee,” ugh”¦). These guys need to go read the really good stuff (or even as recently as Kurt Busiek’s run”¦which I suppose does also fall under the category of “the really good stuff”) and see a far more complex character than the one they’re carelessly tossing about.
WONDER MAN
I’ve always preferred Wonder Man to Thor or even Hercules as the Avengers resident strong dude because he possesses the humanity and weakness those two lack in the form of absolutely insane pathos. Whether it’s guilt over his brother Eric being one of the Avengers’ worst enemies as The Grim Reaper, unrequited lust/love for The Scarlet Witch to the point where he won’t help her save her husband and actually thinks that will get her to like him, or his strange love/hate relationship with The Vision, Wonder Man is one of the most powerful dudes on Earth with the decision making ability and emotional stability of a high school junior thinking with his hormones and I love it!
Simon Williams got his start in the world of being a superhuman because he embezzled money due to the fact that he was a massive failure in the world of big business and had to be bailed out by volunteering to undergo tests from the nefarious Baron Zemo that made him incredibly strong. Zemo used Wonder Man to infiltrate the Avengers, but Williams was ultimately a good person and turned against Zemo, despite the fact that only Zemo had the secret for the treatments that kept him from dying from ionic radiation poisoning, and so did Wonder Man die a hero’s death.
But any fan of the Avengers knows that the second cardinal rule of the team (after “never ever let Crystal or Dr. Druid join again”) is “Wonder Man never stays dead for long!”
Wondy came back about a hundred and change issues later as a zombie under the control of his evil brother, but the Avengers snapped him out of it and he joined the team. It was around this time that WM developed a terrible fear of “dying” again and thus was more or less useless as he developed stage fright every time he got near a bad guy. Awesome!
Eventually, Wonder Man got over the stage fright thing and left the Avengers for a bit to pursue a career in Hollywood, though he still found time to drop in for occasionally missions and clown around with The Beast (comics’ original odd couple and the best buddy duo in the medium aside from possibly Blue Beetle & Booster Gold).
When Wondy helped found the Avengers West Coast, he had swung completely to the other end of the confidence meter thanks to his (limited) success as an actor and made every attempt to usurp leadership from Hawkeye”¦but the best part was the way he did it, not mouthing off outright like Hawk used to do to Cap or even questioning Clint’s leadership abilities, no, by using lines like “you must be so tired from being such a great leader, Clint, and you can’t fly”¦I’ll handle this one pal, it’s on me!” What a jerk!
But poor Wonder Man meant well, just as I’m sure he did when he refused to let The Vision, the man he considered like a brother, borrow his brain patterns again because he had the hots for his bro’s wife. This was far more effective than say sending flowers as Wanda went insane and killed Simon the brought him back to life (duh) for kicks.
For awhile, Wonder Man even got his own solo series, but the only real personal problems he had there was slight anger management issues, so let’s skip right ahead to the debut of Force Works where in issue number one Wonder Man gets blown up by a Kree spaceship! Oh no, he’s dead for good this time!
Psych!!
Wonder Man returned from the dead for a record third time when Kurt Busiek took over Avengers as he was lingering the air as ionic energy the whole time and his love for Wanda allowed him to regain form and return to the land of the clearly living (after another quick stint as a zombie).
At long last, Wanda and Simon were a couple, and Wondy handled himself with all the tact of a bull in a china shop, openly making out with the estranged wife of his “brother” The Vision and then acting all shocked when Vision punched him out and left the team.
Eventually the Scarlet Witch-Wonder Man romance fizzled and Simon went back to Hollywood; he’s made sporadic appearances since, but nothing too major. I’m hoping Bendis brings him back as Bendis has a knack for writing characters completely overwhelmed by personal problems and a lack of emotional maturity and Simon is the king of that!
This bio may have made it seem as though I’m mocking Wonder Man (and to be fair Iam) and thus am being sarcastic about liking him, but I’m not, I seriously love Wonder Man!
Another thing I love about him”¦his horrible taste in costumes!
Just in time for Christmas”¦it’s Wonder Man!
Look Ma, it’s that 3-D Man fella!
Safari time! Nothing says stealth like bright red!
Know what would be cool? If they added a goofy looking jet-pack!
Even animated Wonder Man couldn’t see that purple, green and red really don’t go together”¦
Ahh”¦memories”¦
As this feature has been running, many have asked me my favorite Avengers lineup as well as my dream Avengers lineup; both are tough questions because in my mind every lineup had it’s charms and there are so many great characters I’d love to see as Avengers.
I guess three lineups stand out as among my favorites:
-The classic Roy Thomas/Neal Adams lineup, the one that fought the Kree/Skrull War, consisting of Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, The Vision, The Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver & Goliath II (Hawkeye). It was a nice mix of experience and power with youth and uncertainty. This is the period when the Vision-Scarlet Witch romance began and neither Quicksilver nor Hawkeye could handle it. One of the best things for me was the “big three” (Cap, Iron Man & Thor) seeing that for all their power, even they had trouble solving personal disputes between their hotheaded teammates.
-The “government mandated” lineup writer David Micheline (via Henry Peter Gyrich) put together of Captain America, Iron Man, The Wasp, The Scarlet Witch, The Vision, Beast & The Falcon, with Hawkeye, Wonder Man and Ms. Marvel being around to pitch in when needed. The banter and personal dynamics within this life can’t be beat, whether it’s Hawkeye whining that Falcon has his spot, Wanda and Vision working to make their marriage work, Ms. Marvel hitting on Tony Stark without knowing he’s Iron Man or Beast and Wonder Man clowning around. Many people understandably single this period out as the Avengers’ golden age.
-Still, my favorite lineup of all time remains the one Kurt Busiek & George Perez put together to kick off the third volume of Avengers: Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Hawkeye, The Scarlet Witch, The Vision, Warbird, Firestar & Justice. The team literally only stayed intact for about three or four issues, but if you look at those names, you see the perfect balance of everything you want for an Avengers team: experience, power, pathos, humor, youth”¦everything. This was the second golden age of the Avengers, again, for good reason.
Still, there are very few Avengers lineups I haven’t had some affinity for. “Under Siege” remains to me among the best Avengers stories ever, so that lineup does something for me (Wasp, Captain America, Hercules, Black Knight, Captain Marvel, Namor). The ragtag team that was featured in the early 200s (Wasp, Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Hawkeye, She-Hulk, Captain Marvel, Starfox) made for some fun stories as did the one just before the dark ages began with #300 (Captain Marvel, Thor, Black Knight, She-Hulk, Namor, Dr. Druid). Heck, even the Harras team (Black Widow, Captain America, Giant-Man, The Vision, Hercules, Black Knight, Crystal, Sersi, Thunderstrike) had a sort of “losers trying to make it big” appeal.
The only lineup I truly couldn’t stand was when John Byrne was in charge of both books and he made it completely malleable with members coming and going as needed; I like relationships to be built and broken over time in my comics, thank you very much.
To create my ultimate Avengers team, I’d take the Busiek/Perez lineup and tweak it slightly: I’d sub Wonder Man for Thor, Wasp for Warbird, Darkhawk for Justice and throw in The Black Panther and (why not) The Invisible Woman for fun.
At the end of the day, any Avengers lineup is cool, yes even one featuring Wolverine and Spider-Man, because it’s all about bringing heroes together and seeing what happens next.
That’s going to do it for me this week; thanks to everybody who gave me requests for this week’s column (sorry if I didn’t get to yours) and to everybody who has told me they enjoyed this Avengers feature, it’s been a blast to do.
Next week: the end of The Watchtower as we know it.
It’s my last column for The Nexus, and I’m going out like Butch Cassidy & Sundance, guns a’blazin’, as I tell my entire story, start to finish, from 411Wrestling to The Nexus, Behind The Music/E! True Hollywood story style.
It should be fun, hope to see y’all there (figuratively of course).
In the mean time, thanks for reading.
