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Avengers Re-Read: West Coast Avengers - Part 2 11/18/2014 7:26:32 AM
This post originally appeared on thunderalleybcp.com.
We continue the West Coast Avengers re-read.
Zodiac Attack (West Coast Avengers #25-30 and Annual #2 and Avengers Annual #16)
Another team-up with the East Coasters had the heroes entangled with old foes The Collector and The Grandmaster in a complex plot to steal the power of Death herself. Silver Surfer guest-starred in the far-ranging cosmic plot. Back in their own book, Wonder Man was on the verge of quitting the team, as his movie debuted successfully. But a fight with the Abomination and an eye-opening look into the Hollywood spin cycle had Wonder Man starting to adjust his attitude. Mockingbird struggled with keeping her secret about the Phantom Rider from Hawkeye and the team puzzled over oddball new recruit Moon Knight. Espirita, meanwhile, once again declined membership, taking off on another spiritual quest. Next, the Life Model Decoy version of the Zodiac cartel slaughtered most of the human version and replaced them. Only Taurus escaped to warn the West Coast Avengers. The team chased Zodiac, as Zodiac found ways to infiltrate the team. The end of the story, however, was something of an anti-climax. Readers got a better glimpse into Moon Knight in a follow-on clash with Taurus that raised questions in the others as to whether or not they could trust him. A clash with potential alien invaders read like the throwaway story it was.
Steve Englehart and Al Milgrom had clearly peaked with Lost in Space-Time. There were some nice moments in this arc, especially Mockingbird’s struggle with keeping her secret from Hawkeye, but there’s nothing essential here. It’s fine if you’ve read the other West Coast Avengers collections available, but isn’t for casual fans.
Vision Quest (West Coast Avengers #42-46 and Avengers West Coast #47-50)
A lot happened in the year between Zodiac Attack and this arc. Iron Man left the team as part of the fallout from his actions in the “Armor Wars” story in his solo book. After her secret came out, Mockingbird left both Hawkeye and the West Coast Avengers and Moon Knight also departed. Filling the void were classic Avengers Wasp, Vision and Scarlet Witch, who all officially joined the West Coast team.
Star auteur John Byrne came aboard as writer and penciler and he put the focus squarely on the Scarlet Witch. She woke one morning to find the Vision missing and then a faux-Ultron attacked the team. Mockingbird arrived to warn the team she’d been duped into helping a covert group form a plan to neutralize the Vision. The group turned out to be an international alliance of government security agencies who took action when Vision re-joined the Avengers, fearful of a repeat of the “Absolute Vision” scenario. They completely stripped down the Vision and also unleashed a computer virus that deleted all information related to him in the systems of the Avengers and their affiliates. Hank re-built Vision, but without his memory tapes, his personality was gone. Wonder Man, long nursing a secret love for the Scarlet Witch, refused to allow his brain waves to be used as a template for the Vision again, incurring the Witch’s wrath. Elsewhere, Hawkeye left in a huff after the U.S. Government forced U.S. Agent (who had recently been a substitute Captain America) on the team. He and Mockingbird hit Detroit to investigate a group of second-stringers calling themselves The Great Lakes Avengers. Still unsure of the state of their marriage, they decided to stay in Detroit and mentor the new heroes. As Hank rebuilt the Vision, he made another discovery: he was not the original android Human Torch as had long been assumed. The heroes wondered why Immortus had lied about that to the Vision so many years earlier, as Immortus watched from afar. Tigra had a relapse into a feral state and seemed to mutate into something more cat-like. Wasp and Hank curiously resumed a romantic relationship. And Scarlet Witch and Vision’s twin sons seemed to keep disappearing. Frustrated with her friends’ inability to restore Vision’s personality, the Witch took him to a Texas college that claimed it could help. But it was really a ruse by an ancient force that hoped to make use of the Witch’s mutant powers to be able to exploit the next stage of evolution of planetary life. The group brain-washed the Witch, who began expressing somewhat racist views based on the rhetoric of her father, Magneto. Captain America, She-Hulk and the GLA helped liberate Scarlet Witch and Vision, but the Witch wasn’t especially grateful. And in the 50th issue of the series, the original Human Torch came back to life.
Byrne definitely knew what he was doing back then. While the dialogue and text boxes were overwritten and stuffed with exposition, the plot was daring and forward-thinking. The deconstruction of the Vision was an inspired stroke that built on the character’s history and propelled his wife into dangerous new territory. If Byrne seemed less interested in some of the other plots he included, the fascinating work he did with Scarlet Witch more than compensated. He handled the characterizations well overall, though, and his artwork was strong, coming before the overly stylized approach he’d adopt later in the ‘90s. Vision Quest is a crucial chapter in Marvel history that’s highly recommended.
Darker Than Scarlet (Avengers West Coast #51-57 and #60-62)
Iron Man made a splashy return to the West Coast Avengers, though Tony Stark continued the façade that some other man had taken on the role, even though his old friends suspected otherwise. Scarlet Witch remained in the spotlight. Immortus monitored her from afar, serving as a one-man Greek chorus when he wasn’t busy eliminating alternate timelines. The Witch’s mentor, Agatha Harkness, arrived to address the issue of the Witch’s disappearing children, revealing that they weren’t real, but the manifestations of an hysterical pregnancy given substance when the Witch’s powers latched on to the shards of what were first believed to be Master Pandemonium’s soul. That villain returned and absorbed the twins, driving the Witch to hysteria. The demon Mephisto arrived and revealed that the shards were actually pieces of his own being, which he re-absorbed. Agatha announced that she’d erased the memory of the twins from the Witch’s mind. In the aftermath, the Scarlet Witch suffered a near-total emotional collapse, as the team was drawn into the Atlantis Attacks! And Acts of Vengeance cross-over stories. The latter featured her father Magneto, who wanted control of the Witch. Acts came to a head in Avengers West Coast but ended with something of an anti-climax. Still, it’s one of the earliest mentions of the Superhuman Registration Act, a concept that would be the heart of Marvel’s Civil War series almost two decades later. Wonder Man finally agreed to allow Hank to use his brain patterns to restore the Vision’s personality. But in a twist, the Vision declined, deciding instead to transfer to the East Coast team. Magneto abducted his daughter and facilitated the completion of her break with reality. She adopted a dramatic new look to go with her outlook as a Mutant Supremacist. She exhibited stunning new power levels that she used against her teammates, including the suggestion of a sexual deprivation perpetrated against a captive Wonder Man. Quicksilver arrived on the scene and the reunited family departed for Magneto’s orbital base. The Avengers pursued, but were summarily dispatched back to Earth. Quicksilver was revealed to be on the Avengers’ side (not a certainty, given the character’s then-recent history). In the middle of a major re-match, the Scarlet Witch once again went catatonic. Magneto, on the ropes, managed to escape, but the heroes soon were faced with Immortus. Immortus revealed he’d been manipulating events around the Witch for years, feeding extra energy into her to groom her to be a power source for his temporal sovereignty. Agatha Harkness succeeded in breaking through to the Witch’s inner mind and convinced her to reject the additional power, leaving Immortus in a bind with his the Time Masters to whom he reported and restoring the Witch to her normal personality.
The road to Avengers Disassembled and House of M started in this collection. The things Byrne did with the Scarlet Witch were crucial developments for what future writers would do with her. A lot of it was pretty daring, especially his willingness to allow the Witch to be outright villainous (though she’s redeemed by the arc’s end). The ever-restless Byrne departed before the story wrapped, but veteran husband-and-wife writing team Roy and Dann Thomas took over and Paul Ryan, who’d been inking Byrne’s art, shifted into the penciler role to finish things off strongly. There are some flaws, of course. Tigra is mostly M.I.A., with her friends occasionally remembering they “should” do something about her situation. The Torch returned with lots of fanfare, but was used sparsely and was “deactivated” again after only a few issues. Hawkeye returned as a regular member, but the book’s ambivalence about the state of his and Mockingbird’s marriage was an ongoing frustration. Still, this was another strong collection and is an especially important chapter in Marvel history.
Along Came a Spider-Woman (Avengers West Coast, #58-59 and 63-75)
Clashes with villains Vibro and Hydro-Man filled the gap between the abrupt departure of Byrne and the start of the Thomases and Ryan as the regular creative team. The Scarlet Witch, temporarily powerless, leaned on Wonder Man as she recovered. The Torch came back online and clashed with new character Living Lightning, a future member used here in an adversarial role. The Torch got one more issue in the spotlight, teaming up with old friend Captain America, before disappearing from the book. The next significant arc was “The Reaper and the Robot,” which saw the return from the dead of the Grim Reaper, who needed to consume a human life every 24 hours to stay alive. The team also stumbled onto a plot by Ultron to transform the population into “living robots.” Quicksilver stuck around to help and Tigra, freed of her issues in an Avengers Spotlight story, finally was back on the active list. The Witch regained her powers before the team’s climactic showdown with the two villains. Ryan’s swan song was a grudge match between Hawkeye and the U.S. Agent after the latter was voted out of the team (having lost his government mandate). Next up, the Julia Carpenter version of Spider-Woman turned up after running afoul of members of the Pacific Overlords, a new group of villains led by the mad Doctor Demonicus. The heroes scattered around the Pacific, fighting exotic new villains. Sub-Mariner and Sunfire both guest-starred in the far-ranging plot and Living Lightning returned, first as a reluctant Pacific Overlords member before switching sides. Demonicus’s end game was the formation of a new island-state that he controlled, leaving the heroes with no choice but to depart. After the battle, Tigra left the team, as did Hank Pym and the Wasp, who had also decided to end their attempt to re-kindle their romance. U.S. Agent had redeemed himself and returned to the team, along with new members Spider-Woman and Living Lightning. Finally, a guest-starring Fantastic Four was on hand as the team stumbled into the conflict between Arkon and Thundra.
The two main arcs in this collection were quite strong. “The Reaper and the Robot” was a nice use of old foes, while “The Pacific Overlords” crafted some intriguing new enemies, while making strong use of the book’s Pacific setting. The Thomases had a nice handle on the team and did some smooth character work, including some attitude backsliding from Wonder Man after the Witch made it clear she wasn’t looking for romance. And while the “villain creates his own country” gambit has become more common in recent years, it was fairly fresh back then. But poor Tigra was destined to be ill-used no matter who was writing the book. After being stranded in a retread sub-plot for the better part of two years, her resolution occurred in another series and then she got to be an active member for less than a year before being written out in a bizarrely cavalier way (she elected to hang out with Aborigines in the Australian Outback who’d helped her after her jet crashed there). There was a lot of instability on the artistic front. Ryan did nice work, but his tenure lasted less than a year (with one fill-in issue). David Ross would eventually settle in as regular penciler, but likewise with lots of fill-in work around him. Still, there was no bad artwork and the series would benefit from Ross’s stint, developing a visual style of its own. Fans without any background for the series might be lost in this collection, but for those already onboard, it’s a strong run of stories that’s worth reading.
