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Avengers Re-Read: The 2000s - Part 4 2/18/2015 8:06:52 AM
This post originally appeared on www.thunderalleybcp.com
The Avengers Re-Read concludes its march through the 2000s.
New Avengers: Secret Invasion
Book 1 (New Avengers #38-42)
Book 2 (New Avengers #43-47)
For the duration of the Secret Invasion event, New Avengers and its sister title Mighty Avengers essentially became annexes to the main series. They were used both to expand on scenes from the main story and also to provide deep background about the events leading to Secret Invasion. The tales, on an issue-to-issue basis, were often quite interesting, but trying to read them divorced from the main event can leave a reader adrift.
Book 1 commenced with a confrontation between Luke and Jessica over her decision to register with the Initiative for the safety of their daughter. It’s a fairly interesting scene in many ways. Luke repeated many of the same self-righteous pronouncements he’d been pounding for over a year, but Jessica was deployed on behalf of all the readers who’d had enough and basically told Luke to grow the hell up. The rest of the team moved into an apartment that Iron Fist owned, still uneasy around one another. Echo encountered a Skrull in the shape of Daredevil, who attempted to take Echo’s place. Wolverine, who had tailed Echo, saved her.
After those scenes connected to the ongoing continuity, the arc plunged into some deep background on the Skrull infiltration. The stories provided detailed information on the motivations and technology the Skrulls used to pull off their mass infiltration and how the plan came together. A sidebar from the main Secret Invasion story showed an encounter in the Savage Land between Spider-Man and Ka-Zar & Shanna that provided some follow-up to the events of the very first arc from New Avengers. Then readers saw how the Skrull Queen took Spider-Woman’s place and how she’d manipulated or taken advantage of many of the Marvel Universe events of the past few years.
Book 2 showed more of the Savage Land confrontation and the transformation process the deep cover Skrulls underwent to take over an Earth hero’s life. There was more info on how the Skrulls used a Reed Richards clone to help them devise their technology and plans, then the story switched to the experiences of the Skrulls impersonating Spider-Woman and Yellowjacket during the House of M story. Back in the present, The Hood’s band of villains became aware of the Skrull infiltration and contemplated their course of action, while a familiar, old enemy was revealed as the source of The Hood’s power. The arc ended with a Luke and Jessica flashback setting up a beat carried over from the Secret Invasion finale: a Skrull impersonating Jarvis had abducted baby Danielle.
Taken on an individual basis, a lot of the stories in these volumes were quite well done. Brian Michael Bendis used these issues to provide a lot of deep background info that was pretty compelling. Fans also got a different perspective on many scenes from the series that took on a new meaning when viewed through the lens of the Skrull infiltration. If the non-linear organization of the stories was a challenge, with random lurches between settings and time periods, viewed individually, these were some of the strongest issues of the entire New Avengers run.
A wide variety of artists worked on the book during this period, so there was almost no continuity in the visual style. Given the episodic nature of the run, though, it’s not really that big of a problem. Michael Gaydos, David Mack, Jim Cheung and Billy Tan all made contributions and did some strong work. Gaydos handled the Luke/Jessica scenes, fitting given his history with the characters. Mack, often an abstract stylist, did some rather excellent representational work on the Echo chapter. Cheung did his usual beautiful job on the issues detailing the Skrull past, while Tan handled the other present day installments quite effectively. These are not volumes to read in a vacuum, but for fans who have followed the entire New Avengers series and who have read Secret Invasion, these are essential.
Mighty Avengers: Secret Invasion
Book 1 (Mighty Avengers #12-15)
Book 2 (Mighty Avengers #16-20)
Mighty Avengers followed a similar course as its sister series for the duration of Secret Invasion. The first installments in Book 1 caught up with Nick Fury, as he uncovered the Skrull infiltration, gave an important warning to Maria Hill and then used Daisy Johnson to recruit a team of young operatives with ties to a variety of well-known Marvel characters (the core for his new Secret Warriors team). Next, the action shifted to how the Skrulls neutralized the powerful but unstable Sentry. Finally, readers saw how a Skrull replaced Hank Pym and planted a “Trojan horse” weapon in Wasp’s biochemistry that would come into play at the climax of Secret Invasion.
Book 2 provided a different perspective on the prison break that commenced New Avengers, showed how Elektra had been replaced and how Skrull Elektra’s seized control of The Hand. An episode with the Hank Pym Skrull suggested that several Skrulls had been driven mad living as Hank. Next, readers saw Fury training his Secret Warriors and then leading them into battle when the Skrulls invaded. The renegade Kree Marvel Boy got a little time in the spotlight, as the Skrull impersonating Captain Marvel found that his sympathy for the hero whose life he was living overcame his devotion to his people. Finally, Hank Pym, back from captivity after the Invasion, grappled with Jan’s apparent death and funeral.
Like the New Avengers volumes, this stretch of Mighty Avengers ping-ponged all over the place, with varying results. The Nick Fury issues were the most interesting, providing some valuable insight into Fury’s mindset at the time and showing the origins of the Secret Warriors (whose series was one of Marvel’s most intriguing successes of the past few years). The Hank Pym issues, unfortunately, were a lot harder to appreciate. The bizarre animus that Bendis displayed toward the character was getting off-putting by that point. Forget the brief portrayal of Jan as a drunken party girl, we got to see a vain, almost idiotic Hank sleeping with a student who turned out to be the Skrull who replaced him. The concept that Hank was so damaged that just pretending to be him drove a succession of Skrulls over the edge was insulting. And Hank going off on Tony Stark in the middle of Jan’s memorial was both tacky and another example of the reductive “It’s All Tony’s Fault” non-logic that made so much of this stretch of Avengers history difficult to take at times.
Like its sister series, this stretch featured rotating artists doing some strong work. Likewise, given the episodic nature of these issues and that they abruptly shifted locations and time periods, the lack of visual unity wasn’t really a problem. Instead you got talents like Alex Maleev, Khoi Pham, John Romita Jr., Stefano Casselli and Carlo Pagulayan doing some really nice work with some challenging narratives. These aren’t volumes for casual fans, but for anyone who’d followed the franchise since Bendis re-imagined it in New Avengers and had read Secret Invasion, they’re necessary reads.
Power (New Avengers #48-50 and Secret Invasion: Dark Reign)
New Avengers entered the “Dark Reign” era with a special featuring Alex Maleev art that found Norman Osborn, in a position of power after killing the Skrull Queen at the climax of Secret Invasion, gathering his “Dark Illuminati” for an uneasy conference. The New Avengers soldiered on with a few line-up changes. Spider-Woman and Ms. Marvel were onboard, as was the back-from-the-dead Mockingbird. Echo went missing after Secret Invasion and if you were curious as to what happened to her, well, don’t look for those answers in New Avengers. The team came to reside in the Brooklyn brownstone once owned by Steve Rogers, then occupied by Steve’s Captain America replacement, Bucky Barnes, who became a regular.
The Fantastic Four joined the Avengers in the search for Luke and Jessica’s baby, but a gung-ho former S.H.I.E.L.D. agent killed the random Skrull who could’ve revealed baby Danielle’s location before she could get it out. In desperation, Luke turned to Osborn and his new “Dark” Avengers. Osborn was able to retrieve Danielle, but Luke then went back on their deal. The public debut of Osborn’s Dark Avengers didn’t sit well with the team, especially Hawkeye (still calling himself Ronin). Spider-Woman used herself as bait to lure the Dark Avengers into an ambush (at the old Hellfire Club, of all places), where the New Avengers planned to use power-dampening technology to defeat them. Instead, Osborn sent The Hood and his villain army to attack. The heroes barely escaped. In the end, Ronin went on live television, unmasked and called out Osborn.
This was an effective transition into what was then the latest of Marvel’s almost annual “branded banner concepts” that guided Marvel Universe stories for months at a time. The “Dark Illuminati” concept had merit, but the special was heavy on talk and light on action. The search for baby Danielle was more compelling, as was seeing the still distrustful heroes attempt to unite as a counter weight against Osborn’s new power base. The rematch with The Hood’s crew was well-staged, but Hawkeye’s recklessness still seemed like something from a much earlier iteration of the character. Billy Tan handled the regular art chores and his clean, dynamic style was a good fit for the action. Several notable talents contributed single pages to the big fight sequence in the 50th issue as an entertaining bonus for fans. In all, this was a decent short arc, but something that only makes sense to read in sequence with what’s preceded it.
Earth’s Mightiest (Mighty Avengers #21-26 and Secret Invasion: Requiem)
A new creative team took the book in a new direction built around Hank Pym. Following his ex-wife’s apparent death, Hank fashioned a new Wasp persona for himself. When waves of chaos threatened the planet, Jarvis, Hercules and Amadeus Cho recruited Hank (who was in an extra-dimensional lab with the revived Jocasta – the robot whose personality was built on Jan’s brain patterns) to form a new Avengers team. Meanwhile, a mystic who appeared to be the Scarlet Witch gathered several heroes to assist Hank, including U.S. Agent, Hulk and Stature & Vision of the Young Avengers. Iron Man also got in on the action, though he disrespected Hank’s leadership in the crisis. Chthon, the demon who had caused Scarlet Witch a lot of grief in her life, was back and in possession of the body of her twin brother, Quicksilver. Iron Man’s arrogance almost cost the heroes the day, before Hank devised a solution that undid the effects of the chaos wave and freed Quicksilver. Hulk and Iron Man departed, but the other heroes rallied around Hank as a new team.
“Scarlet Witch” was revealed to be the female Loki in disguise, though the rest of the team wouldn’t learn that for a while. Hank’s team gained international fame as they dealt with a number of global threats. That brought Norman Osborn’s Dark Avengers to their doorstep, forcing Jocasta to “untether” Hank’s lab from its anchor in the Earth dimension. Facing the total loss of the lab, Hank sought a machine he and the late Bill Foster (Giant-Man) had worked on together, then in the possession of Reed Richards. Reed rudely refused to give the machine to Hank, precipitating an attempted heist by the Mighty Avengers and a Hank/Reed confrontation that convinced Reed to turn over the device.
Dan Slott took over the writing duties and his earliest issues continued a few unfortunate trends from the Bendis era: ludicrous disrespect for Hank, “Everything Is Tony’s Fault” as a plot mantra and an unappealing crudeness to the language and humor. But Slott did start to turn things around for Hank, even though he managed to visit a few more humiliations on him. It was difficult to conceive Tony Stark or Reed Richards ever addressing Hank Pym as condescendingly and dismissively as they did over the course of these stories. That was the dying echo of the re-write of history that made everyone disrespect Hank engineered by Chuck Austen and championed by Bendis. But Slott also showed Hank’s intelligence, resourcefulness and ability to rebound.
The Fantastic Four story was something of a hash, too. But the cast of characters, though somewhat random, proved to be fairly strong and Slott handled their interactions well. The Scarlet Witch/Loki bluff worked rather effectively, especially the emotional impact her presence had on Stature, the daughter of the second Ant-Man who’d been killed by the Scarlet Witch’s attacks in the Avengers Disassembled story (picking up a thread that Civil War had puzzlingly ignored). Khoi Pham illustrated most of the arc, turning in some clean, propulsive work. The latter two issues were handled by Rafa Sandoval and Stephen Segovia, whose moodier styles were decent, even if they didn’t seem like quite the right match for the heist caper plot. Overall, though, this was an interesting new direction for Mighty Avengers and the beginning of Hank Pym’s reemergence after years of shameful misuse. It’s worth picking up for fans of that character and is solid reading for fans who had already taken in the earlier volumes.
Search for the Sorcerer Supreme (New Avengers #51-54)
Doctor Strange returned. Having determined he was no longer fit to be Sorcerer Supreme, he was on the hunt for his successor. During a mentoring session with Wiccan of the Young Avengers, The Hood attacked, attempting to seize Strange’s power totems. Strange turned to the New Avengers for help. The heroes took off for New Orleans, where Strange thought the new Sorcerer Supreme might be. The Hood attacked Daimon Hellstrom, who was also in NOLA, and employed Madame Masque to help distract the Avengers while he attacked Strange. Ultimately, Brother Voodoo emerged as Strange’s true successor and, in cooperation with Strange and Hellstrom, de-powered The Hood. The Hood wasn’t down for long, though, since Loki showed up in his hospital room with a new power source for the villain. Hawkeye and Osborn continued to trade barbs in the media and Hawkeye finally decided the only solution was to kill Osborn.
This was probably Bendis’s most focused plot during the “Dark Reign” year. It followed up on the earlier plot strands about Doctor Strange quite effectively and climaxed with one of those reclamations of a character that had been written off as a joke at which Bendis excels. Who knew that Brother Voodoo could be that compelling? Tan split art duties with Chris Bachalo and the tandem proved quite effective. Tan’s cleaner, more classic style was a good fit for the more Earthbound parts of the narrative, while Bachalo’s more exaggerated approach was a well deployed for the mystical sequences. In all, this was a strong arc that’s worth experiencing and can be enjoyed even if a reader hadn’t been steeped in the previous four years of stories.
Powerloss (New Avengers #55-60)
During The Hood’s extended absence, his gang angled to make their own deal with Osborn and reverse engineered the damaged power dampener the New Avengers abandoned during their escape from the villains at the Hellfire Club. The New Avengers debated Hawkeye’s desire to kill Osborn, with Spider-Man especially opposed to the idea. The villains lured the Avengers into action with a brazen attack in Times Square, during which they incapacitated them with the power dampener. Only Mockingbird was unaffected and managed to hold the villains off briefly. The Dark Avengers arrived and at first clashed with the villains, until they made a deal with Osborn.Meanwhile, Loki guided The Hood and Madame Masque to the Asgardian Norn Stones as a new source of power. Mockingbird managed to rescue her incapacitated teammates, getting them clear of the dampener’s effects, but there was a problem for Luke, who went into cardiac arrest.
With his invulnerable skin preventing necessary treatment, Luke surrendered to Osborn, allowing his teammates to escape. Osborn had a medical team use the dampener to facilitate life-saving surgery for Luke, and then a varied band of heroes, all Luke’s friends, joined with the Avengers to rescue him from Osborn. But of course, Osborn implanted an explosive tracer on Luke’s heart. The Hood returned and made his team understand the mistake they’d made with Osborn, even as he regained a measure of his influence. Hank Pym arrived just in time to get the tracer off of Luke’s heart before detonation. Osborn ordered the Avengers to be hunted down and killed.
This was another solid arc, with the team dealing with the consequences of past choices. The clash with the Dark Avengers worked as well here as it did anywhere, though at times “The Canonization of Luke Cage” got to be just a tad overblown. But Luke was probably as likeable here as he’d been in ages and having most of the heroes on the same side again was a relief after the Civil War/Initiative era. The debate over Hawkeye’s plan to kill Osborn was one of the more interesting “talky” sequences, though not bringing up how Hawkeye’s judgment of Mockingbird allowing her rapist to fall to his death years earlier had ended their marriage was a puzzling missed opportunity. Stuart Immonen came aboard for this stretch and did some nice work, splitting the difference between the cleaner, more classical style of Billy Tan and the moodier, shadow-drenched work of Leinil Yu. Overall, it was a decent way for New Avengers to end the decade, but will be most of interest to fans who’d already read the earlier collections.
The Unspoken (Mighty Avengers #27-31)
In this entertaining arc, Hank Pym finally re-emerged as the hero fans remembered. As Hank showed his team the new “Infinite Avengers Mansion,” readers met The Unspoken. He was Black Bolt’s predecessor as King of the Inhumans who’d been deposed and erased from history for disposing of his people’s greatest weapon. U.S. Agent and Quicksilver went on a mission with the Global Reaction Agency when The Unspoken re-emerged in China and became a threat. Stature stumbled onto the Loki/Scarlet Witch secret, but Loki’s spell prevented her from alerting her teammates. The Unspoken moved to recover the lost Inhuman weapon, the Slave Engine, and took down a team of Chinese superhumans who later entered an uneasy alliance with U.S. Agent and Quicksilver.
Loki intercepted Quicksilver’s S.O.S., so Stature brought the other Young Avengers to the Infinite Avengers Mansion to try to find a way to get the secret across to them. They’d been followed by the original Hawkeye, then still calling himself Ronin, who quickly uncovered that Scarlet Witch wasn’t who she said she was. Hank, meanwhile, used his size-changing powers to have an encounter with Eternity, the personification of the universe, who revealed how important Hank was to him, eventually dubbing him Earth’s “Scientist Supreme.” The Unspoken used the Slave Engine to turn normal humans into primitive brutes under his control. Stature and Hawkeye gathered a number of other past and present Avengers and took them to China to confront the Unspoken, with Hank soon joining them. Eventually, the core of the Mighty Avengers team, led by Hank, engineered a victory. The arc ended, however, with a heartbreaking encounter between Quicksilver and his daughter, when the team visited the Inhuman Royal Family.
This was the kind of story that fans had wanted when Slott took over the book. The Unspoken was an intriguing addition to the Marvel Universe and Slott’s exploration of superpowered champions in other countries was welcome. Seeing a large squad of Avengers going into battle together always is a great visual, but best of all was Hank Pym truly reclaiming his heroic status and confidence. A one-panel scene between Hank and Hawkeye all but erased years of pointless ugliness engineered by Chuck Austen’s wrongheaded writing. It felt like a big screen, rousing Avengers adventure and it was what the book really needed. Khoi Pham and Sean Chen split the art duties, both turning in big, bold and clean work that served the story well. This was a great way for Mighty Avengers to end the decade, its last significant story before Siege would bring the title to a close. It’s definitely worthwhile for fans of classic-style Avengers sagas to check this out.
