avengers 267: time and time again

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Avengers, big box of comics, John Buscema, kang, Roger Stern, Storm, time travel, Tom Palmer

One of my favorite Avengers stories features the time-traveling psychopath known as Kang The Conqueror. He sports a ridiculous outfit that only John Buscema and Tom Palmer could make cool.

What kind of evil plan can a person hatch in striped purple thigh-high boots? Stripping to pay his way through college? But don’t judge Kang by his fashion sense, because he rocks hard in this minor masterpiece.

I was 13 when this issue appeared on the comic book rack at the Walgreens on Manchester Road in Ballwin, Missouri. The opening sequence blew my mind, and I still get a thrill reading it years later. The complete three-issue story is one of the few mid-80s superhero yarns that still holds up for me as an adult reader, and though I no longer have the complete Stern/Buscema run, I’ve read it a bunch of times. These days, I just reserve a little space for my absolutely favorite Avengers stories, including this one.

It begins the day Colossus joins the Avengers, and opens with Storm descending from the sky like the weather goddess she is. Goddess and, as we discover, an Avenger.

I love the mood and tone of Stern’s captions on that page and generally for the entire run. Despite some typical comic-book clunkers such as expositional thought balloons, his prose always made me feel like I was reading a book for adults, not children. But back to our story.

The President of the USA escorts Colossus onto the scene to induct him into the Avengers and become an American citizen.

What’s that? You don’t remember Storm and Colossus being Avengers in the 1980s? Pay attention!

Iron Man flies onto the scene to give a gift to the POTUS on this momentous occasion. And gosh, isn’t Tony Stark such a great guy?

Just tug a little harder, sir! But suddenly…

Wait, what? The whole team just got nuked into oblivion? Is the series cancelled? What do you do after THAT?!

If you’re a super-villain, you gloat.

The nuke was just a warm-up. Now, it really starts to hit the fan. It turns out that Kang’s time-traveling adventures are creating all kinds of alternate timelines, and each has its own Kang. A mysterious council has summoned our nuke-loving Kang to their secret chamber in a limbo outside of time. When Kang questions the council’s authority to tell him what a massive screw-up he is for getting his entire planet destroyed, they reveal themselves to be a trio of alternate Kangs!

They kill him then adjourn and vanish. But one Kang comes back to snoop around the building, and who does he run into? One of the other Kangs! John Buscema gives the Jack Kirby treatment to the wonders inside the secret chambers inside the secret chamber, and Kang gives Kang a tour of his time-monitoring operations.

In fewer than ten pages, Stern gave the Avengers new members, nuked an entire planet, discovered alternate realities, hatched a nefarious plot of betrayal and murder spanning centuries and multiple universes, and plumbed the depths of grief, greed, and evil in the human soul. And the real Avengers, the stars of the series, haven’t even appeared yet!

The heroes show up soon enough, and the adventure is a solid one with plenty of twists and turns and mysteries to solve. Despite his goofy outfit, Kang is a strong villain with a plan he seems entirely capable of pulling off, and he steals the show in a way usually reserved for Dr. Doom. Fitting, I suppose, since Kang originally came from the future using Doom’s time-machine and, after becoming an Egyptian Pharaoh in the past, patterned himself after Doom. As far as alternate timeline stories go, I’d rather re-read this classic than re-watch Avengers Endgame any day.

Collector’s Guide: The full story appears in issues 267, 268, and 269 of the original Avengers series, and they cost about $3 to $6 each, depending on their grade.

A big “thank you” to this blog’s readers for making it possible to get these issues as part of my ongoing big box of free comics series.

Son of Big Box of Comics: Turtles, Surfers, and Science-Fiction Mayhem

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Avengers, big box of comics, color classics, comic books, deeper and stranger, John Buscema, Paul Chadwick, Roger Stern, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, world below

The big box of comics series is a tribute to the fun things I wouldn’t have in my life without the readers of this blog who help me earn store credit at MyComicShop.com or Amazon.com every time they use my handy “Collector’s Guides” links to make a purchase.

It’s a symbiotic relationship — much like when an alien symbiote bonds to your nervous system and drinks your adrenaline for survival.

Actually, it’s nothing like that, but you could read that story in the Spectacular Spider-man TPB #1 by Paul Jenkins and Humberto Ramos.

This month, thanks to readers’ generosity, I put together a run of inexpensive reprints of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #2–5, courtesy of IDW’s “Color Classics” versions of early TMNT. A few months ago, readers helped me reunite with the ridiculous majesty of TMNT #6, and I couldn’t go on without reading the preceding issues at least one more time!

Was it fun? Oh, hell yes. But maybe not as great as I remember from my black-and-white collections or the original colorized graphic novels from First. IDW’s coloring is part of that, since they put dark colors over the original Zip-a-Tone midtones, and obscuring the mid-range tends to flatten the artwork and make it less dynamic. Also, one of the pages in one issue seems to be a misprint that duplicates a page from earlier in the story.

AND BRING THE ROBOT TO THE BRIDGE!

But in terms of being an affordable way to read the Turtles’ earliest adventures, these reprints did the job admirably. Because #6 is one of my all-time favorite comics, I enjoyed reliving the outrageous plot that led up to it, and seeing how the storytelling evolved and improved in the early days. As a bonus, I got a few issues from the second volume of Color Classics, including a solo Michelangelo adventure in a kind of Lone Wolf & Cub fantasy of feudal Japan mixed with mystic lizard demons from hell. That issue includes one of my favorite Turtles pages:

Also from the second volume, a color version of an issue of the Return to New York story that’s a favorite of mine. In the black-and-white original, a brain-damaged, dying Triceratops with some kind of plamsa gun kills and burns his way through the New York sewer system for his new friends: a quartet of mutated, intelligent reptiles who are also armored killing machines.

If that doesn’t sound like the greatest scene ever, then you are at the wrong blog!

Along with the batch of ninja nostalgia, I picked up some bargain-priced Fine copies of Paul Chadwick’s The World Below. It’s no secret I love Chadwick’s Concrete series. World Below and its sequel, the four-issue Deeper and Stranger, don’t have the same depth of storytelling and lush rendering as Concrete, but they are a fun romp through Chadwick’s science-fiction imagination.

I like the sequel better than the first series. The sequel uses black and white art with no color, which is almost always how I prefer to see Chadwick’s art. And, the first series suffered from too many flashbacks trying to make me care about characters I never properly met, since the story started right in the middle of the action. Each time a character faced a crisis I wasn’t invested in, the character flashed back to a similar situation in their early life to beat me over the head with how huge an emotional deal it all was. That didn’t work for me.

Also, I could have lived without seeing the characters say, “eff this” and “eff you, you effing effer” instead of using the actual profanity. Those pages in World Below #3 were physically painful to read, and even old-school characters like F@%$ would have been preferable.

It seems to me that if your dialogue depends on using the word “fuck”, then you should just say “fuck”.

The narrative problems (mostly) smooth out in the sequel, which has my favorite issue of the series and an unexpected ending that blew my mind. Deeper and Stranger fulfills the promise of the first World Below and the tagline on those covers: the deeper you go, the stranger it gets!

Finally, this month’s box of comics included a favorite from my Avengers collection that I sold off a few years ago. Recently, someone commented on my old post about the Stern/Buscema/Palmer run on Avengers in the 1980s. It reminded me that while I basically memorized those issues after reading them so many times, Avengers #266 featuring the Silver Surfer really needed to come back to my modest “Avengers favorites” collection.

Let’s get this out of the way right now: the issue is a post-script to one of the most god-awful, tragic dumpster fires Marvel produced in the 1980s: Secret Wars II. Don’t even get me started.

But this issue focuses on two powerful beings—one a respected hero, and one a reviled villain—who need to work together to heal a cataclysmic wound in the Earth before the planet falls apart and kills everyone. All in 32 ad-free pages, in which the fate of the world might depend on one total nerd’s desire to watch sitcom re-runs with his girlfriend instead of letting the disaster take its fatal course. It’s so insane!

This issue has many examples of Stern’s dialogue that endeared me to his Avengers. Namor and Hercules bust each other’s balls like only gods can do, but below their arguing I sense a mutual respect born of the knowledge that they are both beings of power, and maybe they need each other to call each other out sometimes to help keep their rages in check.

She-Hulk isn’t turned off at all by Hercules’ temper tantrums; she flatters him and straight-up asks him to dinner, which is almost as awesome as that time she hooked up with Juggernaut. Jennifer’s a being of great power, too, and she seems perfectly comfortable and relaxed about it.

Hercules’ thoughts on nobility and heroism after the villain supposedly “loses his powers” while saving the Earth — also a lovely piece of internal dialogue.

But my favorite part is the final scene where the villain reveals he never lost his powers at all, and that the hero was complicit in this deception.

But why?

I simply allowed your courage to inspire mine!

The Silver Surfer’s comment on courage and vulnerability really sums up what I love about this Avengers run. Sure, it’s all fun and games in spandex with lots of punching and the fate of the universe at stake, and there’s no shortage of expositional thought balloons. But every now and then, Stern’s humanistic and thoughtful depictions of his characters meld with John Buscema’s and Tom Palmer’s artwork to create peaks of visual literature.

You know what? I might need to reclaim a few more of my favorite story arcs from this run — especially the Kang saga and the assault on Avengers Mansion.

That’s it for September’s big box of free comics, and I am excited to tell you about the October box that is on its way!

The Avengers by Stern, Buscema, & Palmer

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Avengers, collection, John Buscema, Marvel Comics, Roger Stern, Tom Palmer

Tom Palmer’s painted cover kicks off our favorite years of the Avengers. Roger Stern, John Buscema, and Tom Palmer would collaborate from #255 through #285 in a number of powerful story arcs and historical events. Stern would hand over the writing reigns to Ralph Macchio and subsequently Walter Simonson while Buscema and Palmer stayed on through #300.

The creative team begins with a brutal destruction of the primitive but beautiful Savage Land, a hidden ecosystem in the Antarctic regions where dinosaurs still roam tropical jungles. While the Avengers take down the bad guy, it comes at a heavy cost, and Stern makes no effort to put a silver lining on the tragedy.

The storytelling in the next arc of deep-space intrigue continues to fire on all cylinders for several issues. Then we get derailed by the hokiest ending possible. Why? All I can type without raising my blood pressure is “Secret Wars II.”

The stories bounce back quickly when Sub-mariner comes on stage. The X-Factor tie in of #263 makes a much better read than the Secret Wars II debacle. Some may revile this issue for cheapening the death of Jean Grey by bringing her back, and they’ve got a point.

After the last unsavory Secret Wars II tie-in, #266 comes as a surprise: one of the highlights of this run.

Maybe it’s that opening splash page of the Silver Surfer zooming through a seething gouge in the earth’s crust, magma and stone implacably raging all around him. Buscema draws the Surfer like no one before or since, and it’s a treat to see him in these pages. Stern gives us an intimate character study of the Surfer and the Molecule Man against a background of geologic ferocity.

The stories kick back into high gear with a totally off-beat Kang story. Stern takes us wandering with lost Avengers in a misty maze of limbo as a madman with a time machine tries to kill off every version of himself except the one living now. This was the story that originally got us into the Avengers, and we may show it some undue favoritism. It still kicks ass.

Just seeing this opening splash panel where Storm joins the Avengers brings a smile to my face. Oh, this is going to be good!

The Sub-mariner gets a very sympathetic treatment in these tales. Stern portrays him as arrogant and hot-headed, yes, but he’s also grown up a lot. Public outcry about crimes he has committed in the past saddens him. He knows he has acted rashly and been in the wrong. Captain America and Hercules know what the score is with Prince Namor, though, and they stand by him. The entire team has his back when he needs to set things right in Atlantis, and many readers recall this as a highlight of the series.

The brutality of the next big story arc is all the more disturbing in light of how unflinchingly the team handled the devastation of the Savage Land twenty issues earlier! The Avengers get beat down, and we mean beat down. They suffer.

Since the writing of this arc, many mainstream comics have topped it for sheer shocking brutality. But you would be hard pressed to find an Avengers fan that wasn’t blown away at this particular point in the series. It has a certain subtlety to it, like when we see a character’s face reacting to the horrors we never see.

In the aftermath of this battle, we get a few issues of character studies, shake up the membership roster, and have a quiet moment with Jarvis the Butler in the hospital after his terrible beating. Stern ends this run by pitting the Avengers against the Gods of Olympus in another action-packed confrontation.

The Gargoyle’s Touch Turned My Armor to Stone!

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Avengers, Avengers 191, David Michelinie, George Perez, Grey Gargoyle, John Byrne, Roger Stern

John Byrne pencils one of our favorite Grey Gargoyle appearances in Avengers #191, with the plot/script team of Roger Stern and David Michelinie. Great things were simmering in the pot here: Stern and Byrne would craft a short but memorable run on Captain America, David Michelinie was just a few years from making Spider-man a super-hot franchise with Todd McFarlane, and cover artist George Perez would soon be teaming up with Marv Wolfman to create the wildly successful relaunch of Teen Titans.
Here, however, they prove that most superhero problems can be solved with lots of punching, kicking, beating, hitting, smashing… and a magic ray.

Collector’s Guide:
– from Avengers #191; Marvel, 1980.
– Reprinted in the paperback collection Avengers Visionaries: George Perez. Dont ask us why, since Perez did the cover, not the interior art!

Doctor Strange vs. the In-Betweener, Round Two!

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Creators Chronicles, Doctor Strange, Ernie Chan, In Betweener, Roger Stern, Tom Sutton

Doctor Strange #28 contains the big finale to “The Creators Chronicles” by Roger Stern and Tom Sutton, with Ernie Chan. Did you miss Round One of this cosmic battle? By the Rings of Raggador, click Part One to take your astral self where it needs to go.

Collector’s Guide: From Doctor Strange #28; Marvel Comics, 1978.

Doctor Strange vs. the In-Betweener, Round One!

Tags

Creators Chronicles, Ernie Chan, In Betweener, Roger Stern, Tom Sutton

Roger Stern concludes the saga begun by Jim Starlin in Doctor Strange #23. With artists Tom Sutton and Ernie Chan, Stern pits the Doctor against the In-Betweener for two solid issues. It’s pretty awesome, and check out these radical double splash pages!

If you sense the hand of Jim Starlin in these two issues, you are right on. He isn’t in the credits, but Stern wrote a letter to the letters page telling how Starlin masterminded this whole storyline and told Stern what he had in mind for the good Doctor. The whole thing ends up tying up some loose plot threads from Starlin’s original Warlock run. For the conclusion of this cosmic battle, click Part Two.

Collector’s Guide:
– From Doctor Strange #27; Marvel, 1978.

Captain America for President!

Tags

Captain America, John Byrne, Roger Stern

Roger Stern and John Byrne‘s brief collaboration on Captain America ran from #247 to #255. Most Cap fans regard these tales from 1980-1981 as a minor classic, deserving a place in any collection of the best Cap stories. One of the big ideas they tackled was the idea of Captain America’s running for President. The letters page we included here has a column by author Roger Stern detailing the genesis of the idea and his thoughts on the concept. We enjoy all 17 pages of the story in Cap’s 250th issue. But, couldn’t this idea have been taken much further? How cool would it have been to have four years of Marvel continuity where Cap was president?!

Captain America would make the most awesome president ever. He’d certainly get our vote, and we don’t even agree with him on everything. Cap is everything our politicians are not: strong, dependable, honest, trustworthy, virtuous, caring – and have you seen what he can do with that shield? We just don’t buy his speech at the end explaining why he won’t run. He is obviously the man for the job. So man up, Cap, and get on the ballot!

Even if he didn’t make it into office because of some inane Red Skull plot, the possibilities are amazing. Fan Fiction geeks, fire up your word processors and get to work on this story. The rest of you, take advantage of your civil liberties and get to the ballot box on election day!

Collector’s Guide:
– From Captain America #250; Marvel, 1980. Script by Roger Stern.
Art by John Byrne and Joe Rubinstein.

He Stands Triumphant in the Very Center of Pangea!

Tags

Avengers, Holocaust in a Hidden land, John Buscema, Ka-zar, Roger Stern, Savage Land, Terminus, Tom Palmer, Zabu

Remember when the Savage Land was totally destroyed by a giant alien in space armor? Dinosaurs on the run, Terminus looking mighty creepy, and the Avengers flexing in the jungle. Not to mention Hercules making friends with a sabretooth tiger, a little Kirby Krackle, and Shanna trying on her new leopard bikini. It’s all part of one of our favorite runs on the Avengers. We posted two excerpts: Part One.

Collector’s Guide: From Avengers #256-257: “Holocaust in a Hidden Land.”

Roger Stern plotting and scripting, John Buscema handling layouts and breakdowns, and Tom Palmer’s finishes bringing it all together! This team rocked the Avengers for thirty issues in #255-285, from 1985-1987.

You are Mine to Do with as I Choose!

Tags

Avengers, Holocaust in a Hidden land, John Buscema, Ka-zar, Roger Stern, Savage Land, Terminus, Tom Palmer, Zabu

Remember when the Savage Land was totally destroyed by a giant alien in space armor? Dinosaurs on the run, Terminus looking mighty creepy, and the Avengers flexing in the jungle. Not to mention Hercules making friends with a sabretooth tiger, a little Kirby Krackle, and Shanna trying on her new leopard bikini. It’s all part of one of our favorite runs on the Avengers. We posted two excerpts: Part Two.

Collector’s Guide: From Avengers #256-257: “Holocaust in a Hidden Land”

Roger Stern plotting and scripting, John Buscema handling layouts and breakdowns, and Tom Palmer’s finishes bringing it all together! This team rocked the Avengers for 30 issues #255-285, from 1985-1987.