You Can't Keep a Good Dead Avenger Down...

This blog is very much like Marvel these days, we can't have too many Avengers.

The above cover (nicely rendered by Tom Grummett) is for something called Chaos War: Dead Avengers.

Genius.

You have your Avengers, your New Avengers, your Secret Avengers, your Young Avengers, your Pet Avengers, your Ultimate Avengers (not to mention Avengers Next running around, cartoon Avengers in the offing, and rumors of Cosmic Avengers)...how silly of me not to have considered the possibility of having your Dead Avengers shaking the old dust off to do some more Assemblin' for old times' sake...like I said, genius.

Both Marvel and DC have hit upon a formula that suits them well...why bother trying to come up with a bunch of new ideas that people won't care about or buy when you can just milk your existing franchises until you've sucked all of the life out of them? And, much more importantly, you can suck as much money out of the pockets of the fans of the franchises as you can (before those fans get fed up and starting spending that disposable income on hookers, blow, and iPhone apps instead of comic books.)

(Is it too early to put in a request for Black'n'Blue Avengers? Black Panther, Black Widow, Black Knight, Blue Marvel, and, if they could get the rights, Blue Man Group would make a kick-ass Avengers team...)

Avengers Assemble...um...again...

And the buildup to 2012's Avengers movie continues with this fall's animated series from Disney, Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes. It's got the original Avengers along with teases of Captain America, Hawkeye, and the Black Panther plus tons of villains, Nick Fury and SHIELD, and all that jazz.

Could be cool.

Avengers Assemble! (Yeah, we'll wait...)

14. For the first 110 issues of the series (roughly 1963-1973) Marvel’s premier super-hero team, the Avengers, managed to get by with just 14 official members (and that number includes 3 “blink and you’ll miss ‘em” members: The Hulk, the Swordsman, and the Black Knight.)

14 Avengers (the others were, of course: Thor, Iron Man, the many faces of Hank Pym, the Wasp, Captain America, the Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, Hawkeye, Hercules, the Black Panther, and the Vision) during the course of a decade’s worth of issues (mostly written by two guys: Roy Thomas and Stan Lee)…kind of an exclusive club and that was pretty cool.

Since that time though just about every writer who has come on the book has felt the need to put a personal stamp on the series by adding new faces to the team; a fact which has caused the membership to be something less than exclusive with seemingly dozens of heroes (including a couple of X-Men and three-fourths of the Fantastic Four) carrying Avengers ID cards over the years. There are enough Avengers to fill an auditorium and yet all these writers feel they need to add their pet characters to the mix (as opposed to just drawing from the already incredibly deep bench of formerly active Avengers.)

With the recent announcement that the beloved character Red Hulk would be joining up, the beat goes on.

Hell at this point they might as well just issue every costumed hero in the Marvel Universe an Avengers ID card and tell them “we’ll call you when we need you.”

Don’t get me wrong, I know that some of the later characters have gone on to have distinguished Avenger careers (Beast, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, Captain Marvel, and Luke Cage come to mind offhand) but just once I’d like to see somebody take over an Avengers title and not feel the need to add somebody new to the already lengthy roster of Avengers.

That’s probably not gonna happen but I, as long time Avengers fan (the book was my first favorite Marvel title back when I started reading comics in the 60’s), I can dream…

14…imagine that…

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Hulk

The Marvel Universe is in a state of manic flux of late.

Bucky is alive and Captain America is dead. The Avengers have disassembled, reassembled, dissembled again, split in two, and are now, through the auspices of “The Initiative”, in the process of spreading super-hero police state glory to all 50 states.

The Civil War has codified the differences between super-heroes into two distinct camps: either you’re a good citizen who registers with the government or you’re a lawless vigilante who will be hunted down and tossed into a other-dimensional prison without such pesky concerns as due process (this dichotomy was always there…Captain America, agent of SHIELD versus Spider-Man, masked menace…but the differences are now separated by an angry, burgeoning chasm that is more bitter and poisonous than it has ever been.)

Millions of sentient beings have fallen victim to annihilation out in the cosmos while the mutant population on Earth has been reduced to a statistically insignificant species.

The United States government is at war with the Inhumans and with Atlantis (and not on the best of terms with Wakanda.) And apparently there are Skrulls everywhere.

And then there’s the Hulk.

Having by exiled off the planet by a covert group of self-appointed guardians of the world…Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic, Black Bolt, and Dr. Strange (the other members of their smug little cabal…Professor X and Prince Namor…were, respectively, not present for this particular decision and violently opposed to it ), the Hulk ended up on a violent world…Planet Hulk…where he became a slave gladiator, a rebel leader, and, eventually, a warrior king complete with a pregnant warrior queen (we suspend disbelief enough to go with the notion that beings from different worlds are biologically compatible enough to co-create children.)

But there are no happy endings in the life of the Hulk, of course. The ship that carried him to his new home malfunctioned destroying the world, his wife, and his unborn child and now, with the aid of the survivors of the cataclysm, the Hulk has come home…angrier than ever, more wily than ever, and more focused than ever. As Black Bolt has already found out, it brings a whole new level of meaning to the pithy phrase “Hulk smash.”

Planet Hulk was a grand story…an epic tale of triumph and tragedy…that worked so well because it was largely removed from the rest of the Marvel Universe goings-on (the over-sized hardcover collection of the storyline is a lovely thing indeed.)

World War Hulk has the potential to be a grand story…and its off to an engaging start for the most part…though its chances are somewhat mitigated by the fact that its editorial tentacles are spreading out so far (when we’re being “red skied” by a WWH branded issue of Ghost Rider that has nothing to do with the overall story beyond its final page, it’s an ominous sign.) We shall keep a good thought for the rest of the series just the same.

Hulk smash. Fanboys rejoice.

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