Weird Science

Last time, we looked at the peaks and troughs of the Brian Bendis Years. Today,  I want to talk about the Marvel Now! relaunch of the Avengers titles. After sampling the first issues of the new era, I find myself missing those talking heads, "The Hell?" and even the sexist banter about Mesdames Masque and Hydra.

 Jonathan Hickman wrote the Fantastic Four for the last three years and has immediately returned the Assemblers to a "kozmic" scale. He has souped up the team roster and given the title a very different look from Bendis's snarky troupe of urban superheroes.

Having enjoyed a visit to an Inverness graphic design company with some of my boys this week, I suppose the visual aspect of the comics interests me most. Take, for instance, the chart that implies a command structure for the team. The individual symbols remind me of the emblems used for the Legion by Keith Giffen in the 80s.
Avengers.

Hickman has introduced a number of new members, with the intention of giving the team a global remit and a more diverse makeup:

Hyperion: a Superman parody created by Roy Thomas and Sal Buscema in the Sixties. At least two versions of this survivor from a microverse appeared from then until the Nineties. But for all I know, this could be the Marvel MAX version, who also flitted about the Ultimate Universe. Huh. Comics

Shang-Chi: Marvel's original master of Kung Fu, who's been pretty directionless since the House of Ideas lost the rights to Fu Manchu.

Sunspot and Cannonball: two of the original New Mutants. Cannonball appeared as an Avenger in 1995's gloomy Last Avengers Story.

Captain Universe: a fairly obscure Bill Mantlo creation from the Micronauts. Ditko drew a few Weisinger-style stories with the Captain; they seemed quaint and dated in the late 70s. I've read a suggestion elsewhere that this is Monica/Captain Marvel. I'd rather they let her be.

Smasher: a new female incarnation of an Ultra Boy parody, created as Imperial Guard cannon fodder by Dave Cockrum. Smasher? Really?!

Manifold: a teleporter with powers related to Superstring Theory. Some relation to the X-Men's enigmatic ally in Australia, Gateway.

In the early Nineties, John Byrne deployed the Avengers as one large team, not unlike tv's Justice League Unlimited or the aforementioned LSH. Personally, I feel the assemblers work best as a six -or -seven member squad , focusing on the relationships of three or four members exclusive to the title. The Bronze Age model, in effect.

With the capture of the movie Avengers, the first issue reminded me very much of the début of the All-New X-Men in 1975. The antagonists are godlike, sci-fi beings with allusive, magical names. Furthermore, they seem completely unconnected to the sci-fi antagonists of  New Avengers.

 This comic is a relaunch of Bendis's Illuminati. This clandestine group of the Marvel U's most powerful, influential and brilliant is a logical idea but in effect, this was a Black Panther solo book. A very good one to be sure, with an ambitious sci-fi tone but rather obscure. A Caucasian Manifold cameos but is killed off;  the significance of the scene is unclear.

To be honest, I found both books wilfully obtuse and a touch pretentious. I was reminded of the worst of Alan Moore in the attempts to blend  the language of sci-fi cinema with imagistic prose. Given the parlous state of the global economy and high street gloom, the fact that this is essentially a weekly comic seems greedy, if ultimately fruitless.

The third Marvel Now! launch-Uncanny Avengers- is a John Cassaday vehicle that pits a group of Avengers led by Havok against the Red Skull. The tone is dark and the action is sadistic and ugly. But mostly, it's redundant: the Avengers have had a mutant presence since 1965! In any case, Cassaday has quit because he couldn't keep up the schedule. However, he does draw an accurate group of early-80s X-Men.

Matt Fraction's Hawkeye truly is a good example of a Mature Readers comic. Essentially an urban Western, the Christmas issue "Six Nights in the Life Of " is wryly funny. Hawkeye, a minor media star now, is an Everyman identification figure, rather than the needling braggart of the Sixties. The cartooning and varied panel use of artist David Aja are a major part of the comic's appeal. Of all the Avengers titles, this would be the one I'd like to continue reading.

However, it baffles me why there isn't a title devoted to the Avengers team who, you know, starred in the most successful super-hero movie ever.  That's what Avengers Assemble was, originally. New Avengers could then focus on whoever the hell the writer wants to promote- Gravity, Namora, Blade- Freedom Ring, even! What a way to run a railroad.

Coming soon: Old Time Radio and Invisible Men of Mars

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