Sunday, February 1, 2009

AVENGERS DISASSEMBLED




The last gasp of 90's Marvel. In order to promote what Marvel wanted to publicize as a major event, Avengers Disassembled became a crossover of sorts, where every major title that didn't have mutants in it had "disassembled" tacked onto it's title in an effort to shake up the flagging core Marvel heroes line. Few of these tie-ins interacted at all with the main Avengers Disassembled storyline - Mark Waid was wrapping up his flimsy, Saturday morning cartoon run on Fantastic Four, Captain America was killing time until an imminent relaunch written by Ed Brubaker, and Thor was in the midst of an epic Ragnarok storyline written by Mike Oeming, one of the few well-liked dudes in contemporary comics who can reliably be expected to care about that kind of shit. It was a mess. 

The core Avengers storyline started where the hated Chuck Austen had left it. The Avengers had undergone their most successful recent incarnation some years before as an insular, retro team book under Kurt Busiek and George Perez. After a long period of playing second fiddle to the X-Men books in storylines like The Crossing, Busiek's solution was basically to just abandon trying to integrate the Avengers into the larger Marvel Universe. In "The Avengers", Avengers characters fought Avengers villains in Avengersy places. Even books that were nominally part of the Avengers family, like the original version of the Thunderbolts, were left out in the cold. As the quality of writing sunk from Busiek to a larval Geoff Johns to Chuck Fucking Austen, all of the Avengers-related books became isolated continuity backwaters, full of outdated concepts and convoluted storylines that were hopelessly separate from the Marvel books that people actually gave a shit about. 

So at the beginning of Bendis' run, we have a bunch of B-List characters sitting around a swimming pool making small-talk. The remaining heavy hitters - She-Hulk, Hawkeye, and the Wasp - are basically sitting around wondering aloud who they haven't fucked yet. Whether this is idle Bendis banter or a needling commentary on the incestuous and repetetive nature of the Avengers books, it sets the stage pretty appropriately. One minute we've got a bunch of whiny, pampered brats drinking mojitos in their mansion, the next minute, BOOM. 

Jack of Hearts, a character no one gives a shit about, quickly shows up and explodes, killing off the second Ant-Man before anyone knows what to do. Ant-Man 2 was one of those ill-conceived attempts to replace an established silver age hero with an "everyman" type who was supposed to be more relatable. Like "Thunderstrike". Ant-Man 1 was a brilliant, quirky, and emotionally conflicted scientist who invented cool stuff every time he appeared on-panel. Ant-Man 2 was a struggling single father who resorted to burglary to make ends meet and somehow ended up in an Ant-Man costume. Good fucking riddance, Ant-Man 2. You were lame. 

Crazy explosions and strange happenings abound, as sinister figures lurk in the background promising to destroy everything the Avengers stand for. Hawkeye blows up trying to take down an imaginary Kree Starship, Nick Fury shows up to yell at some people, and the culprit is eventually revealed to be the Scarlet Witch, whose reality warping powers have been loosed on the Avengers as the result of a long-running plotline to convoluted and dull to explain here. At the end of it, Hawkeye's dead, the Vision is dead, the Scarlet Witch is in a coma, Iron Man is a disgraced public figure who's lost most of his fortune, and Captain America is suddenly left feeling purposeless and alone. 

An elegant finale issue in the ashes of the Avengers mansion mostly featured Beast and Iron Man waxing nostalgic about the better days, a setpiece which dovetailed nicely with Grant Morrison's successful portrayal of beast as an aging intellectual, bored to tears by all the horror and catastrophe of the X-Books, and doing all he can to preserve the last remaining embers of the wit and spirit that defined his time with the Avengers some years before. The Avengers themselves were basically convinced to admit that they'd become a pretty pointless excercise at this point, and were thus encouraged to go their separate ways.

1 comment:

  1. this saga was so cool, specially the title "one of this avenger will die", since you start reading this saga you can't stop, and you don't wanna stop, almost in the final you can find a secret code that say viagra online what is the meaning of this? maybe we never know the answer.

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