Avengers #96 (Feb. 1972)"The Andromeda Swarm!"
writer: Roy Thomas
artist: Neal Adams
inkers: Adams, Tom Palmer, and Weiss (Alan?)
Karen: First off: that has to be one of the most memorable Avengers covers ever!
Doug: Funny you should mention that -- not too long ago I was checking out some of the Link-Within posts of days past when I came across the very first Do-It-Yourself Open Forum.
The question of that day was on favorite Bronze Age covers and you picked this very one!Karen: At least I'm consistent! You thought you'd seen some spectacular scenes in the previous issues of this extravaganza, didn't you? Well, the best is yet to come! Our mighty team goes space-bound to save not only their own team mates, but every man, woman, and child on Earth!
Karen: Our story opens with our five free Avengers landing at a colossal orbitting space station. Once there, Nick Fury offers them up a spaceship, telling them to hurry before H. Warren Craddock manages to intercede. The team boards the craft, and powered by Thor's hammer, blasts off spectacularly into space.
Doug: Allow me to be SHIELD-ignorant -- can you or anyone else tell me when or where this was used before? Shoot, since would be nice, too! I was not a regular Strange Tales or Nick Fury reader. There is some nice characterization on the flight deck, and the thought that Mjolnir could power the ship just added another layer to the legend of the Asgardians.
Karen: I'm not sure if it was seen before, as I only have a handful of SHIELD or Strange Tales comics. I thought maybe it was Starcore, but I think that shows up in a few issues. So anyone out there no about this space station? After exiting hyperspace the Avengers come out to find the vast Skrull armada ahead! Luckily for them, the Skrulls assume that their presence is some sort of trick and come to a dead halt in space. The Skrulls only detect one vessel with their space-radar, but visually they see a fleet. The Skrull commander, by order of the Emperor, takes his flagship to investigate while the othe
r ships hang back. Here's a question: who made that image of the fleet? It doesn't seem like the Avengers did it. Was it the Supreme Intelligence? This left me puzzled.Doug: The emergence of the Avengers' ship in the midst of that armada was right out of Star Wars! Or, Star Wars was right out of this, rather. I don't really know who was behind the illusion -- as I was reading it, I just assumed that it was some sort of cloaking device in the ship's defenses. However, as we'll see toward the bottom of this review, it most possibly could have been the Supreme Intelligence.
Karen: Our heroes figure if they can defeat the commander maybe the other ships will take off. That seems like a stretch. They launch in four smaller ships (Iron Man is his own ship basically) and are fired upon by a missile, which Thor destroys. As the Armored Avenger draws fire, Thor and the Vision fly up to the Skrull ship, and using their bare hands, tear back the hull! Inside they are attacked by gun-wielding, space-suited Skrulls. Cap sends his small ship crashing through the hole his comrades have made, ejecting just in time. Goliath stays outside, patrolling in his ship in case any of the other ships come to the flagship's aid.
Doug: While the visual of Thor and the Vision ripping into that Skrull ship was awesome, did you have any problems believing Iron Man's armor could withstand the vacuum of space? Thor -- I guess not. But the Vision, too... I just wasn't sure that his body shouldn't have ended up inside-out. Oh, heck, long as I'm nit-picking: Cap and Clint just had on the ol' fishbowl spaceman helmets. At least the Legion wore those paper-thin "trans-suits".
Karen: Some spacesuits might have been nice for Cap and Goliath. I could buy Shellhead surviving for a short time though. The Avengers make their way through the ship towards the command center. Thor rips off the huge door and throws it across the room, making quite the dramatic entrance. He warns the Skrulls that they are "but the meekest harbingers of those who follow" and tells them to turn back. The commander is not so easily fooled though; he knows most Earth
people do not have such powers. Suddenly the enormous view screen behind him comes alive and the Skrull Emperor tells the Avengers to give up -and shows them the captured Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. he also shows them Captain Marvel, and describes how he is building an omni-wave device for them! The Avengers wonder if Marvel would really do this -well they quickly learn the answer. he's used the omni-wave to make an illusion of himself, so that he could surprise his Skrull guards! After knocking them out he frees the two imprisoned Avengers and turns on the Emperor, who has a force shield to protect him. So it's game on again!Doug: Thor's line was great -- a bluff, yet full of bravado. Mar-Vell was a hero to the end. After reading the graphic novel we reviewed last week, I am becoming more and more inclined to pick up the first Essentials of his adventures. Roy is really amping up the Vision/Wanda tension. Even that old warhorse Captain America is catching the vibes of love. Then he says "nah...". Did you think it was intentional that both he and Thor at different times referred to the Vision as an android? Was Roy creating some sort of "racial" tension? That sort of thing would certainly have been taboo in 1972.
Karen: There was the possibility of that, but all of the Avengers, with the exception of Quicksilver, pretty much accepted the relationship between Wanda and the Vision. Despite the Avengers' threats, the Emperor is crafty. He orders the commander to carry out Plan Delta. The order is given before the Avengers can act. The Vision grabs the commander and demands he tell them what Plan Delta is. He also demands to know the location of "the girl -and the others!" Shockingly, the android delivers a savage beating to the alien; he might possibly have killed him if Thor and Iron Man had not intervened. The panel showing the Skrull's battered face is burned into my mind. The commander reveals the truth of Plan Delta, as he says it is too late to stop. A small ship has left the flagship, headed for Earth, with a cargo of "a nuclear warhead to dwarf all your daydreams of destruction." In another very memorable sequence, Cap radios Goliath and tells him to stop the ship "at any cost -including your life! Do you read me?" A grim faced Clint simply says, "I read ya Cap." I still get goosebumps from that. Clint manages to maneuver on top of the Skrull ship and somehow blast his way inside. He finds himself staring at four Skrulls and wondering why oh why he threw his growth serum away.
Doug: You have to love a bunch of uglies that complain about how backwards a planet is, and then go and use an alphabet from its most classical civilizations. Hawk was great, wasn't he? We all know he idolized Cap. I've been thinking through this entire storyline how well Roy has been writing Clint. It's been a nice and seemingly natural evolution from his obnoxious days under Stan's pen.
Karen: Of all the secondary Avengers, I always thought Hawkeye had the best story arc, and best progression as a character. He did a lot of growing up, although he never lost his smart-ass nature. Far away from this action, we turn to Rick Jones, boy captive, and the Kree ruler, Ronan. Sadly, Ronan will be miscolored as a "pink Kree" the rest of our tale. I know nit-picky, but it bothers me. Ronan is highly displeased to find that although he requested that the Inhumans be brought back to Kree-Lar to help fight the Skrulls, all he has in hand is Rick. Rick pulls an incredibly lame-brained stunt and whacks Ronan with a staff, which obviously does nothing but cheese him off. He smacks the kid, but has a grudging respect for
his bravado, and decides to make him his 'body-slave' (Oh my...shades of Spartacus!). He's in a generous mood, as he shows Rick the great Kree fleet that is taking off to go battle the Skrulls for Earth. Rick tries to run off but is easily stopped by Ronan, who tires of him and throws him in a room...with the Supreme Intelligence? Kind of a strange move. The S.I. (not Sports Illustrated) tells Rick that he's been manipulating events behind the scenes, such as stirring up H. Warren Craddock, causing Rick to have his prophetic dream of Mar-Vell, and keeping Mar-Vell from realizing 'Carol' was actually the Super-Skrull. He also caused the Kree solider to kidnap Rick last issue. But why? That'll have to wait, as S.I. has one more stunt: he zaps Rick in to the Negative Zone -right next to Annihilus!Doug: In time... but I didn't get the Negative Zone deal. Good excuse to end this with Annihilus, though. After all, we started this whole mess with him, didn't we?
Karen: There's just no let up in this issue. Wall to wall action, but every bit of it was entertaining. And those visuals! Adams does an amazing job with the space scenes. It re
ally transported me. This was certainly the most spectacular comic I had read at this point. He and Thomas really drive home that sense of extreme heroism here. As I said before, I think this is when the Avengers truly became big leaguers.Doug: One of the complaints I had earlier in the series was Neal's long and lithe figurework not being wholly appropriate for Thor. No problems here, as the God of Thunder has been appropriately bulked up. Adams draws movement so well, doesn't he? And big leaguers? Wasn't it Kurt Busiek who once characterized the Avengers as the varsity? There can be no doubt in this storyline.
9 comments:
Wow, so MANY things to comment on here.. So I'll just mention a few..:
1) Yes, one of the stellar covers, I'd put it in the 'top teens' of Avenger covers, not sure the top 10. Striking, nevertheless.
2) Still gorgeous art, especially the beat-up Skrull and Clint's accepting of 'his mission'.. Now, true to my earlier comments, I still ponder having Adams chosen to do the opus of this saga, over say Buscema, but nevertheless, it is breathtaking art, for in retrospect, probably the grandest (and longest, pre-Korvac) of Avengers storylines ever, gently pushing the FF aside as frontiersmen of galactic adventure, Marvel style.
3) Totally agreeing on Clint's maturity here. I typically think of either Hank or Vish's development (both good and bad) as the cool thread weaving throughout the decades, but Clint really ascends as the one to watch. When he was featured, he was always handled much better than the others.
Don't have much to add to your review here - you pretty much underlined all of the cool aspects, i.e. the continuation of non-stop action coupled with Adams' gorgeous visuals. I just have to note, I was amused by the fact that Thomas found a way to have Rick Jones referred to as both a 'whelp' (twice!) and a 'stripling' in this issue (and I did wince a bit at that 'body-slave' reference...)
That panel showing Thor and the Vision tearing the ship’s hull apart together is extremely cool!
I can definitely buy Iron Man surviving in space – that’s never been a problem for me. Still, the Legion’s trans-suits are the best. Who wants to see superheroes in clunky suits and fishbowl helmets?
I like Thor’s attempt at trickery, too, even though it didn’t work. Hey, it’s worth a shot.
Also, yes the "I read ya Cap." Sequence was stirring. I also loved the way Hawkeye used to ride Cap, but Cap eventually earned his respect, though I’m sure much of that was just Clint’s maturation.
I’m sure Ronan was even more displeased than you, Karen, to be miscolored pink, considering the racial tensions between the pink and blue Kree.
By the way, Rick Jones has some serious cajones. If it was me, I’d be lickin’ Ronan’s little green booties!
Seriously wonderful perspectives from Adams here. The only thing I didn’t like at the time was the Vision’s big fist as he whacks the Skrull through the air, but having seen the preliminary sketches and read Adams notes when he did something very similar with the Beast* I really like that pic now.
Karen – regarding SHIELD, well, a big part of it, certainly when Stan was writing it, was that it was entirely driven by technology. In fact, when Fury was kidnapped by the Fixer & Mentallo, Tony Stark rather than anyone else actually took over. One of the things I like about Stan’s imagination was the amount of stuff that actually became real afterwards. He seemed to have a knack for looking at stuff that already existed and working out what else it could be used for e.g. Fury had a suit made of a fine steel mesh long before Kevlar...which existed at that point as a material but was used for racing tyres. Likewise the airbag, which had been patented, but no one had built a car with one. Except Tony Stark, who had them as standard 30 years before anyone else. All round airbags, too.
I’m therefore not surprised to see an orbital space station, which, let’s face it, is less of an ask than the helicarrier or flying cars. When Stark went into space to disarm Hydra’s Betatron bomb (where do they get these names?), he piloted a ship called the Brainosaur (seriously, where?) which launched from Earth, not an orbital space station, but then he was under a lot of time pressure that day.
Richard
*this is in Schumer’s Silver Age of Comic Book Art.
Doug, I don't know when that space station was first used but it turned up again in X-Men #99-100, with the Sentinels using it as their base.
Come to think of it, isn't the space station shown as being under construction in that Avengers tale? If you look at that splash page you posted, you can see that, towards the rear of the station, building work is still underway on one of its shuttles. In which case that issue might have been the first time the base was seen.
Here's a little more on the space station in the comments section of this link.
http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix/weatherm.htm
Some more great stuff there from Adams. It's just a shame he couldn't stick around after this to finish off the story. I remember being really disappointed at the time when I got the next issue and it was drawn by John Buscema. Not that Buscema's stuff was bad, just that it suffered in comparison to Adams; where Buscema seemed to settle for the old familiar poses, Adams seemed to come up with something bold and exciting.
Definitely an iconic cover featuring the Vision, breaking out of his Mr. Spock persona and displaying he could be all too human! This issue in particular was a clear inspiration for the space operas to come from Starlin as well as Claremont & Cockrum or Byrne, and if I recall right there'd be more mention of the space station in ish 102 with some pre-pro input from Claremont. All this and significant character development in Vision and Clint (not-quite-yet Hawkeye again). Thomas was really firing on all engines during his last year on the Avengers.
Another unavoidable comment from the future. Sorry.
While reading the lively thoughts and commentary, I'm nagged by one question: Do you guys READ the comics?
Earlier head-scratching about the transfer of Super Skrull's captives from tabletops to upright tubes. What we're then shown is a vastly different, and even without comparison scale, bigger ship than the saucer Goliath tried to punch. It even has a crew! And, the telling point, the narration box calls it the Skrull MOTHER SHIP. Obviously, the saucer rendezvoused somewhere in the Sol System and on they went.
The fleet mirage? I've never thought of it as other than a gizmo built into the SHIELD ship, because of Clint remarking: "Thought we had 'em spooked for a second there." That, and the Avengers reactions, show no cosmic manipulations or sorcerous mystery.
My last explanation is not so obvious, I grant you. But the reason Clint gave up on Goliath (to my great disappointment as well) was that he almost never accomplished anything as Goliath. So much so, that in Avengers #86, when Goliath saves the day on the Squadron Supreme Earth, his fellow Avengers tease him about "finally pulling his weight." Clint even sort of agrees, saying "...Cap always said I'd amount to something one day."
I like me giant characters very much. Archery characters are pretty goofy. But, the writers of the Avengers never let Clint-Goliath do much more than provide dynamic background. As Hawkeye, they let him win a few times.
Onwards and upwards! You have a new fan of BAB!
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