Reading Through 2021 99: Acts of Vengeance: Avengers, by Marvel's 1989 crew

Acts of Vengeance: Avengers, by Marvel's 1989 crew

1989

A company-wide Marvel crossover in the 80's that didn't revolve around the X-Men. What a fresh concept!

That was a good image

Marvel first got into the crossover business with Secret Wars and Secret Wars II, but it blossomed with the in-title X-Men crossovers. First was the Mutant Massacre, which was loosely connected between Uncanny X-Men and X-Factor, both telling aspects of a single event, but the characters never really crossed over. It was followed by Fall of the Mutants, which featured those two books and New Mutants, but was mainly a crossover in theme and format. All the books featured independent stories. A year after that came, what was for me, the pinnacle of X-crossovers, Inferno. All three books crossed over into a mega-storyline which pulled in every New York-based comic from Avengers to Spider-Man. At this point, editorial was convinced this was to be an annual event, but there was some fatigue in the X-offices. 

Who could these mystery villains be?

In 1989, the Avengers were made the center of its own crossover, Acts of Vengeance. The concept was brilliant, in terms of a crossover event. Villains would fight heroes they had never fought before, hopefully succeeding with the element of surprise. For Marvel's creators, it was a mandated crossover, but they could basically take any villain from Marvel's history and have fun with them. It was a corporate mandate that creators could enjoy.  Some books were better than others, as always, but it was fun to read.

The crossover has been split into three books, this one focusing on the Avengers, another one being Spider-Man and X-Men, and the last being the rest of the Marvel Universe. I have some nostalgia for the Spider-Man of this crossover, where he gets goofy Captain Universe powers, but none of it is essential. This book, I'd read about half of it at the time and had some fond memories of it, and wanted to revisit it. 

A random assortment of creators

The main creators in this are basically a who's who of people who worked under Jim Shooter. Three of the writers, Gruenwald, Mackie and DeFalco, were never major players in comics, just dependable Marvel Bullpen writers. Gruenwald is really interesting in that he was obsessed with Marvel, and spearheaded the nerdiest Marvel project of all time, the Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe. He did a lot to create a space where Marvel obsessives could explore their fandom. DeFalco at this point had replaced Shooter as editor in chief. I had no love for his work as a kid, but I've reevaluated it after enjoying a lot of his Thor run. I never enjoyed a Mackie book, and can't say I did here either.

Dwayne McDuffie was a newer writer at the time, and went on to be influential with creations like Damage Control and Static Shock, but this might be some of the first work I've read of his that I remember. He went on to work in TV and at DC before passing away too young.

And of course John Byrne, who famously threw a party with a burning effigy when Shooter was fired. I loved Byrne in 1989, and I like it a lot still, but there is a snideness in his work which turns me off. He seemed to think other creators were less than him, and it comes out in his work whenever he "fixed" what he thought was wrong with a book or characters. In this volume, he was writing Avengers, and both writing and drawing West Coast Avengers Avengers: West Coast. (His first act upon taking over WCA was to change the name, because it was a poor decision in his mind. Since he left, Marvel has gone back to the original title for its revival.)

Why would the Sub-Mariner attack his best human friend?!

So all the creators get to have fun. Gruenwald was writing Captain America and Quasar. His Cap run is not exactly beloved, but multiple ideas he introduced have stuck in the decades since, like John Walker and Crossbones. The first two issues feature the Controller, an Iron Man villain I've never heard of before or since, but the third features Magneto and is the high point of the whole crossover. I'll get back to that at the end. 

Eon basically just kills the conversation here. Awkward!

He also does Quasar with bland artist Paul Ryan. Quasar was not a comic I would pick up off the rack to even flip through. The costume, the hair... It was incredibly uncool. I have heard some Quasar fans in the years since say it was an interesting series, so I gave it a chance here, and there were positive and negative things about these issues. Quasar himself couldn't be more bland. A handsome, blond suit-wearing 80s corporate type. It was a dynamic that would have worked in the 50s or 60s, but he comes across as Marvel madlibs here: Tony Stark's aesthetic, Steve Rogers' hair, Peter Parker's bad luck. The peek into the cosmic stuff in the book is interesting though. Quasar's office has a cosmic doorway through which he can chat with tree-like entity named Eon.

Hey gloopy alien, I'll catch you in a net!

Quasar fights the Absorbing Man, the Red Ghost and the Living Laser, but Gruenwald rips on Venom. The pettiness on display here was shocking. The most popular new character at Marvel in a decade, and Venom is promised on the cover. Quasar fights Venom and wins in two pages! He just catches him in a net and then ties him up. Gruenwald is basically just saying Venom sucks and he hates him without explicitly saying it. Hey, Venom does kind of suck, but all the same, Quasar defeats him without breaking a sweat, but also without acknowledging Venom's power set whatsoever. They must have gotten a pile of angry nerd mail after this. The Quasar issues weren't great, but they were competent 80s comics. I can imagine getting into it if I were 10 or 11 years old, but not when I was 14.

The street has no life, the brick building has a hedge behind it. No effort was made on this, this looks like a paycheck

The issues of Avengers Spotlight weren't all competently done though. Spotlight was an Avengers spinoff meant to highlight Hawkeye and other Avengers. The Hawkeye stories here, written by Mackie, and drawn by Al Milgrim and inked by Don Heck, are the kind of comic that made me mad as a kid, but I didn't know why. Some Marvel books just had lazy art on them. Milgrim was a Marvel editor who liked drawing, and Heck drew the Avengers after Kirby left. Heck had some skills, but these stories look rushed and not up to par. Backgrounds are inconsistent or missing, the world looks like nobody lives there. I think if a young artist submitted them to Marvel in 1989, they would have been turned down and told to come back after some practice. It's a shame, because I want to find something to admire the old artists continuing to work in comics for decades, but I just don't think Don Heck is my kind of artist. I already knew I didn't enjoy Milgrim's work.

Dwayne McDuffie's dialogue was surprisingly fun. It calls back to Stan Lee's quips in the 60s

Iron Man was being done by Dwayne McDuffie, with Herb Trimpe pencilling and Al Milgrim on inks. I was not looking forward to these at all, but I really liked them. I wouldn't say they were good exactly, but there was some good stuff going on in them. They were basic stories of a good guy beating on a bad guy. McDuffie had a great sense of humor here, while Trimpe surprised me with some nutty illustrations. 

Just for this single image, I'll never have any doubts why Trimpe was working at Marvel for decades

Back then, I would read Iron Man for a few issues and then drop off. I wanted to like it. I loved the suit and technology, I hated the mustache. I was so turned off by 80s machismo as a kid, I never watched Magnum PI, and I couldn't vibe with Tony Stark. As an adult though, it's a lot easier to wade through the testosterone of it all enjoy what's going on.

Is this what they mean when they say PC culture is killing America? Would Iron Man be allowed to show off his junk to a random hot blonde in a convertible these days?

Meanwhile the Avengers themselves are fighting off random baddies. On the west coast, they fight Hulk villains the U-Foes, an evil version of the Fantastic Four, and the Mole Man's monsters. They are inconsequential stories. In both cases, the villains were duped into attacking the Avengers, and when it's revealed to them, they give up and go home. 

Byrne can draw some exciting stuff. X-Ray is one of the cooler character designs in the Marvel Universe

On the east coast, they fight Freedom Force, the renamed Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, and later the Mandarin and the Wizard. These are also drawn by Paul Ryan, with heavy inking by Tom Palmer. Palmer has such a strong brush that I can enjoy the meat and potatoes layouts Ryan gives. Byrne, for whatever frustrations I have with his attitude, always tries to do something inventive and new with characters. Shrinking Blob down and having him sink through the ground fits that bill.

Palmer brings a great John Buscema vibe to his inks

Next we come to Thor, by DeFalco and Frenz, who were in total sync at this point in their run. It's not a knock on them, but I definitely like their space and Asgard stories more than their New York stories. Here though, they bring the Juggernaut against Thor, which seems like a "why hadn't this happened already" idea. Not only that, they introduce a new team to the Marvel Universe: the New Warriors.

Ever since I read this, I want to send people a message the reads: It's war! Total war!

Thor can hold his own against the Juggernaut, but his infinite arrogance treats Juggernaut as a problem he can solve with punches, when in truth, nothing can stop the Juggernaut.

Skateboard to the Juggernaut's face! Frenz kills it in action scenes. These panels are hyper-kinetic while still being totally coherent

They fight for two issues, and Thor solves it by creating a vortex and dropping Juggernaut onto an asteroid. No matter how grounded a Frenz-DeFalco Thor story was, they always made sure something happened that was absolutely crazy.

How you gonna get home from there, tough guy?

One other book dropped in here is an issue of Cloak and Dagger, who were labeled as mutants at this point. Inker Terry Austin is writer, and I don't think it was very good. After a bunch of pages where it felt like the story never ended, I checked and it turned out to be a double sized issue. Avengers play a substantial role, which I guess was the logic for including it in this collection. It's competent, but very inessential.

The Hulk robot from the worst issues of the Eternals is brought back and stuffed with gags

The collection ends with the big revelation of the crossover, that the mastermind behind it all is Loki, who has never forgiven himself for causing the Avengers to unite in the first issue of the series. Byrne does a pretty good job portraying Loki as a person consumed with hatred and frustration that they just can never win.

Byrne is a fanboy at heart, and he gives the crossover a sensible foundation rooted in the Avengers history. Compared to the X-crossovers, which often seemed cobbled together under their editor's orders, this feels like a naturally occurring Avengers storyline. And Byrne gets to draw a fairly traditional lineup of Avengers doing their thing, as the east and west (and Great Lakes!) branches have come together at this point.

This image of Thor and Loki felt retro in 1989

All in all, this was a great crossover. It managed to do the things a crossover is meant to, without falling victim to the common weaknesses of them. It helped sell books to people following their favorite villains to other books, and create a feeling of a unified continuity. At the same time, none of the crossovers were essential, and you didn't need to read the central books to grasp what happened in the crossover issues. It was good for the managers, good for the creators, and good for readers too!

Kids paid for this sort of thing!

The book includes an epilogue that was printed as a back up story in an annual, that basically just tells what happened. This was published a year or two after, and is exhibit A of why Marvel's annuals became a waste of money. In order to pad out 64 pages, they created "stories" like this that only left readers confused about why they paid triple price for filler.

Not even the Wizard thinks Nazis are tolerable

The best thing in the book has to be the loathing of the Red Skull. It's questionable if a Nazi should be made a villain to sit along with Doctor Doom and Loki. Nazism is a real thing, Latveria and the Lord of Mischief aren't. But, at the very least, the writers are fully aware of how no matter how despicable Marvel's villains are, Nazis are at the bottom of the totem pole. 

Magneto is not taking this crap sitting down

Magneto is a character whose revamped 80s origin was that Nazis were the prime reason he has no faith in humanity to treat mutants humanely. If the story had had them working together without any of this commented upon, in retrospect, it would have gone down as one of those tone-deaf stories that failed so hard that "it was a different time" wouldn't let it go, like the time Carol Danvers gave birth to her rapist and everyone was fine with it.

Here, the writers make an issue out of it, and in the final Captain America tie-in, Magneto takes down the Red Skull.

Magneto levitating out of the room is a great image, as is the dark falling on the Skull

Magneto loathes the Red Skull and all he believes in. Upon confirmation that this Red Skull is the same as the one from World War II, Magneto tracks him down and promises to make him suffer. He locks the Skull in a windowless room with nothing but water, and I'd like to think the Skull is down there to this day. As this was still a point in time when millions of Americans weren't confused about whether Nazis were bad or not, Magneto is an anti-hero here.  Always, the cry of some folks in the industry is to keep politics out of comics, but these comics of the 80s were some of the things that started to make me politically aware as a kid. The politics were always there.

Yeah!

All in all, I burned through this, and liked it even where it was a bit shoddy. It's not on my top ten Marvel books of the 80s, maybe not on my top twenty. But if you have an appetite for the format of the time, that is, complete stories every issue; art which makes sense, and colors which are never muddy; and fun; you would probably get a lot of pleasure out of this.

That mess has been cleaned up

I've spent so many years reading superhero comics being written for adults, and sometimes they're amazing. But as I get older, I'm finding that I love the work that was made under the comics code and when comics were aimed at young teens. Superheroes were never intended to be obsessed over by 40 year olds. I'm enjoying these older comics that embrace that fact.