Unca Cheeks the Toy Wonder's Silver Age Comics Web Site!
From the "Why the
Avengers Have a Group Dental and Medical Plan Like You Would Not Believe"
Dept.:
When -- in the course of your Avengers-type duties -- you find yourself suddenly confronted by a SERIOUSLY cheesed-off troika comprised of the Hulk; the Sub-Mariner; and the Silver Surfer... it's a good idea to start mentally updating that ol' super-hero resume. Just in case, y'know, the Super-Friends are... like... hiring.
Actually, I just ... you know... threw this cover in to keep all
of the X-MEN dweebs happy
This is around the time when long-time AVENGERS scribe Roy Thomas was winding down what had proven to be one of the most consistently high-quality tenures by any writer on any mainstream super-hero title. Fans of the title didn't have anything to worry about on the storytelling front, however; a guy by the name of Steve Englehart was slated to step up to the plate, within the next few issues... and all he managed to do was belt the comic for the writing equivalent of a four-run homer.
People still speak of the Englehart "run" on AVENGERS in awed, hushed tones, to this day. There's a darned good reason for that... lots of 'em, in fact. Take, f'rinstance...
... the case of the short-term member of the Avengers known only as "Mantis."
An amnesiac Vietnamese martial artist extraordinaire, this character took the readers of the title in almost precisely the same sense that Sherman "took" Atlanta... even if she did have one of the most annoying speech impediments in all of recorded comics history. (Y'see... she never used personal pronouns, such as "me," or "I"; it was always "This One" -- as in "... This One feels an overwheelming desire to kick your sorry buttocks up around the general vicinity of your clavicle." Stuff like that, there.)
The ongoing search for clues as to Mantis' past and identity proved an exciting and durable storytelling engine for this title, for the better part of several years. Some truly eye-popping artwork throughout the bulk of the run -- such as Sal Buscema's, represented here -- didn't hurt matters none, either.
The other member of the team to benefit from some major "face time" during the Englehart run on the title was everybody's favorite melancholy and existential android the Vision.
It was during the point in the Avengers canon that ol' Vis went and got himself "hitched" to a real, actual, flesh-and-blood type woman fellow Avenger, the Scarlet Witch.
Apparently... some women can really get into... ummmm... "action figures."
Given that the Black Panther is my second all-time favorite Avenger (right after Captain America)...
... no way in heck was I gonna wrap things
up here without at least one cover showing the Prince of All Wakanda
takin' care of a little business... !
I suppose -- looking back on it -- that I haven't exactly gone into hard'n'fast specifics, re why I've always loved the Avengers so... certainly not in the same exacting, point-by-point way I did Batman and the Justice League, on the pages set aside for fawning over them, anyway. But... y'see... in the cases of those particular series', The Reasons Why and Whereof make a concrete sort of sense (to me, anyway) on the intellectual level as much as they do the emotional.
The "Silver Age" Avengers -- by way of comparison -- are more of a gut-level adrenaline sort of thing, I suppose. It's not the sort of thing which one can readily put into words, really; just a base-of-the-spine tingling at the sight of Captain America hefting that waycool shield of his and hollering "... AVENGERS ASSEMBLE --!", when you get right down to where the rubber meets the road.
I specifically selected covers for this retrospective that -- I hope -- make up for my total inability to express the specific equation "This plus That = Marvel's Best Comic." If even a little bit of that feeling came through -- just the slightest frission of what science fiction writers like to term "sense of wonder" -- then they did pretty much everything I expected of them, actually.
... and...
oh, yeah. One more thing...
[hefts shield over his head:] AVENGERS ASSEMBLE
-- !!!
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