Marvel 1995 Week--Avengers #388!!

Well, it's Marvel 1995 Week, and yesterday I left you hanging with a cliffhanger at the end of Captain America #441. Of course, I can't be that mean to you, so:

Ah, things are 'splodin' real good, eh?

This is the fourth and final part of a crossover story, Taking A.I.M. For the full poop on this story, go back and re-read yesterday's post. For the rest of you, the 10-cent summary: Captain America & the Avengers have gone to the Island of Boca Caliente to shut down an A.I.M. operation. But that operation has accidentally breached the walls between dimensions, and now the entire world is in jeopardy. Cap & M.O.D.O.K. are trying to shut it down, the Avengers are just basically hanging around doing nothing, all the A.I.M. agents turn out to really be Adaptoids, Cap is dying because his super-soldier serum has failed, there's a couple of random Cap villains wandering around, too, and the Red Skull is being a dickweed. Phew...let's get started, eh?

Before we go further, who created this story??

Now, sadly, this 4-parter plays a little bit like the DC Challenge, wherein the creators of Captain America and Avengers aren't actually talking to each other. They're riffing off of the same basic plot outline, but the details don't sync up well.

Take, for example, that boy and his dog. They appear in the Avengers issues of this crossover, but not in the Cap issues, even though the boy plays a particularly crucial bit in this storyline. So, while this first page theoretically takes off from the last page of Cap #441, the boy wasn't there...so this feels like some other starting point.

So, anyway, before the complex blows, let's discuss artists. Marvel's biggest problem in the 1990s was that, having lost their most popular artists to Image, the cupboard was a bit bare. Yet, the desire to be as Image-like as possible in their art to draw back some of the Liefeld/Lee fanboys was a palpable force in most of the books they published. So, in essence, they had a lot of people trying to draw "like Image," but simply not capable of it.

And then there's Mike Deodato:

Mike Deodato is a pretty good artist, as his later career has demonstrated. And in 1995, he was clearly one of the best at fulfilling Marvel's commandment to "draw like those guys." (And he also mastered the deadline abilities of those artists, only once drawing more than 3 consecutive issues of Avengers during his two years on the title). Indeed, he later did actually do some work for Liefeld's studio.

Deodato managed to put some sense of balance between the Liefeldian energy and exaggeration & actually drawing a comprehensible comic story and human anatomy (and he could draw feet!). But boy, could the man draw pouches and belts:

You note that, unlike her depiction in the cap portions of the story, where she was beltless, the Black Widow is fully 1990s Marvel accessorized, with a completely useless jacket and a utility belt. Hercules somehow lost his shirt between Cap #441 and this story. And Hank Pym--what, does he have a separate pooch for each individual Pym Particle?? Lordy!!

Anyway, the explosion reveals that:

There never was an island!! OK, that's a twist...but...

Mean, M.O.D.O.K. decides to, well, I'm not sure what...

So, he just bails to the other dimension. Perhaps he should be named M.O.D.O.R.A. (Mental Organism Designed Only for Running Away). Anyway, that's the last of M.O.D.O.K. we see in this story. But we still have a villain in the piece, sort of:

Of course, it's the mid-90s, so he needs a heavily accessorized super-suit.

One more thing to say about Mike Deodato: at this stage of his career, he was far, far too obsessed with splash panels and double-page spreads. He would often lay other panels over the splashes, so the could be some debate over what truly is a splash page versus what is an unorthodox panel layout. But, by my count, 13 of the pages in this issue are dedicated to splashes/spreads. Take that, Bryan Hitch!!

And apparently, it was in his contract that at least once per Avengers issue, he got to do a sideways double-page spread--so rotate your monitors, everyone!!

Yes, that scene definitely called for a sideways double page spread. Certainly. Sigh...

So, our big reveal is that the boy was really an Adaptoid. Well, I suppose. Maybe if he had appeared in more than 10 panels throughout the 4-parter, we'd have cared a bit more.

Meanwhile, let's jump back to the rest of the Avengers, to see if they're doing anything more than look around and going "Oh, gosh" yet:

Another good thing about Deodato--equal opportunity on butt shuts!! But again with the...odd..layouts. What's with the jagged box around Natasha's head? We couldn't figure out she was authoritatively shouting without that? To pretend there are more panels than there actually are? Because it looks cool??

And...if the island was never a real island, why are there "islanders" to rescue?!? Where did they come from? How long has this A.I.M. complex been there? I'm so confused...

Back to Cap and the Adaptoid, where we crib the old chestnut about Pinocchio:

Then, one of those random villains I mentioned earlier shows up:

Superia is an evil scientist, you see, whose full origins and motives haven't been revealed yet (and never will be). She's invented a cure for Cap's condition, and wants to trade it to him for a favor. And Cap says:

Deodato's having fun with layouts again, but...the lower left-hand corner...what's the point of using a panel line to show the motionless Data Adaptoid?? It doesn't add anything to the spread...no extra information, no sense of motion. It's a distracting reminder of how silly some of his layouts are.

Anyway, the Skull takes the cure for himself (he is in a cloned body of Steve Rogers at this point), kills Superia, and vanishes. Hmm, no villains left. Whatever will we do?

I know--go sideways again!

Can Cap and Data the Adpatoid stop the pending swallowing of our dimension?

Yes, but only by completely ripping off the the idea of Fortress Lad:

He adapts to become...a wall?? Really??

So, the crisis resolved, Cap falls:

But is rescued:

And there's time for the (unearned) moral:

Yes, Cap...if his dream was to become a wall...no, seriously, it was touching and all, sort of, and might have worked had this been an actual character and not just a deus ex machina. There was no build-up, no foreshadowing...just, in the last half of the fourth part of a 4-parter, a minor character (who wasn't even in 2 of the issues) is revealed to be an Adaptoid who wanted to be human and has powers no Adaptoid has ever shown before which just miraculously happen to be the exact powers which are the only way to save the day. At least Bob Harras and Terry Kavanagh didn't steal Arm Fall Off Boy, too...

So there's the Avengers 1995...except, this wasn't really much of an Avengers story. They don't do anything significant, just sit around gazing in Spielbergian ways at the crisis unfolding around them, while Cap does the heavy lifting. They never even meet any of the villains--the bad guys all leave of their own accord or are killed by other villains--they do nothing to prevent catastrophe, and we don't any characterization moments for any of them. I suppose that's one consequence of these required constant mini-events...you can't always find something productive for all of your cast of thousands to do. Of course, this time we found nothing for any of them to do. But damn, they did have pouches!!

Things would go downhill from this point pretty quickly. Next up was The Crossing, an event that made Avengers Disassembled look like the Kree Skrull War, as the Avengers are betrayed by one former member, have it revealed that one of their founding members has been a traitorous sleeper agent for years, turns the Wasp into an actual...wasp. Really. And then a couple of months later the entire team was replaced by this:

Ye Gods. Where's Deodato when you need him???

ELSEWHERE IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE:

Marvel was in the process of absorbing Malibu's Ultraverse, as we see in:

It's always struck me as rather odd that, since Marvel tried so hard to bring the Ultraverse into their fold--Black Knight became the leader of Ultraforce, Prime met Spider-Man, Juggernaut joined the All-New Exiles, Rune captured the Infinity Gauntlet, the Phoenix Force ended up in the Ultraverse for awhile--everything just petered out and vanished after a few months, never to be mentioned again.

There are apparently legal reasons and other "dirty laundry" (Joe Quesada's words) preventing any use of these characters, which is kind of a shame. Now we have even less chance of seeing the Malibu characters again than we do of seeing Milestone show up in the DC Universe...

Extra Bonus: try to count extra muscles an anatomical inaccuracies on this cover: