Marvel 1995 Week--Captain America 441!!

For all the bitching and moaning about how bad some comics are today, we need a healthy sense of perspective--because (at least at Marvel), things were much worse 15 years ago.

That's right, it's time to hop in the Wayback Machine once again, for the unholy terror that is Marvel 1995 Week!!

And where do we start? How about with Cap?

Now, there's a few things we can immediately glean from this cover. First, check out the Marvel logo:

Yes, Marvel was attempting to divvy up its books into "families," and make it kind of super-official. Every "family" of books got their own logo!! And check out the "Mark's Remarks" from this week:

5 different editors-in-chief? I've commented that, at certain times the Big Two seemed to be dividing into fiefdoms in 2010. Well, at Marvel in 1995, it was literally true! Instead of one big happy Marvel Universe, everyone was getting their own Marvel logo, their own editor, their own "look what Marvel mags are out" pages that focused on books under that editor's umbrella.

It's kinda of a sad statement, especially when you start the second paragraph with "the marketing guys tell us." That's who was running the show at the time, rather than any kind of creative vision. Whatever other excesses the 1990s brought to Marvel, that was by far the worst, albeit the least visible at the time.

The other thing to look at on the cover is this little logo:

We complain, with some justification, about event fatigue today. But in 1995, Marvel was making everything a "mini-event" in its own fiefdom. Taking A.I.M. was a crossover between Captain America and the Avengers. Atlantis Rising ran through the Fantastic Four, Fantastic Force, Warlock And The Infinity Watch, and the Fantastic Four: Atlantis Rising bookends. All the Spider-Man mags were running The Trial Of Peter Parker this month, and next month started the madness of Maximum Clonage. The X-titles had just finished Age Of Apocalypse. It was increasingly difficult to purchase a single issue of a Marvel comic that didn't require you to purchase other titles in order to continue the story. The marketing department was indeed in charge.

But back to this issue: what's up with Cap?

M.O.D.O.K.'s been rocking the stairmaster!!

Who created this issue??

(That's Dave Hoover on pencils, just to be complete).

We're in part 3 of a 4 part crossover story. Plus, this is very near the end of Mark Gruenwald's epic 137 (nearly) consecutive issue run on Cap. Pretty damned impressive, obviously. But it also means there's a lot of info someone coming into this comic needs, because as much as I respect Gruenwald, he does a crappy job of giving us the most basic background info. If you hadn't been reading Captain America for the past two years, you're going to be lost with a few of these characters, and Mark's not going to help you out in the least.

This, I think, is where all the complaints about convoluted Marvel continuity come from--not necessarily the continuity itself, but the assumption by the writers that they no longer needed to bother to give us even a simple sentence anywhere explaining who or what some of the characters who randomly show up are. It's an arrogance--"the real fan will already know"--that was especially galling during the pre-Wikipedia era. Sigh.

Anyway, our plot. Cap & the Avengers have separately come to the island of Boca Caliente, tracking crazy energy emissions of the same type as we've seen in Cosmic Cubes. Well, surprise, the island is an A.I.M. stronghold, A.I.M.'s experiments have ripped open the dimensional fabric, our reality is going to be destroyed. A.I.M. has revived the once-dead M.O.D.O.K. to try to fix things.

But all that Cube-like energy has made this island into a "Shore Leave" planet, with stray thoughts being randomly converted into reality. Which explains why Bucky is here. Because, as we all know, Bucky is dead with a capital-D, never to be truly revived.

Ahem.

Just so we can establish how unreal this is, Bucky re-enacts his favorite Warner Brothers cartoons:

Which gives us the daffy scene of see-through Bucky pounding on M.O.D.O.K.'s head:

Oh, yeah, and M.O.D.O.K. has some new abilities:

Meanwhile, some people you don't know are doing something:

Gruenwald never "introduces" us to these characters this issue. Jack Flag and Free Spirit are novices Cap is training as heroes, and they came along on this mission, only to get captured. If you've haven't been reading the past dozen issues of Cap, you're not going to know who they are. And believe it or not, Free Spirit is never referred to by name in the entire issue. Even once. If this is your first issue of Cap, if you're just picking this up because of the Avengers crossover, well, tough luck. She's there, if you don't know who she is it's your fault, newb.

Well, then we get a starling revelation about our A.I.M. agents:

They're all Adaptoids!! All of them!! Now, it's never explained anywhere in the 4-parter where all these Adaptoids come from, how or why they replaced the real A.I.M. agents, or what they're doing, what their goal was. It was in the writers' head--why bother to put it on the page?!?

Oh, yeah, there are a couple of random super-villains running around:

Again, Superia and Snapdragon have come from the past few years of Gruenwald's Cap run. Do we tell the reader who they are? Nope. What their goal is? Not really. Their relation to anyone in this story? No. Just watch them run around and do stuff.

It's beginning to feel as if Gruenwald is actively punishing us for not reading along with all 137 issues, isn't it?

M.O.D.O.K. tries to seal the breach:

Oh, and yes, some Avengers are on the island, too, experiencing there own version of Fantasy Island. Black Widow meets her "long-dead husband"

Whereas Hercules meets a chick who died on him a couple of issues ago in the Avengers:

Just for the record: there's not another word of explanation of who she is, and in fact, she doesn't even appear in another single panel of the issue--she's just completely forgotten about. So why is she here? Uh...

Oh, yeah:

The Red Skull is here.

Now, from the previous chapters of this "epic," we already knew the Skrull was involved. Why Gruenwald waits until page 11 to have him show up here, I'm not sure. Can't interrupt all those scenes with Gruenwald-created characters that nobody knows doing nothing important, I guess.

When the Skrull goes after A.I.M.'s leader, he makes a discovery:

The Super-Adaptoid!! Bitchin'!! I luvs me some Super-Adaptoid!! And he's fighting the Red Skull!! So what exciting form is he going to shift into to face the Skull?? What adapted powers is he going to display?!? I'm so excited...

Oh.

Sorry, that's it, folks. You bring in the Super-Adaptoid, and all you can do is have him fire a generic energy bolt? That's it?!?! Sigh...

Meanwhile, things are going badly for Cap:

Oh, yeah, they forgot to remind us: Steve Roger's Super-Soldier serum was going bad, so his body was atrophying at a terrible rate, and he could only get around with an exo-skeleton. But, last issue Superia had surreptitiously given him a small dose of the cure, which is why he's walking around right now. And it looks like it's wearing off, as she explains:

Fact: We never learn what the "favor" Superia wanted was. After the story wraps up in Avengers, she is never seen again. Ever. Sorry, people who might have wanted to understand this story.

Meanwhile, even though Taylor Madison has vanished without a word, Natasha is still having a Spock-like debate with her dead-ex:

Yeah, Natasha is real rattled there...

The island explodes a little bit, and Steve is helpless...

...or is he?

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! I had forgotten how bad that abomination was!!!!!! AHHHHH!!

Well, it is a magic wishing island, Cap!!

So Iron Cap goes to help M.O.D.O.K.:

Well, that's an underwhelming cliff-hanger, ain't it? Don't worry, we'll finish the story when we cover the jacket-wearing, pouch-covered Avengers tomorrow.

Meanwhile, final grade? Well, I don't want to be too tough on Gruenwald. As per usual, there were a ton of good ideas here. And he was obviously restricted by it's being part of a cross-over tale. But this issue was marred by poor pacing; a surplus of characters, many of whom the reader had absolutely no idea who they were; events and concepts never explained in the least...it was just a general contempt for storytelling, and for readers who weren't already reading every issue. But hey, it made you go buy the next issue of Avengers, so, good for the marketing department!

Two more issues would see the end of Gruenwald's monster run, and Mark Waid would take over for an all-too brief moment of glory...and then Marvel handed the keys to the inmates who had already escape from the asylum. Brrr.....

ELSEWHERE IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE:

Of course, this being post-Image Marvel, Cap wasn't the only one who got a ridiculous new costume:

Hmmm, you can't see it very well. How about another look:

Man, I hated the 1990s...