The interesting thing about my personal Avengers line-up, Kurt Busiek once pointed out to me, is that they never actually existed. This was several years ago, before the thought of Kurt actually writing the Avengers was even a gleam in Marvel's corporate eye; a group of us on CompuServe were discussing the Avengers, and what our favorite run on the Avengers had been, and who should the Avengers be, really. I volunteered that when I pictured the team, this were the characters who leapt to mind:
- Iron Man
- Captain America
- Thor
- Wasp
- Ant-Man
- Scarlet Witch
- Vision
- Beast
- Hawkeye
Kurt was (of course), entirely correct: although they all were Avengers individually, that had never actually been the line-up of the team. Nevertheless, if I envision them all standing there for a team-photo, these are the people I see.
Now, I could rationalize the list--offer arguments as to why each of those characters really belongs on the team, describe what it is that they bring to the mix, but that's not really the point: that's not how I arrived at the line-up. It just bubbles up out of my sub-conscious based on all the Avengers stories I've read over the years; I can't avoid thinking of this team as the Avengers any more than I can avoid thinking of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, Aquaman, and the Flash as the JLA (okay, you can throw in Green Arrow, but to be honest, he's always an afterthought to me). They just are; the fan-boy in me has spoken.
Which brings us to today's review, the final issue of the set-up story arc where Kurt and George P駻ez cram everyone who was ever an Avenger into the hopper, before trimming it down next issue to their version of the Avengers.
Avengers #3
by Kurt Busiek & George P駻ez
published by Marvel, color, $1.99
rating: Keen.
This almost worked for me, but not quite. Once in a while (actually it happens quite frequently with some authors, but hardly ever with others such as Kurt Busiek or Mark Waid) I read a comic and think, "I wish they had talked to me before committing this to paper--I could have told them how to fix what's wrong with it." This is one of those comics. If you haven't read this yet, there's a spoiler ahead, so be warned.
That the Avengers all banded their energy and convictions together to give power to the Scarlet Witch in her magical duel against Morgan le Fay was mildly inspiring; that the newly reconstituted Simon Williams was willing to give up his brief return to life was even better, but...the problem, as I see it, is that the fact that this energy was enough--just barely enough, but enough--to defeat Morgan was a coincidence. There was no particular reason that it should be so, except that this would be a damned short relaunch if it failed. No matter how many panels they stretch the struggle over it has the emotional impact of a flip of a coin.
How could it have been different? I say that it would have a much greater resonance, with me at least, but I don't think I'm atypical, if the resolution seemed inevitable from the set-up. In fact, that's been offered as one of the hallmarks of good plotting--that the resolution seem inevitable (at least in hindsight) given the set-up. If Morgan had failed because, say, she was unwilling to make the ultimate sacrifice, while all the Avengers were willing, then that would have made her downfall flow inevitably out of who she was, while making the Avengers' victory the sweeter for vindicating their moral position, their commitment to their cause and to eachother, and not just because they happened to be able to muster more power than she could. Obviously this would have to be carefully established, rather than just sprung on the readers in a lump of exposition at the end, but one way that occurs to me to have done that would have been to go a little into the nature of the Twilight Sword. (This is ranging a little far afield here, but bear with me. I want to show that this may be arm-chair quarterbacking, but at least it's arm-chair quarterbacking that's rooted in the specifics of the story.)
In Marvel's version of Norse mythology, the Twilight Sword was forged by the fire-giant Surtur (way back in Walt Simonson's run) to destroy all of creation during the battle of Ragnarok. Obviously, Thor and the other Asgardians managed to stop Surtur from employing it, but....implicit within the idea of destroying all of creation is that the sword will ultimately destroy the wielder. That didn't bother Surtur; that was his bag. On the other hand, that's not what Morgan le Fay is about. She may be a megalomaniac, but she's not suicidal. It would make sense then, I think, in a fairy-tale kind of way, if in a struggle to control the sword the side that's willing to put everything on the line--that is in fact willing to let the sword destroy it if that's what it takes--wins out. The side that wants to use the sword but escape unscathed is fighting not only the other side, but the sword's nature as well. If that was the set-up, then Simon Williams' heroic self-sacrifice would seal the victory in the inevitable-once-you-see-it way for which this story should have been shooting. It would have been a very small change, I think, to the narration, but in terms of oomph it would have changed everything.
The reason I go into this at such length is not that I think Kurt should hire me as a story consultant, but that in the past it's been so rare that Kurt's written a story that I thought I could improve upon; when it comes to pushing my buttons, there's not a writer alive who does it better than Kurt Busiek. He can hit me where I live without half-trying. Yet in the past couple of months, I've thought his stories were just a little...off. They're still entertaining, and they still have great bits of characterization, but somehow they just don't seem quite as dead-on-target with me as they used to. Well, except Astro City; with that he still wallops it out of the park every at-bat. I'm wondering if it's because he's getting a little stretched thin with his current writing schedule, or whether he just hasn't quite found his feet with the new Marvel titles, or what. What do you think?