Web hosting Custom Email SiteBuilder

People Who Should Have Known Better and Avengers #200

Bad comics do not necessarily require the application of the energies of the demented or talentless. The previous two installments of this column, for instance, deal with the misdeeds of the clever Keith Giffen (in Bloodstrike #5) and the resourceful Steve Engelhart (in Captain America #186).

It took a village to make a comic as bad as Avengers #200. To celebrate the 200th issue of Marvel's team book, said publisher assigned the team (or should we say "gang?") of Shooter/Perez/Layton/Michelinie to put together a big send-up of a story to comemorate the continued success of the title.

Avengers #100, with the loving labors of Barry (Windsor-)Smith, represents a very tasty, very collectible, and very hard to find piece. On the other hand, Avengers #200 represents the kind of comics that earn an eternal place on the Comics Walk of Shame.

In this book, the co-conspirators took an unappealing second-string superhero, the ill-named Ms. Marvel, and turned her from something no one wanted to read to something no one could stand to read. The legendary badness of this one book still spawns consequences over two hundred issues and two volumes of Avengers later. Writers still can't fix the wrongs they did there, so Shooter/Perez/Layton/Michelinie's conspiracy must here receive due credit for a conspicuous crime of storytelling.

It just goes to show: Talented people can create misery that the amateur can't even approach.

No One Deserves This

From her very inception as a superhero, I found the dysphoniously-named Ms. Marvel a nuisance. Her concept derived from another, not particularly successful, superhero whose image and name she appropriated in order to act as a female equivalent; her costume represented an insult to the eye; her first story condescended to the reader and ultimately proved offensive to the very market Marvel intended to reach; and even her haircut got on my nerves.

You could conclude that I disliked Ms. Marvel, and do right by the truth.

However, bad or annoying characters await only the attentions of someone with the right feel to achieve storytelling redemption. Comics teem with characters that started inauspiciously and became something better. The right talent with the right ideas could fix worse than her.

Towards the end of her days as "Ms. Marvel," she enjoyed the hands of genuine talent, but the treatment ultimately became such an atrocity that Marvel had to commission another story to attempt to cauterize the affects of the first.

Early History

Before comics ever knew Ms. Marvel, who later bore the name "Binary" and currently calls herself "Warbird," readers saw the character as a supporting role in the various titles that dealt with Marvel's Captain Marvel, way back in the sixties when the character even tried to maintain a human secret identity.

Carol showed up for many of Mar-Vell's early adventures, beginning in the days when he wore the green-and-white Gene Colan costume and continuing into the era when he wore the red-and-blue togs Gil Kane created for him. She endured as his companion and contact into the Kree-Skrull war story arc in Avengers in 1971.

Between that appearance and her subsequent return to become Ms. Marvel, her appearances remain obscure; I can't verify if she appeared in print at all in that gap.

The character definitely represented a post-Lois Lane figure: She acted, rather than waited for others to act upon her. She flew planes and held rank in the Air Force. She got people out of fixes. I can recall no instance of her appearing on a cover strapped to something as Mar-Vell burst through a wall to rescue her.

She therefore presented the raw material for the superheroine that later creators would want to make her, even if false starts and a dead end kept her from realizing her potential.

Superheroic Makeover

If Marvel wanted to use an established support character like Carol Danvers, why, we must wonder, did they ignore the details of her history when they appropriated her to become Ms. Marvel? Marvel cast her in the role of a freelance writer for a women's magazine J. Jonah Jameson wished to peddle to the up-and-coming female professional.

Given her background as a pilot and companion to superheroes, one must wonder what made her settle for such fluff. However, the context of her times tells something about the inability of some writers to handle heroic female characters in the seventies. Television's "Bionic Woman" often featured scenes of Lindsay Wagner doing housework at super-speed even as her male counterpart appeared in scenes where he attempted the conventional superheroic stunts rather than cybernetically enhanced housework (email me if you recall a scene of Steve Austin using his cybernetic limbs to help him unclog the sink or mow the lawn).

To make of her a magazine writer did nothing to push the envelope of traditional typing of females in comics. Almost forty years previously, Lois Lane worked in a newsroom. Marvel, perhaps, feared to alienate readers with something that really did not elicit so much controversy in the seventies; once women working outside their homes became palatable, the specifics of the work did not generally offend.

Her investiture with superpowers involved no great reach for what passed for causality in comics; her frequent encounters with aliens, including a brief appearance in the Kree-Skrull war storyline in Avengers, derived from an exposure to Kree weapon energies which, at a later date, invested her with a full set of powers related to but not identical to those enjoyed by her male counterpart, Marvel Comics' Captain Marvel.

Her book did not immediately become a hit (perhaps content had something to do with this) but ultimately two of the lights of Marvel in the 1970s, Chris Claremont and the much-missed David Cockrum, did some work on her. Cockrum discarded the last atrocity of a costume that still tried to echo that of her male counterpart, instead working in long gloves, long boots, and a sash over something like a one-piece swimsuit. This combination still endures.

Further rehabilitation came from her appearances in Avengers, which in those days enjoyed the likes of George Perez (who gets better every year) and John Byrne (whose peak occurred at the end of the seventies, roughly contemporaneous with these Avengers pieces). The character had risen from her initial laughingstock status to that of a respectable second-stringer, better than the achievement of most of the superheroes ever created, but perhaps not enough to justify her continued presence in the Avengers.

Marvel, therefore, decided to craft a story setting the stage for her exit.

Marcus and Parthenogenesis

Troublesome superheroes have various ways of making way for more popular, more salable, and more contemporary peers. Sometimes they retire. Sometimes they die (and sometimes when they die, Jim Starlin gets to kill them). Sometimes writers leave an escape clause by sticking them off in some kind of limbo, like the rather absurd fate of the Justice Society immediatedly after Crisis on Infinite Earths (their doom involved having to fight a giant forever in a timeless limbo).

Marvel didn't want to do this here. Therefore, in a stroke of bad judgment, they put her in a story where she woke up pregnant one morning with no obvious source for the child inside her. This pregnancy advanced at an incredible rate (because comics does not have the time to let a character gestate for nine months except for a few rare exceptions).

Already, perhaps, this story begins to chafe. The power of "super- pregnancy" that sometimes besets female characters in comics (described in this column) seems somehow insulting, more appropriate to a giant queen bee than to someone who flies and crashes through walls. If we have "super-pregnancy," why not also "super-digestion," "super-hair growth," and "super exfoliation?"

An issue later, in the not-classic Avengers #200, all became known when Ms. Marvel gave birth to "Marcus," an extradimensional being who appropriated Ms. Marvel's reproductive apparatus in order to free himself from the doldrums of some limbo-place where he lived. In the process, he decided he wanted also to mind-control Ms. Marvel so that she became his lover; and, as the Avengers nodded and winked at this harmless little bit of nonconsensual sexuality (sometimes called "rape" in modern parlance), Marcus took her away to limbo with him.

Damage Control That Failed

After this sickly attempt at a happy ending, one might suspect that Marvel would have swept the whole business under the rug. They must have suffered the temptation to refuse ever to mention this story, or the insulted, Ms. Marvel, again.

Instead, though, Marvel decided that Chris Claremont and Michael Golden, in Avengers Annual #10, should rip the scab of this wound away, spray it with some really painful antiseptic, and wrap the wound again.

Avengers #200 did so much damage that the scenes from it that appeared in Avengers Annual #10 suffice to cause a sensitive reader to cringe; but, in fairness to the continuity model, writers and editors have occasional obligations to follow the consequences of stories.

Claremont had Carol Danvers, the erstwhile Ms. Marvel, reappear as an amnesiac rescued from suicide by Spider-Woman, another of the female-equivalent characters (Marvel now boasts its third Spider-Woman, undeterred by the failure of the previous two).

Amid a huge free-for-all between the Avengers and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (starring Rogue, who later became an X-Man and a popular character in her own right), the end of the story left unresolved in Avengers #200 came out.

Ms. Marvel, in limbo, under Marcus' control, got to watch as Marcus' misalignment with the time stream caused him to age rapidly and die, leaving her stranded. Somehow she returned to our dimension, but upon her return Rogue stole her powers and memories, leaving her a miserable, empty, friendless shell. Therefore she attempted to throw herself off the Brooklyn Bridge and would have died but for Spider-Woman's intervention.

She confronts the Avengers for standing around nudging and winking and making ogling noises as Marcus dragged her into limbo to serve as her sex slave. This scene must cause the reader pain for its unfairness, because Carol slaps Thor instead of bringing up her knee into the dangly parts of the writers who did this to her.

Uncertain Escape from a Certain Doom

Normally, when comics furgle a character this badly, when they bungle a personal history to the point that it induces illness when retold, writers and editors quietly send their mistakes off into the land of Nod, never to resurface and embarass those who brought about such horrors. Marvel killed Ben Reilly, the "Spider-Clone," when his own history had become so polluted and atrocious that his continued existence started hurting sales of Spider-Man books.

We should, perhaps, consider it to Chris Claremont's credit that he tried to redeem the character in the pages of X-Men around the last days that his compatriot Dave Cockrum worked on the book. He took the occasion of another X-Men space adventure to rebuild the character as "Binary," who could funnel the energy from a "white hole" (the hypothetical outlet of the matter and energy destroyed by a black hole).

From this state, Carol Danvers enjoyed more power than she had held in previous incarnations, but story developments forced her out of her title yet again. Ms. Marvel had fallen to cancellations (as had, in their turn, Astonishing Tales starring The Cat, She-Hulk, Spider-Woman, and probably others I can't recall). Then bad writing drove her from Avengers. Soon after her assumption of the Binary identity, the X-Men took the villanous Rogue as a member, and their shared history meant Carol would not remain in the company of the convoluted mutant superhero team.

Titles like Marvel Team-Up and Marvel Two-In-One furthermore did not have too long to live past that point in the eighties, so they could not provide her with anything like a regular gig; likewise, Defenders faced cancellation. She had used up everywhere she could appear. If she showed up anywhere between 1986 and 1997, this probably meant someone at Marvel had lobbied hard to use the character.

The Final Straw?

Kurt Busiek and George Perez have done much to redeem Avengers as a Marvel franchise. After the cancellation of the entire Marvel line and the abortive (and frequently not good) recasting of all the Marvel properties in a Liefeld-and-Lee mold, Marvel readers deserved some good news about one or any of the titles that dated from the sixties. Perez and Busiek made such news.

They took a back-to-basics approach in designating the new Avengers lineup, but also thought to give homage to Perez' earlier run on the title. Including Ms. Marvel, who now acknowledged the ear-abusing horribleness of that name and chose to call herself "Warbird" instead, pointed back to the late days of Perez' previous run on the volume 1 Avengers.

However...

...Busiek chose to do a story about the effects of alcoholism on the character as she turned to the bottle to fill the void left in her life by the theft of her memories by Rogue, all those years ago in Avengers Annual #10. So, therefore, very soon her drinking caused her to choke as an Avenger, and her screwups forced Captain America into calling her to task in an Avengers court-martial. She refused to sit through this business and stormed out of the mansion and out of the book...again.

As in the case of the Falcon before her, one bad story, magnified through comics continuity, kept her out of a better role in comics for something like fourteen years. Then, as soon as she came back, Busiek's excellent stories cauterized this wound: No one will reattach that limb.

All of which demonstrates the dangers of mixing the occasional and inevitable Truly Bad Story with Dogmatic Continuity. Radioactive waste has a shorter half-life than a bad comics story, and furthermore no one encourages the waste never to break down.

Continuity imposes costs on storytelling, and bad stories more so. Together, however, they seem to multiply rather than add their ill effects. If DC's drastic measures to houseclean their history seem absurd, consider the alternative of keeping the history of Warbird intact, so that everywhere she appears the reader has to deal with the stench of cheap liquor and rohypnol.