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The Avengers: The Morgan Conquest  2000 (SC TPB) 112 pages

Written by Kurt Busiek. Pencils by George Perez. Inks by Al Vey.
Colours: Tom Smith. Letters: Richard Starkings & Eric Eng Wong. Editor: Tom Brevoort.

Reprinting The Avengers (3rd series) #1-4 (1998) - plus covers of 1, 2, 3 (including variants of 1, 2)

Rating: * * 1/2 (out of 5)

Number of readings: 1

When various ex-Avengers are attacked, the entire team re-unites -- really. Just about everyone who had ever been an Avenger and can still walk or crawl gathers together, totalling something like 40 super heroes. Before they can accomplish much, though, their foe is revealed to be Morgan Le Fay, from the King Arthur legends (being in the public domain, Morgan's a popular gal in comics, with both Marvel and DC utilizing the character from time to time). Morgan re-shapes reality into a medieval state and brainwashes the Avengers into being her knights, all with spanking new medieval-themed costumes. Eventually some of the Avengers shake-off the brainwashing and try to set things right. The final story included here has the Avengers, having defeated Morgan and restored reality, trying to settle on a more manageable membership.

This kicked off the current Avengers series, and writer Kurt Busiek plays the nostalgia card heavily as he reunites the disbanded team. Unfortunately, since the Avengers only disbanded a little before this, it doesn't generate a nostalgic lump in the throat one might get if this was, I dunno, a revival of the Inferior Five or something. These guys haven't been gone long enough for the fans to really miss them. Busiek also threatens to fall into the trap of what I've come to dub the "Iconic Age of comics". If the "Marvel Age" of the '60s and '70s was about writing super heroes as people, with real problems and personalities, the "Iconic Age" of the '90s is where fanboys-turned-writers emphasize the super over the human. Iron Man tells us that he and Thor are friends...but Busiek never shows us. Instead we get lots of dialogue about how great the Avengers are, and how unflappable Captain America is...and how dry scenes can be of 40 superheroes patting each other on the back and saying how wonderful everyone is.

Eventually the adventure stuff kicks in, and the concept is certainly grand, but again, hurt by Busiek's handling of characterization. It would've been a great opportunity to explore why the different characters react the way they do to the brainwashing. And there are some nice character bits -- a scene between Captain America and Hawkeye, reminding us that Hawkeye really likes being an Avenger, or some solo scenes of the Scarlet Witch, or the reasons for Iron Man's reaction. But overall, the character stuff is thin. With 40 odd characters, most really have nothing to do except show how many people George Perez can draw in a single panel.

The plot to the 3 part Morgan story (called "Once an Avenger..." inside the book) is likewise a bit undeveloped. For such a nifty idea -- all those Avengers, reality-warping, medieval times, etc. -- Busiek doesn't really shape it into anything more than an O.K. time-waster. It's not that it's wretched or anything. It's just a bit...pedestrian, lacking twists and turns and intimate scenes.

It's the final story that catches fire.

The action-adventure stuff is minimal as the Avengers attempt to prune their roster. But Busiek finally does character-stuff right. Suddenly the "icons" revert to being people and there's a bigger rush of nostalgia in just seeing these characters in character than in all the chest beating and trumpet sounding of the earlier scenes. This is the Avengers, and these 22 pages gives one more faith in Busiek's ability to handle the team than the epic Morgan trilogy. It's a nice issue. Period.

A long ago Avengers artist, George Perez's art is jaw-dropping to look at here, but maybe a little too much. He's always been a detailed artist, but here it's maybe a little too busy occasionally, with intricate panels where the minutia threatens to obscure the key elements. Still, that's a minor quibble. And the problem may rest as much with colourist Tom Smith's overly dark colours that kind of sap some of the energy.

The letterering employs varied fonts to portray the speaking voices of various characters, but not always successfully. Iron Man's words are etched out in mechanistic bubbles...but since Iron Man is a man in a suit, surely it better captures the character to portray his words in normal balloons, emphasizing the contrast of the mechanical suit with the man inside. And, I'll admit, I'm just not a big fan of the computer-generated lettering used by many modern letterers.

The Morgan Conquest is comprised of an O.K. but unexceptional adventure...and a really quite appealing character-driven one-shot issue.

Cover price: $21.95 CDN./$14.95 USA.

The Avengers: Nights of Wundagore
In this age of proliferating TPBs, sometimes older comics get released in more than one collection...but the Nights of Wundagore storyline might be among the most oft collected. It has been collected in at least three different volumes...usually with some slight variation in the issues collected (some collections including just the core issues, others throwing in a few extra, but non-essential, comics). This story has appeared as the colour TPB, The Yesterday Quest (re. #181, 182, 185-187), and as a black & white digest-sized collection as part of the (very short-lived) Backpack Marvels line (rep. #181-189), and more recently as the full colour Nights of Wundagore TPB (rep. #181-187).

Backpack Marvels: The Avengers: Nights of Wundagore 2000 (SC digest-sized TPB) 160 pgs

Written by David Michelinie, Bill Mantlo, Steven Grant. Pencils by John Byrne. Inks by Dan Green, Klaus Janson, Gene Day, Dave Hunt.
Letters: various. Editor: Roger Stern.

Reprinting: The Avengers (1st series) #181-189 (1979)

Black & White

Rating: * * * * (out of 5)

Number of readings: 2

The Avengers return to the European nation of Transia to learn the deadly secret behind the origins of the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver -- as well as other adventures in this reprinting of 9 consecutive issues in black and white.

Years ago the reprint medium of choice was digests -- half the dimensions of a regular comic, but with lots of pages. However digests fell out of favour, eventually replaced by expensive Trade Paperbacks which are at the opposite end of the economic spectrum from the cheap digests.

Marvel seems to be testing the water for a resurgence in low-cost digests with their Backpack series which are (slightly) bigger than the digests of old and similiar to Marvel's Essential books, in which a bunch of issues are published in unbroken continuity in black & white (Marvel's also produced a Spider-Man and at least one X-Men book in the format)

The art by John Byrne, back in his glory days, takes to the shrunken format quite well, everything clearly portrayed and comprehensible, and printed sharply on white paper. This put me in a nostalgic mood -- I used to love digests (what kid on a budget wouldn't?) -- and it harkened back to my misspent youth, and a time of the Avengers with which I was already vaguely familiar, having issues from around that period.

Nights of Wundagore was a lot of fun. Perhaps not on the same level as Jim Shooter's characterization-intensive run that these issues follow, but these are nevertheless engaging in a kick-off-your-slippers-and-relax way, with David Michelinie's capable scripting and Byrne's crisp, detailed art. The membership roster alone keeps you on your toes, with characters leaving and then rejoining within a few issues. Avengers who appear in significant turns include Iron Man, Captain America, The Scarlet Witch, the Vision, Quicksilver, the Beast, The Falcon, Ms. Marvel, Wonder Man, The Wasp, and Hawkeye, with Jocasta having a few lines, and cameos by others.

The "Nights of Wundagore" storyline, clarifying the origins of the Scarlet Witch and her brother Quicksilver and involving a confrontation with an ancient evil, could have been covered by reprinting #181-182, 185-187 -- and was! I believe those issues were allready collected in a full colour TPB called The Avengers: The Yesterday Quest. But following the trend of the Essential books, in this book we get an unbroken stream of continuity (#181-189) that is appealing. As such, no single story is expected to shoulder the burden of entertainment exclusively. The Wundagore stuff is the highpoint, but isn't flawless. But when combined with a few other "filler" tales, such as a two-part battle with the Absorbing Man, it works nicely.

The Wundagore story may've been building for years (the old man who arrives in New York in #181 was shown embarking for America wa-ay back in #166), or it may've been a desperate attempt to explain continuity errors. The story contains the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver's recollections of quite different origins (We were raised by Gypsies -- no, no, we're the children of the superhero The Whizzer), which are woven together. It's clever, gradually showing how the different fragments contain partial truths, scenes acquiring new significance when viewed from a new perspective. There's a nice sense of a narrative progression, too.

Admittedly, there're confusing references to other comics, and not just in the mythos-intensive Wundagore issues. These stories were published concurrently with Iron Man stories (collected in The Power of Iron Man TPB) and partway through Iron Man disappears, then reappears a few issues later, with only cryptic references as to what happened. That's why I'm an advocate of annotations in collections to fill in gaps, so confusing references can be cleared up for modern readers. In that vein, this contains character profiles of the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver at the back of the book that answer a question left unanswered in the stories themselves: namely who their biological father is. Because of that, a dangling question that could be aggravating...isn't. O.K., I knew who their father was, but it's a plus for those not aware of that little genealogical tidbit.

Still, I'm curious as to the how the people who decide what goes into these collections make their selections. You see, Nights of Wundagore begins with the Avengers forced to operate under tighter government regulation, with Marvel's resident smary bureaucrat, Henry Gyrich, insisting they adhere to (supposed) equal-opportunity guidelines and recruit the (black) Falcon. The final story ends with Gyrich vowing to shut down the Avengers entirely.

Here's the thing. In the next two issues which aren't included (#190-191) the whole Gyrich story resolves! What's more, the Falcon (finally) proves his mettle, putting to rest any doubts he, and others, had about his membership. In other words, had this collection included just two more issues, not only would it have brought closure to one sub-plot, but thematic closure to another.

As is, Nights of Wundagore, reprinting Avengers #181-189, is an entertaining collection of mainly decent tales. But had it reprinted #181-191 it would've made a true graphic novel -- with a beginning, middle, and end. And isn't that what they should be aiming for?

The whole equal opportunity thing is kind of awkward anyway. The characters, including the Falcon, are insulted by the concept, but once the Gyrich/government regulations thing was dumped from the series, the Falcon (I believe) quickly followed. In other words, whether by accident or design, Michelinie and company may've actually proved the value of such policies, since, without 'em as a story ploy, the Avengers quickly became an all white group. Food for thought, eh?

Anyway, it might be nice if Marvel did more Backpacks, using it as a format for stories that maybe aren't "hot collectibles" but might be attractive to readers in this more modest format. And DC Comics, too -- you listening? O.K., DC has conspicuously refused to emulate the success of Marvel's Essential books, so I don't think providing entertainment for people on a budget is high on their priorities...but we can dream.

Ultimately, this is nothing classic, but crisp writing and art combine -- particularly with the cheap price tag -- to make for compulsively enjoyable reading.

Cover price: $9.95 CDN./$6.95 USA.

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