The mighty assemblers must face...
"ECHOES OF THE PAST"
Writer: Bob Harras | Pencils: Steve Epting | Inks: Tom Palmer
Colors: Tom Palmer | Letters: Bill Oakley
Editor: Ralph Macchio | Editor-in-Chief: Tom DeFalco
Note: This issue (or at least the version reprinted in the AVENGERS: THE GATHERING OMNIBUS) does not include credits. The above are pulled from Comics.org.
"ECHOES OF THE PAST"
Writer: Bob Harras | Pencils: Steve Epting | Inks: Tom Palmer
Colors: Tom Palmer | Letters: Bill Oakley
Editor: Ralph Macchio | Editor-in-Chief: Tom DeFalco
Note: This issue (or at least the version reprinted in the AVENGERS: THE GATHERING OMNIBUS) does not include credits. The above are pulled from Comics.org.
While the battered Avengers regroup, Magdalene and Swordsman appear in a remote control room, where the mysterious Proctor heals Swordsman and speaks of revenge on Captain America and the Avengers. At Avengers Mansion, the group decides that the man they battled was the real Swordsman, somehow back from the dead, and wonders what to do next.
Continuity Notes: There's lots going on between the main conflict's pages in this one! First, Luna's nursemaid, Marilla, gets into a spat with Jarvis in the Avengers' kitchen when Marilla tries to doctor Jarvis's recipe to make his food more palatable to Crystal. In the same scene, Sersi returns to the mansion unexpectedly. Jarvis tells her where the Avengers are and mentions that Captain America has been concerned for her, but Sersi declares that her life is her own. Then, as she leaves to go join the team, she is stopped when she catches sight of her own reflection and begins babbling to herself.
During the battle with Swordsman and Magdalene, Black Knight takes charge, ordering the Avengers to "start acting like a team." Later, he is the Avenger who confirms for the group that the Swordsman seems to be the original article, by comparing footage of the deceased Avenger's last recorded training session with the moves of the man the team just battled, and reveailing his heretofore unknown ability to study and identify anyone's body movements. So between those bits, his being the one to defeat the Swordsman, and his cover spotlight, the Knight's evolution into this run's "main character" is already well underway.
Assemble: Nope, not this issue. ("Avengers Assemble!" count: 3 in 11 issues to date.)
My Thoughts: This is a somewhat oddly structured issue, and not something I'm used to in comics. It opens with a big fight scene, and you assume that fight, interspersed with the little sub-plot pages, will carry us through to the issue's end. You get to the point where Magdalene and Swordsman teleport away, and you assume the issue's basically over, but then you realize there are a number of pages left! After the fight ends, there's a wrap-up for Swordsman, Magdalene, and Proctor, the Avengers do a post-mortem on the fight, and then we get one last sub-plot page with the Watcher.
Again, it may not be remarkable in a lot of mediums -- TV, for example. Many shows do this, with a final act to tie everything up after the episode's main plot has ended. But in a comic, this just jumps out at me as unusual, so I felt I should mention it.
But it's all about to be interrupted for a massive nineteen-part crossover! So be here next week as we look at the first month of "Operation: Galactic Storm". Don't worry; eventually we'll get back to this run, and it will finally proceed uninterrupted (aside from fill-in issues here and there) after "O:GS".
ReplyDeleteI don’t have much to say about this issue directly but yet again I’m reminded of an early Avengers comic of mine and the memory even kind-of comes with another mistaken notion.
As it happens, I got #157 around Christmas, during a visit to relatives. The defeated heroes on the cover were all familiar to me — Vision, Scarlet Witch, Yellowjacket, Iron Man, Captain America; not so the mysterious blurbed “Ghost of Stone” who turned out to be [mild but highly relevant 46-year-old spoiler] a simulacrum of the Black Knight. Wasp, Beast, and Wonder Man also figure into the story, as do Hawkeye, a bunch of Defenders, Mantis, and Swordsman in a flashback to the Knight’s transformation into a statue after the Avengers/Defenders War. An unknown entity grants mobility and thought to the Black Knight’s stone form, which like the apparently revived Swordsman in #344 here at least thinks it’s the real thing, although by the end of the issue the animated statue learns that Dane Whitman’s spirit was actually drawn out and summoned back in time by Merlin to possess his ancestor. The final page is to me at least as poignant as the legendary Avengers #58, albeit marred by the fact that writer/editor Gerry Conway’s narration unconscionably forgets the whole point (and famous title) of that tale by stating the Vision would perhaps shed a tear if he could. Zoinks!
For the longest time I mostly knew of the Black Knight from #157 and a few random spot appearances in reprints, because as previously discussed my Avengers experience was pretty sparse during the decades in which he was brought back to the present and eventually became rather a core member of the group at the hands of Roger Stern and beyond. I’m realizing now, however, that I had a vague notion the Black Knight whose body got turned to stone was Dane Whitman Sr. or somesuch to the latter-day Black Knight’s Dane Whitman Jr., along the lines of Whitman being the nephew of the the villainous Black Knight who’d fought the Avengers, since it did not and does not compute to me that the youthful Dane Whitman of casual speech, laser sword, and eventual bomber jacket could possibly be the same fella whose introduction in Avengers #47 I just reached in my personal read-through and who is seemingly resurrected in #157. Of course plenty of characters sounded more stilted or melodramatic in the early Marvel Age than later on, never mind that the animated statue wasn’t the real thing, but reconciling the presentations is still hard.
Fascinating! I've never read any "classic" material with Dane Whitman, so I didn't realize he ever spoke in anything other than contemporary dialogue!
DeleteActually, I take that back -- I did some of his serial from the Marvel U.K. comics, where he teamed up with Captain Britain, but I don't recall how he spoke in those stories. However if it was in a more old-fashioned way, I probably just assumed the U.K. writers weren't well versed with the character!
I don't know, then when he changed. I know I've read a very few of Roger Stern's AVENGERS issues, and I think he has the modern-day speech style there, so I would assume perhaps it's Stern who did it. But in any case, under Bob Harras's hand, he's definitely about as hip and modern as a character could be in the 90s!
(I actually have a theory that Harras and/or Epting intended the Knight as not merely a POV character, which Harras declared him to be in an interview from this era, but as a self-insert character for one or both of them. There are a few occasions where he feels slightly "meta", as if he is the author(s) commenting on the story. But I could be totally misreading that.)
DeleteHe wasn’t all, y’know, “prithee” and stuff as if from Camelot himself but, at least re the version in #157, look at Tom Palmer’s memorable head shot on the Marvel 25th cover of Avengers #273 — I think he talks the way that guy seems like he would talk, haughty and considered speech, certainly more Quicksilver than Hawkeye if not quite Dr. Doom.
I honestly can’t bring to mind anything I read with the Black Knight in it beyond #157 and the wedding of the Pyms as reprinted in a Marvel Treasury Edition (where if memory serves he’s just kind of there in the crowd). So when I noticed the version with the bomber jacket and lightsaber in the ’90s at the comics shop I just kind-of assumed he was a young successor. I mean, Palmer drew him on that cover above like Jonathan Harris is under the helmet.
Proctor's comments focused on Captain America are a little surprising in hindsight given that Cap will soon leave the team for a while and Proctor will soon be focused on other Avengers. They suggest that Bob Harras may not have had Proctor's eventual backstory figured out at this stage and that the X-Men editor wasn't much good at forward planning even his own storyline on a single title.
ReplyDeleteWhile I agree that it's possible Harras didn't know at just this moment what Proctor would turn out to be, I do think he figured it out fairly quickly. I went into these issues knowing what his deal was, and I feel like Harras's writing reflects a long-term plan for Proctor and the Gatherers as we go along.
Delete(In fact, at one or two points upcoming, you'll see me praise Harras for his long-term plotting in contrast to his editorial attitude of letting his writers make things up as they went along!)