BHOC: AVENGERS ANNUAL #2

As I’ve mentioned here before, having become aware of the fact that my father’s place of employment was located right in the vicinity of the Levittown Heroes World location, the only real comic book shop I yet knew of, I would regularly plead for him to stop by the place and pick me up some comics on his way home. Every now and then, he would agree to do so, and I would provide him with long, elaborate lists of issue numbers I wanted for particular titles, books that at that moment had caught my attention. I can recall him coming home one night with both this issue of AVENGERS ANNUAL #2 and the following ANNUAL, #3. “Look at those numbers!” he said with some excitement and triumph. I didn’t have the heart to explain Annuals to him, so I accepted his kind offering with gratitude. It was still a beaucoup haul. That John Buscema cover is a classic, with its black background used effectively in making the Avengers old and new pop off the page. It promised maximum excitement.

At the time when this Annual first saw print, writer Roy Thomas was in the middle of his long AVENGERS run and had shaken out the kinks to make the series a true reflection of his passions in super hero comics. It was legitimately his book now, rather than editor Stan Lee’s. Roy in particular relished the Annuals, where he could do long stories like those his beloved Justice Society of America had starred in in ALL-STAR COMICS back during his youth. And he had a killer concept for this particular Annual, springboarding off of the events of a then-recent issue: the original Avengers battling the modern Avengers! What kid could resist that? The story opens with the Avengers returning to their Mansion headquarters after a storyline in which they journeyed back to the past to find out conclusively whether or not Bucky Barnes, Captain America’s wartime sidekick, had survived or not. But as the Avengers walk up fifth avenue, they are disconcerted by the stares of other passers by, who react as though they had no knowledge of this band of heroes.

And it’s no wonder, because arriving home, the Mansion’s built-in defenses don’t recognize them either. And after fighting their way through, they find the original Avengers gathered in their central meeting room. Of course a fight breaks out, but the new Avengers are pretty overmatched by the originals, though they give a good accounting of themselves. Ultimately, though, the new Avengers realize that this fight is meaningless, and they bug out on the originals. They realize that somehow, their earlier trip through time must have altered history–and indeed it did. We are introduced to the Scarlet Centurion, a mysterious entity who appears before the original Avengers seconds before the Hulk quits the team, and offers his aid in turning the Earth into a paradise if the Avengers will just wipe out all of the other super heroes and villains on Earth. It seems foolish for the Avengers to go along with this, but they do, and we get to see them mop up on everybody across the nascent Marvel Universe in flashback.

A pause in the story here for this dynamite two-page pin-up from artist John Buscema of all of the Avengers past and present at that point. It’s a much smaller group than it would become over the course of time. Sadly, John was too busy working on the regular monthly AVENGERS series to draw this huge Annual, so the art chores were split between two Marvel mainstays, Don Heck and Werner Roth. Both of them were fine artists, but neither one was as intrinsically exciting as Buscema at his peak.

And this mid-story spread of the old Avengers cleaning up on the assorted miscreants of the Marvel Universe proves it. It isn’t a bad spread at all (it looks to my eye to be the work of Roth rather than Heck, though it’s tough to tell after inker Vinnie Colletta gets finished with it.) but it isn’t as jaw-droppingly charged as Buscema’s pages. Anyway, the Centurion praises the Avengers’ good works but tells them that there are still five more heroes who must be put down before the transformation of the world can begin–the new Avengers, of course. So a reckoning is coming. For their part, the new Avengers have figured out the history of this changed world as well as where the old Avengers split up all of the components of Doctor Doom’s time machine after they had defeated them. Reassembling the device is their only hope of being able to go back into the past and fix things. So going into the second half, the new Avengers split up to retrieve the pieces of the device, and the old Avengers do likewise to hunt down the new Avengers.

As the story moves into chapter two, we open with the Black Panther and Hawkeye, who have to contend with Iron Man and the Hulk in their attempt to retrieve their component. The two new Avengers are clearly outpowered here, but some excellent teamwork and a little bit of luck (Hawkeye’s sonic arrow somehow causes the Hulk to transform back into the powerless Bruce Banner at a key moment) helps them to win out. That and being the lead characters in the story, of course. Elsewhere, Captain America finds himself hard-pressed to fight off the Thunder God, Thor. That is, until it occurs to him to try to separate Thor from his hammer for sixty seconds (Cap doesn’t know about the enchantment at this point in history, but he figures, “Hey, Thor’s always hanging onto that hammer for dear life, maybe if I separate the two…”) When the arrogant Thor reaches his time limit and returns to the form of Doctor Donald Blake, it’s all of a second’s work for Captain America to turn Blake’s lights out. And finally, Goliath and the Wasp battle earlier versions of themselves, back when Hank was called Giant-Man. But in their case, they’re much more experienced and polished than their old Avengers counterparts and win the fight handily. So the new Avengers now have all of the bits that they need to fix things.

The new Avengers get the time machine put together, but before they can activate it, the Scarlet Centurion appears. He reveals that he’s a time traveler himself, the mastermind driving all of these events, including Cap’s sudden interest in revisiting Bucky’s death that set this adventure into motion. Now he intends to prevent the Avengers from changing what he has wrought by destroying them. But these heroes just went through the old Avengers like a hot knife through butter, so they’re not going to permit one guy in red armor from stopping them now. Ultimately, it’s Goliath at ant-size who is able to activate the machine, which sweeps up all of the Avengers as well as the Scarlet Centurion himself, sending the would-be conqueror hurling uncontrollably back into the timestream. And then the Watcher shows up, to explain the plot not to the Avengers (who will have no knowledge of these events when the timestream resets itself) but rather to the readership. He reveals that the Scarlet Centurion would continue into the future, where he would one day become perennial Avengers villain Kang the Conqueror. So that’s a fun little kicker at the end of the adventure.

John Buscema did contribute a few pages to this Annual, and in a style that he didn’t often get the opportunity to use. One of the features that had been decided upon to run across all of the Annuals that year were humorous tales of how the creative team put that year’s story together. It’s a legitimately funny little story that Roy Thomas spins, with Buscema’s genuinely adept cartooning providing the visuals. I enjoyed it a hell of a lot. On the one hand, it’s hugely self-indulgent, but on the other, it did give a sense (albeit a fictitious one) about how a comic book like this one was put together. And that was information that I was hungry for. It also helped to characterize some of the creators in the Marvel bullpen, something that Stan Lee was always keen on doing.