BHOC: MARVEL TRIPLE ACTION #46

This was a pretty welcome issue of MARVEL TRIPLE ACTION with its reprinting of this conflict between the Avengers and the X-Men. I was a bit unhappy about how the Beast and the Angel had been miscolored on the cover–somebody was pretty clearly working from reference of them in their original blue and yellow costumes. Goliath, meanwhile, is also colored incorrectly for this story, as his attire had shifted a couple of issues earlier to red and blue. I’m a lot more understanding of such errors today, now that I understand the process, but as a kid, it really bugged me. Didn’t Marvel know its own characters and history at least as well as I did? Fortunately, everything was more on point in the interiors.

This story was the culmination of an arc that writer Roy Thomas had been building in AVENGERS at the time, one that intersected with concurrent issues of X-MEN and involved Quicksilver and an amnesiac Scarlet Witch leaving Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and rejoining Magneto and his Brotherhood of Mutants. This crew struck at the X-Men immediately after the death of their leader Professor X and pretty well clobbered them all. But the Angel managed to escape and summon help from the Avengers, who have been trying to ascertain the whereabouts of their missing members for some time. Unfortunately, when they show up, they find Cyclops having just put the kibosh on Quicksilver and jump to the sorts of conclusions guaranteed to generate a battle between the two good guy teams.

As the Avengers leap to the attack against Cyclops, who figures they must be some trick of Magneto’s, android replicas or whatnot, we move into an extended flashback which shows the Angel arriving at Avengers Mansion to petition Earth’s Mightiest Heroes for help. Everybody on the X-Men is especially rude to the Black Panther in this issue, as the Panther has only just joined the Avengers, and the X-Men seem to delight in putting T’Challa down, telling him that they don’t know who he is. Anyway, upon hearing the Angel’s tale, they follow the winged mutant back to Magneto’s citadel. But just as they’re about to arrive, the Wasp discovers a bug planed in the Angel’s wings. In a pretty absurd stretch, assuming this means that Angel is in league with Magneto, the Avengers tie him up before going in search of the Master of Magnetism and his cronies.

This is all going according to the master plan of Magneto, even though it seems that he’s improvising wildly as events transpire. He tells the Toad that he wanted the Angel to bring the Avengers to him so that he could destroy them–and the instrument of their demise will be the brainwashed X-Men themselves! Magneto subjects them to the same mind-control ray that he intends to turn upon the whole of humanity, and so the die is cast for the promised conflict depicted on the cover.

The fight is pretty perfunctory from a story standpoint, but it’s well illustrated by John Buscema and George Tuska. And honestly, this whole issue is one of the best depictions of the original X-Men up to this time. Ever since Jack Kirby departed the series, the artwork in X-MEN had been handled by artists whose strength tended to be more in soap operatics rather than dynamic super hero action, and as a result, the X-Men often didn’t seem all that formidable. It hadn’t been long before this that Spider-Man held all five of them at bay at once in an issue of their series. If the X-Men had more regularly been handled by artists of John Buscema’s caliber, they may not have found their way to cancellation just a couple of years later.

But after a number of pages, the Avengers get the upper hand–almost as though this were happening in their series–and the X-Men go down. At the same time, Magneto’s mind-control apparatus ceases to function. Turns out it was destroyed by the Angel, whose captivity aboard the Quinjet was just another convoluted stratagem. The high-flying mutant launches himself into Magneto and the Toad, and is joined moments thereafter by the raging Avengers. On the back foot, Magneto begins to think about making a strategic withdrawal–and he brings down the roof in order to hold the Avengers back before he can make his escape. Just for good measure, he has the Toad activate the base’s self-destruct sequence, hoping to maybe catch the heroes in the detonation.

But the Toad has had enough of being knocked around by Magneto even as he serves the guy faithfully. So he piles Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch into an escape ship that was somehow constructed by Magneto entirely of non-metals for no good reason apart from setting up this climax, and takes off. Magneto tries to latch onto it as it rises, but as it’s non-magnetic, his powers don’t help him, and the Toad stomps on his gripping hand and sends him plummeting back down into the detonation of his base, where he’s seemingly killed. The Avengers and the X-Men, meanwhile, have all piled into the Avengers’ air-car and gotten away safely. They see the Toad’s ship zooming off, and despite being obsessed with Pietro and Wanda for several months, they decide that enough is enough and let them go. And that’s the wrap-up on this one. I liked it a lot as a kid, but looking back at it with adult eyes, it’s a bit dodgy in a number of respects. There’s a lot of action and fighting, but the plotting is pretty rough and characters often leap to the worst conclusions for the thinnest of reasons–or else act out of character deliberately as part of some ridiculous long-term stratagem. Either way, they do what the story calls for them to do regardless of whether it makes any sense or not, and with only the thinnest papering-over of the motivations involved.