BHOC: AVENGERS #19

One of the things that the Batcave comic book shop was notable for during this late 1970s period was in having affordable copies of relatively old and key comics. These were typically more well-read copies, but for my purposes, i didn’t care. there was some elusive magic in holding an actual vintage book from a bygone age–as an object, it carried some sense of specialness and antiquity even apart from the story that it contained. On this particular trip to the shop, I happened across a copy of AVENGERS #19 in the back issue bins. It was well-read but not in terrible shape, and they were only asking something like $3.00 for it. So I picked it up. This cover, featuring the debut of the Swordsman, was primarily made from Jack Kirby’s initial character design, with inset heads of the assorted Avengers and a technology-filled background added by Don Heck. Kirby was often called upon to design new characters even for stories he wouldn’t be illustrating, and often he wasn’t paid for these efforts. I wonder who got the check for this cover, Kirby or Heck or both or neither?

Speaking of Don Heck, he was an artist whose popularity waned over the years, but in 1965 when this issue came out, he was largely well-regarded. A few things impacted on Heck’s work in the coming years. The reduction of the size of the original art boards around 1967 didn’t do his work any favors (it had an impact on almost everybody to one degree or another.) On top of which, super heroes weren’t really Don’s strongest idiom. He could do them, but he was much better at depicting real-world elements. That Kirby=styled exaggeration wasn’t his specialty. And as that became more the norm, and other, better draftsmen such as John Buscema came into the field, Heck’s work became seen as a bit old fashioned and tired. I wasn’t a huge fan of his current stuff in the 1970s myself. But I liked, and continue to like, his efforts throughout the formative Marvel period.

As for AVENGERS, at the time this issue first came out, the series had been through an almost-unthinkable transformation. It had begun a few years earlier as a counterpart to DC’s JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA, a team made up of Marvel heroes who each headlined their own ongoing solo series. But as the series lagged in reader interest, writer/editor Stan Lee found two things to be of issue. The first was that, as the Marvel stories began to lean further into continuing epics, the fact that a given hero was in jeopardy in one title but fine to be running around with the Avengers in another was ruining the suspension of disbelief for a portion of the audience. The second was that Lee keyed in on the fact that it was the personality conflicts and soap opera running romances that were bringing the Marvel audience back month after month. And AVENGRS didn’t have any of that. So Lee completely overhauled the series, taking all of the established heroes off of the active roster (with the exception of Captain America, whose solo strip was set during his WWII adventures at that time) and replacing them with a trio of ambivalent villains who had garnered some popularity among the readership: Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. To say this was risky is a bit of an understatement–it was a complete overhaul of a title the likes of which had never been seen in comics before. But it seemed to work.

A quickie pause here for one of Marvel’s ubiquitous house ads of the period. I loved getting these old books and seeing these ancient covers. In particular, this AMAZING SPIDER-MAN cover was striking, though I’d already seen a modern day riff on this approach on AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #188 a few months earlier.

The New Avengers as they were informally called for several months, all had attitude and personality, but very little in the way of backstory. That’s part of what this issue sets out to address. It opens with a mysterious costumed mercenary, the Swordsman, breaking into Avengers Mansion in an attempt to join the team. The Swordsman realizes that having priority Avengers clearance would give him legitimacy and license to do what he pleased. The New Avengers, specifically Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, are unimpressed by this arrogant newcomer, and best him in battle when he attacks them. Captain America shows up at this point and runs a background check on the Swordsman, learning that he’s a wanted fugitive in several countries across the globe. But before the Avengers can take the Swordsman into custody, he’s able to cut the power to the lights and escape in the confusion.

Hawkeye is the last to arrive, and he’s ashen-faced as the team tells him about the Swordsman’s break-in. Turns out that he’s got history with the Swordsman, who was the one that trained Hawkeye in archery at the circus in the first place. So we get to learn a bit more about Hawkeye’s background (though not his real name–that wouldn’t be revealed for another 46 issue, believe it or not.) Meanwhile, we get a strange sort of tie-in to events elsewhere across the Marvel line. A few issues ago, having heard that his old colleague Nick Fury had gotten into counter-espionage work following the War, Captain America wrote to him in the hopes of earning a position within Fury’s team. But now Fury has been recruited to ramrod S.H.I.E.L.D., and that organization’s enemy group Hydra is keeping tabs on him. they waylay the letter that Cap wrote, then discard it as unimportant to their plans for Fury. But the discarded letter winds up in the hands of an underworld stoolie, who is able to sell the information it contains to the Swordsman.

The Swordsman figures that he can capture Cap and use him as a bargaining chip to get the Avengers membership he desires–a pretty bonkers plan when you come right down to it. But he writes back to Cap as Nick Fury, arranging a meet-up at a run-down warehouse. Cap is elated at potentially having a mission and being out from under foot, so he’s not all that cautious about attending the meeting. Meanwhile, Hawkeye stops a typical burglary, one of the perpetrators of which is the stoolie that sold the info to the Swordsman. He gives up this info to the bowman, who scrambles to alert the rest of the Avengers since Cap is already gone. But they’re too late–Captain America walks into an ambush. Of course, Cap is no slouch, so what we get next is an extended multi-page bout between the Swordsman and Cap.

But this would be a pretty dull story if Cap simply clobbered the Swordsman, and so, while he gives an excellent accounting of himself, Cap is undone when a stack of crates falls atop him. The other Avengers race to the scene, but by the time they arrive, the Swordsman has Cap out on a makeshift plank, and he threatens to hurl the hero to his death of he’s not immediately instated as the new leader of the Avengers. The three younger heroes aren’t sure of just what to do next, but Cap takes the decision out of their hands–he deliberately hurls himself forward into open space to his doom so that his team won’t surrender to the Swordsman. And that’s where this story is To Be Continued. I wasn’t especially worried about Cap’s fate here–even if I didn’t know that he was still alive and active in the present, I could think of a dozen ways that the other three Avengers could save him from a fatal fall.

After the story came another house ad, this one from two just-released Annuals for that year. Again, I found seeing these early books very cool.

This early version of the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins page was mostly turned over to hawking Marvel merchandise, such as the cool stationery set that was being offered. I never had one myself, though I wanted one. But the page continued to print the names of 25 members of the Merry Marvel Marching Society, including in this batch future Marvel writer Tony Isabella, known today as Jenny Blake.

The two page All About the Avengers letters page included the first bunch of reactions to the sudden change in the team’s line-up. Suffice it to say that most correspondents weren’t enthusiastic about this change, though Lee front-loads the page with more positive reactions. One of these comes from Cary Burkett, who would one day write for DC. The letters pages at this time were a kind of hybrid operation, including material that would eventually migrate over to the Bullpen Bulletins page, including the Marvel Checklist. There was also a blurb concerning the short-lived name change from Marvel Comics to Marvel Pop Art Productions–a designation on the cover of this issue that confused me at first. It’s a good example of the fun, funny, self-aggrandizing, self-effacing conversational tone that Lee permeated the Marvel titles with, which made the company feel less like a publishing endeavor and more like a crazy gang of like-minded weirdos having a fun time. Much of this impression was manufactured, of course, but it was a key element in Marvel’s ongoing popularity. A reader, even one perusing these pages so many years after the fact as I was, couldn’t help but feel like Stan was talking directly to them, and treating them like a respected adult.