For the record, Abandoned Storylines #1 would be here. As you might have heard, I've spent some time going through my collection recently, and so I've come across a few stories that were started by writers that never finished, for whatever reason. So I'm going to discuss those, just to see what people think about them, if they have any thoughts on where they might have been going.
First, Geoff Johns' Avengers run. His first story involved various cities around the globe vanishing into another dimension, and someone having split the In-Betweener into separate entities of Order and Chaos. Things get so bad, the Avengers are granted worldwide control to prevent utter chaos, what with most of the capitals of the world being MIA.
Ultimately, we learn that a new Scorpio is behind it, using the power of the Zodiac Key. The Avengers stop him, recombine Order and Chaos to make the In-Betweener, and all the cities are returned. Except Scorpio escaped with the key, which now has all sorts of valuable information on the Avengers (what information I don't know), and he was part of a larger organization. A Zodiac, which is now poised to strike. Uh-oh.
There were some thing I liked from that story (and Johns's run in general), and some things I didn't. I liked that when Namor is less than impressed by the Avengers currently present to deal with the vanishing cities, he's standing at the head of the table while yelling at them. Then Captain America walks up behind him and Namor just moves slightly to the side, ceding the command position to him. Plus, Cap tells Namor he'll be paying for a new meeting table, so after the arc is over, Namor presents them with this really nice table, crafted by the top Atlantean metalworkers, I think. Then he laughs his butt off when Cap asks him to stay with the team, and thanks Cap for always being able to make him laugh. You get Thor vs. the Order half of the In-Betweener, and Ant-Man and the Falcon being useful (which warms my lower-tier character liking heart).
Still, I kind of wince seeing the Wasp and Yellowjacket hanging around each other, because that always means the writer's going to explore their relationship, and that's tends to bore me. There's the start of tension between Jack of Hearts and Ant-Man, which always seemed overdone, though I suppose Jack has reason to be irritable. For that matter, I felt Johns overplayed Iron Man's hostility towards the Black Panther, especially in light of the things Stark's done since then. Kind of amusing for him to be mad at T'Challa over joining the team to spy on them, considering he went and made a clone of Thor without asking. That's not Johns' fault, but he did seem to write Stark as ready to jump on the Panther for any little comment or action. You'd think a successful businessman would play it closer to the vest, watch someone he didn't trust quietly, maybe give them some extra rope to potentially hang themselves with.
Anyway, we never did see what the Zodiac had planned, or what advantage the Key had given them. There were some stand alone issues, the Red Zone arc (and may I say, watching Black Panther nearly punch the bad guy's jaw off was extremely enjoyable), the death of an Avenger, and that arc where they went looking for She-Hulk and she tore through a town like she was her cousin, who also popped up*. Then Johns was gone, Chuck Austen wrote a couple of arcs, then Bendis came along and dismantled everything. I've only seen the Zodiac in one story, and that was in Engelhart's West Coast Avengers. They were somewhat difficult to take seriously there, when you're dealing with 12 people who supposedly control the 12 major markets dressed up like bulls, fish, crabs, and the like. Plus, they were wiped out by LMD versions of themselves inside of 10 pages, as part of LMD Scorpio's plan to replace humans with LMDs. So, not a threat I regarded as terribly dire while reading. I have no idea whether Johns' Zodiac was going to be LMDs, or new people assuming the roles, but I imagine they had something different on their mind. I really would have liked to have known what.
*And Hawkeye had the bright idea that the best way to stop her was to make Bruce Banner transform into the Hulk to fight her. Smooth, Clint.
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6 comments:
Man, it's been a long time since Busiek was on the Avengers, and they had, y'know, an actual direction. John's run started off OK, but it just went off the rails, and then Austen came in and stank up the joint. Hopefully, after SI is over, there will be a good Avengers book again, I mean, one NOT written by Bendis.
Gadzooks, I don't remember this at all! In fact the thought of Geoff Johns writing an Avengers books rather startles me as well. I rather gave up on the Avengers a while back, as you may have noticed.
But yes, plots that go nowhere are annoying.
I first encountered the Zodiac in a really early issue of the Bronze Age Ghost Rider that guest-starred The Stuntmaster.
(Geez, whatever happened to THAT guy?)
Anyway, the new Zodiac probably got their butts kicked by the all-new, all-kewl Hood. Remember, nothing counts unless its written by Bendis, Millar and Bru-Fraction!
jason: I looked and it's been, geez, 6 years since Busiek's run ended. Where does the time go?
sallyp: Well, this predates Johns becoming Grand High Poobah of the DC Universe. Actually, that may have been why he left Avengers. Don't hold me to that.
fortress keeper: Hmm, maybe Jason Aaron will hit us with some Stuntmaster action in his Gjost Rider run. He already brought out the Orb, Blackout, and someone called Death Ninja, I believe. How many more Ghost Rider enemies can there be?
One of the things I recall most fondly about Busieks time running the Avengers was that he put a good deal of effort into trying to correct the mistakes made by John Byrne and others; he really leaned into this with Avengers Forever, but elements of it went on through his run on Avengers. Among the points he focused on was a retroactive redemption of Hank Pym, trying to give his character a fair shake rather than the pinheaded "wifebeater" tag he'd been given. So it was that I didn't mind any of the time spent during that run or thereafter if it looked as if Hank and Janet were reconciling. Busiek and I are of the same era of comics fan, each of us holding many of the character aspects of Steve Englehart's time writing Avengers in fairly high esteem. Steve's almost always needed help in keeping his plots together, but he knew how to deliver a character-driven story.
I haven't revisited Johns' run since reading those as monthlies, but my overall impression (and I believe it was confirmed by Johns and others in the fan press afterwards) was that he was constantly being meddled with by an editor who was taking his cue from the accounting department. The almost relentless pressure to pad a story that could and should have been told in one or two issues into ones taking four, five or even six issues ("writing for the trade") resulted in padded pieces that were unsatisfying for all. Marvel had a fantastic opportunity and they blew it.
mj norton: I can't remember how I felt about Busiek's Pym. I think my problem with him and the Wasp (and this is more a critique of serial fiction than any specific writer) is that one writer will go to the trouble of trying to reconcile them, but then the next one promptly brings up all the same old bad history and sends things down the tubes again, so I get a bad feeling when I see it starting up again.
I really wish Marvel hadn't gotten into that pad everything for the trade mode. One of the things that surprised me was, reading JMS' Amazing Spider-Man, was how he frequently wrote 2-3 issues arcs, especially the first three years or so. It was later that everything started going 5 or 6 issues, and the quality declined. Whether that was from stretching things out, or just him running out of ideas I can't say, but neither one helps.
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