Saturday Splash Page #225

"Cruise Liner Security," in Quasar #7, by Mark Gruenwald (writer), Mike Manley (penciler), Danny Bulanadi (inker), Paul Becton (colorist), Janice Chang (letterer)

Wendell Vaughn got hold of some alien bracelets that at one point belonged to Golden Age hero (and future Agent of Atlas) Marvel Boy. (Sort of. It's complicated.) At some point, he got tagged by an alien named Eon (that looks like a floating root wad with a face) to be the new "Protector of the Universe." And Quasar did protect the universe over the course of his 60-issue ongoing series, although he also died in the process. Maybe more than once.

(Dying fighting some big threat and then being resurrected later has kind of become Quasar's thing.)

I know the book has some folks who vouch for it. That writer Mark Gruenwald delved into a lot of strange corners of the Marvel Universe for locations and threats for Quasar to confront. The Stranger has an entire planet for the menagerie of unique beings he's collected. Maelstrom ends up being some great threat. There's a cosmic race with most of Earth's speedsters, that ends up being won by an amnesiac guy in ragged red clothes who appears in a lightning bolt and is supposed to Barry Allen after his big heroic death in Crisis on the Infinite Earths. I think Wendell ends up pregnant at one point?

That said, the only issues I own are the Acts of Vengeance tie-ins. They do act as a pretty decent intro to the set-up Gruenwald's established. Wendell Vaughn has his own security consulting firm, which needs clients, but the hero thing keeps interrupting. Eon's got him investigating sources of alien energy on Earth, because of some portent about an alien menace. (This actually leads him to Spider-Man, unknowingly rocking the Enigma Force, in issue 7.)

Wendell's a polite guy, as he spends much of his fight with the Absorbing Man trying to convince him these fights are a waste of time and getting the man nothing. (This does not work.) When he chases the Living Laser to the Moon, he knocks on Uatu's door (with a giant glowing hand) before entering. When the Laser jumps through a portal to escape and possibly kills that timeline's Thunderbird in the process, Quasar apologizes to Uatu for intruding. Uatu teleports him out without saying a word. Dick.

Overall, it paints a picture of Wendell as curious, conscientious and clever. He takes his time to try and figure out ways to quickly handle his opponents, rather than overwhelm them with sheer power. Which might work well on your standard Earth super-villain type, but maybe wasn't a great approach for the sorts of cosmic menaces a Protector of the Universe has to confront?

Sunday Splash Page #229

 

"Lurkers," in Hawkeye (vol. 1) #3, by Mark Gruenwald (writer/artist), Eliot Brown (assistant artist), Christie Scheele (colorist), Joe Rosen (letterer)

Minus the occasional solo spotlight issue, Hawkeye was an ensemble character for the first 20 years of his existence. I almost typed "team player", but given his role as team irritant, that wouldn't be entirely accurate. In 1984, he got a 4-issue mini-series, written and drawn by Mark Gruenwald.

At this point, Hawkeye's not part of the Avengers, instead acting as Head of Security for Cross Technological Enterprises. Things are going pretty good until a certain blonde ex-SHIELD agent shows up following rumors that Cross is working on a sort of mind control weapon. In less than an issue, Clint loses his job, his home, and his girlfriend, the latter making sure to twist the knife on the way out. With nothing better to do, and too much pride to go crawling back to the Avengers, Hawkeye teams up with Mockingbird to help uncover the truth of what's going on and runs into a string of third-tier villains.

The mini-series sets up a lot of things that have carried through for Hawkeye over the last 35 years. The relationship between Clint and Bobbi (which also continues Clint's tradition of dating women involved in espionage work). Crossfire becoming an arch-foe to Hawkeye (he targeted Hawkeye for his villainous scheme because he consider Clint the weakest, most vulnerable known crimefighter, which ouch.) Although of all the villains Hawkeye faces, I liked Silencer the best. Sound-deadening outfit, with kind of a Dominic Fortune look to it. Professional, not annoyingly chatty. Sadly, this was apparently the only appearance of that version of the character, and they re-used the name a few years later for someone in Strikeforce Morituri. 

Clint losing his hearing is established here, as he defeats the mind control weapon by jamming one of his sonic arrowheads in his mouth and setting it off. The sky-cycle Hawkeye would use for a lot of years, I think at least until Bendis killed him in Avengers Disassembled, is introduced as something one of Cross' engineers made for him. Clint's tendency to take setbacks poorly and slip into a funk, something certain writers took to exasperating lengths later on.

Prior to reading this, I had no idea Gruenwald drew any comics, since I really only knew him as the guy who wrote Captain America for most of my childhood. His style seems similar to a Bob Hall or some of the other Avengers artists of the time. Brett Breeding is inker/embellisher on the first two issues, before it switches to Brown for issue 3 and Danny Bulanadi for the final issue. The issues with Breeding as inker look the best; more fluid and subtly expressive than Brown, less heavy-handed with the shading than Bulanadi.

Gruenwald seems to really like pages with one panel that stretches top to bottom at either the right or left edge. Uses them mostly as establishing shots, either introducing characters or the setting for a scene, but some of them don't work with the overall layout as well as others.

Sunday Splash Page #104

"Captain America is Going to Save the Country's Crumbling Infrastructure", in Captain America Annual #8, by Mark Gruenwald (writer), Mike Zeck (penciler), John Beatty and Josef Rubinstein (inkers), Glynis Oliver (colorist), and Jim Novak (letterer)

I own one Captain America Annual, and this is it. The one with the cover that's been homaged 10,000 times. The reluctant team-up with Wolverine. Cap telling Logan the Avengers would never have him, little knowing what was going to happen once Brian Michael Bendis got to write the Avengers. 

(To be fair, it was Stark that pushed for Logan being added, not Steve Rogers, so Cap was true to his stance. Stark just overruled him, and exercised his usual poor judgment. And I can't remember anything significant Logan actually did while part of the Avengers. Get shot in the face by the Hood?)

I was gonna describe this as having the typical Marvel misunderstanding fight, but I'm not even sure Cap vs. Wolverine qualifies. I guess it does, in that Cap suspects Wolverine might be here for nefarious purposes under the orders of Magneto, who the X-Men had recently accepted into their ranks. Although before the issue is over, I think Cap realizes how silly the idea of Logan readily following orders is. But Cap doesn't leap in , hurling his shield around. He just starts speechifying at Logan until the Canadian loses patience and tries to carve him into pieces. There's no misunderstanding on Wolverine's part. He's got shit to do, this old man won't quit talking at him, so he decides to kill him. 

But once that's out of the way, this is a team-up, against a prototype robot that was supposed to be America's defense against their own army of super-soldiers, if necessary. With only one super-soldier, and him missing, the project got mothballed. That's not a bad hook for a threat. A mutant calling himself Overrider, with the power to control machines, finds TESS and brings her online to help carry out his plan: prevent nuclear holocaust by getting rid of the U.S.'s nuclear arsenal, for the sake of his son. Not atypical for an '80s comic.

Both of the heroes are drawn in different ways, and each of them go about gathering useful information different ways. And it isn't simply Cap asking questions politely and Logan busting heads. Cap has his computer hotline thing people can contact him through, and Logan takes advantage of Cerebro's files to get a bead on who Overrider might be and his motives.

The two don't get along at all, but for all Logan's grousing about, well, everything Cap says or does to him, he mostly follows the shield-slinger's suggestions, if they're phrased nicely. Like me, Wolverine is willing to help, he just wants to be able to bitch about it while he does. I think TESS would be repaired and sent at the Avengers later as part of some group of machine foes, but my next encounter was when Doom repaired it to throw at Spider-Man during Acts of Vengeance.

Next week, well, I wanted to highlight a one-shot about Batroc Kieron Gillen and Renato Arlem did a few years ago, but there was no splash page. So we'll turn our attention to a different Captain.

Sunday Splash Page #103

"Cap Thought It Was Pretty Self-Explanatory", in Captain America #371, by Mark Gruenwald (writer), Ron Lim (penciler), Dan Bulanadi (inker), Steve Buccellato (colorist), Jack Morelli (letterer)

The majority of the Captain America comics I own are from the middle-third of Mark Gruenwald's lengthy tenure as writer. More specifically, a 25-issue stretch starting with The Bloodstone Hunt up through the point where Diamondback gets booted from the Serpent Society because she's been canoodling with Captain America. Kieron Dwyer as artist in the early going, then Ron Lim later on. Neither of them is exactly a flashy artist, but I'm not sure you necessarily need one for Captain America. 

Certainly not Gruenwald's Cap, who is played as pretty square mostly of the time. In this issue above, he explains to Diamondback that he's not the sort of guy who would look right going out with a girl with magenta hair. I don't see what that has to do with anything, but sure, Steve.

There's nothing revolutionary about this stretch, but The Bloodstone Hunt's an enjoyable globe-trotting MacGuffin hunt story. The Acts of Vengeance tie-ins give us Magneto putting the boots to the Red Skull before leaving him to slowly die in an old bomb shelter. The Streets of Poison's a goofy story where Cap gets dosed up on cocaine, and Gruenwald tries to draw some pretty iffy analogy between recreational drug abuse and Super-Soldier Serum. But wacked-out Cap throwing down with Bullseye is novel, if nothing else. Plus, you get the Red Skull (in a clone body of Cap's) fighting Wilson Fisk to determine whether the Skull gets to sell drugs in NYC. I really like the notion that basically all other villains hate the Red Skull.

Gruenwald introduces Crossbones during this stretch, who's kind of become a mainstay hench-villain even outside Captain America comics. The whole romance angle with Diamondback, which does provide some focus to the strain it puts on her professionally and personally. I don't know if the Serpent Society was always depicted as this sort of cliquish group of low-level villains, but this is where I encountered it, and that's kind of nice. The shifting alliances and in-fighting, jockeying for position. And Cap getting caught in the middle of it, not really sure what he's even doing there, other than trying to help a friend.

31 Days of Scans - Day 19

The theme for this week is to pick a character I used to hate, but now I like. Or at least don’t hate them. So, when I was a kid, I really didn’t like Captain America. I know, I know, you’re thinking how two days ago, I cheered Squirrel Girl for beating him up and wondering if I don’t still hate him. You have to understand, that was about him being old, not him being Captain America. That's ageism, which is totally different! Anyway, in my younger days I fancied myself a smart aleck with limited respect for authority, and Cap seemed like the definition of the stuffy, stick in the mud leader character to me, not a whole lot different than Cyclops on the X-Men cartoon.

Look at that speech he makes to Wolverine. ‘Furthermore, I think your general attitude –‘? What is that? I was wholly rooting for Wolverine to take him apart, especially since Logan was on the trail of the same bad guy as Cap (the days when Marvel misunderstanding battles were still common). That was my perception of Captain America: He made big, boring speeches while the cool characters tried to get stuff done, if only he’d shut up and let them do it. What saved him? For one thing, I got a little older, my feelings changed. Characters who stood for ideals didn’t seem so bad to me. But that’s boring and doesn’t really involve pictures, so let’s say there’s more.

Like Kurt Busiek’s Avengers run. Put Cap up against actual bad guys, rather than good guys he chooses not to trust, and the speechifying is more acceptable.

What’s more, make them serious bad guys. Villains out to enslave or eliminate the human race, and fully capable of taking down all the Avengers to do it, let alone one man with somewhat enhanced physical abilities. Have Steve Rogers square off against that, and still be able to make big speeches while going on the attack, and I’m good with it. For that matter, have him face long odds against a friend he feels has gone astray.

One of the issues that struck me the most when I first read it was from Geoff Johns’ stretch on Avengers. Thor has Odin’s power in addition to his own, and he’s taking a more active hand on Earth than his dad. Some people in a small Eastern European country have started to worship him, and when their government cracks down, Thor cracks down on the government. It’s near the Russian border, so they get spooked, which spooks the U.S. It’s on Latveria’s border, so Doom gets involved to make things worse, and then Iron Man tries to fight Thor with a suit powered by Asgardian magic. Into the middle of all that goes Captain America, and soon enough it’s just him against Thor.

Which doesn’t go real well, but it doesn’t stop Cap from getting right back in there and continuing to try and reach Thor with words, while also keeping him focused on Steve rather than on any of the nearby soldiers. I remember reading something on JLA/Avengers once, someone online saying how silly it was there’s a scene of Cap and Superman almost coming to blows, because what was Captain America going to do? Well, that’s kind of the point of Steve Rogers, isn’t it? If he thinks someone is wrong, is trying to oppress or bully others, he stands up to them, it doesn’t matter how powerful they are. He didn’t back down when faced with a Thor more powerful than he’d ever been before. He didn’t back down from Thanos when he had the Infinity Gauntlet. He’ll always stand up to oppose someone abusing their power, and he’ll keep trying to find a way to win. I think he was like that when I was younger, I just didn’t see it.

Diplomatic relations between Canada and the U.S. break down in Captain America Annual #8, by Mark Gruenwald (writer), Mike Zeck (penciler), John Beatty (inker), Jim Novak (letterer), Glynis Oliver (colorist). We learn genocidal androids hate trips to the dentist in Avengers #21, by Kurt Busiek and George Perez, Al Vey (finished art), Tom Smith (colorist), Richard Starkings and Comicraft (letterering). Cap punches Kang like he was just told Sally Floyd will say he can’t represent America because he doesn’t watch NASCAR and yeah, I used that joke for the Bagley post, but screw it, Civil War: Frontline was a goddamn trash fire, in Avengers #54 by Kurt Busiek (writer), Kieron Dwyer and Rick Remender (artists), Tom Smith (colorist), Richard Starkings and Comicraft (letterers). Cap gets pimpslapped by a god, and still commands respect in Avengers #63/478 by Geoff Johns (writer), Alan Davis (penciler), Mark Farmer (inker), Dave Kemp (colorist), Richard Starkings and Albert Deschesne (letterers).