Now we reach a point where the two Avengers books intersect. Just one problem: The New parts come out months before the Mighty parts due to Frank Cho. Mighty Avengers 7 and New Avengers 34 take place kind of at the same time, and the 2 titles end up telling different sides of the same story for a minute, but Mighty Avengers 7 comes out 4 months later. Terrible. Well, anyway, Frank Cho has presumably just spent 6 months staring at butts on the internet instead of drawing your comic, and now it’s superlate, and you have plans, and you need it back on track. Who you gonna call? Mark Bagley, of course! Bags is about to crank out 8 issues of Mighty Avengers in 5 months. How? Because he’s no longer doing Ultimate Spider-Man. We’ve been away so long we missed it. After a historically long run, Bags was tired of Spider-Man again. Understandable! 70+ issues of ASM, a couple years doing other things, then 111.5 issues of USM, PLUS 5 Spidey-centric issues of the Pulse. Bagley was ready to do anything but Spider-Man. And… here he is doing symbiotes. He cannot escape. He will soon flee to DC Comics to get away from Spider-Man, and in a way, even that won’t work. He’ll produce a typically astounding 76 issues in 3 years at DC, then return to Marvel to do… Ultimate Spider-Man. And while he’ll do other things… An Avengers book, Fantastic Four, All-New X-Men, Hulk, a creator-owned book with Bendis called Brilliant, Deadpool, a 12-issue event tie-in… He’ll also do many Spider-Man projects, a brief Venom run, and even a Ben Reilly book. He seems to have accepted his fate. While I deeply understand the desire for variety, being one of the most beloved artists for arguably Marvel’s single most popular character is certainly not a bad thing. By this point, he and the similarly unable to escape John Romita, Jr. are THE Spider-Man artists by virtue of their longevity as much as anything else. Johnny has drawn 22 issues of ASM in the last 2 years as I type this in 2024. At 67! Can’t get away. No less than 3 people ink Bags this month, just to further speed things up, one assumes, and they are Danny Miki, Allen Martinez and Victor Olazaba, with Justin Ponsor on colors. And we pick up right where #6 left off.
When did Daredevil appraise the situation?
Tony wants her to join his team, because if she does, any Skrull on it will react. And he wants time to do an autopsy on the body and try to figure out how they’re undetectable. Tony and Jessica agree they can’t trust anyone. What a bad time for all the heroes to be so divided, eh? So, then, sometime later, Tony is having a little thing to congratulate his new team on being Avengers and also thank them for saving his life. Wonder MAn stands up to make a toast and rambles for awhile before getting embarrassed and stopping, and making everyone think about their dead friend, Captain America. And then Tony pulls his surprise on them.
Ares thinks about how he’s going to bed every woman on the team, and yet I don’t think he manages to romance any of them. It’s hard to remember. In fact, I don’t really remember if any of either Avengers is a Skrull or not. I know who the major Skrulls are, but I’ve forgotten a lot. This leads to a funny bit where Jan parades out a bunch of models in supersuits she designs, saying Wonder Man has to choose a new look. And as he protests that he likes his jumpsuit, Carol pipes up that these are the exact same suits she tried to foist on Luke Cage in the Pulse just before Jessica had Baby Cage. Jan says it’s a fashion intervention, and there’s some much needed joking around. Meanwhile, in space, some astronauts are collecting bits of Tony’s shattered weather satellites when a stray piece of debris hits another satellite and some kind of orb falls out of it.
Now there’s something you don’t see every day. Back in the Tower, Tony Stark is having a very paranoid internal monologue as he sizes up all his Avengers, thinking one of them must be a Skrull, sent to kill him. Then Lindy comes to tell him he should find a way to power down Sentry or kill him before he kills everyone. And THEN Maria Hill calls to tell him about the whole symbiote situation.
What’s this got to do with the New team? We’ll see next post.