So now the recap page of NA 35, which comes out 3 months before MA 7, has to tell you a virus fell out of a satellite and turned regular people into Venoms so you’ll know what’s going on in this book. MESSY! But, now we have 2 different comics cliffhanger-ing into a symbiote invasion, so naturally… this comic isn’t about that at all. My increasingly spotty recollection is this issue’s contents were changed when it became clear Cho was going to screw up Mighty Avengers’ timeline, this story moved up and slightly modified to fit here and put off the actual symbiote action one more month. But even that wouldn’t be enough to fix things. To get things started, we find Jigsaw trying and failing to rob a place “several days ago” when Tigra finds him in the act and stops him. Then the cops bust in.
Now those are some realistic cops! Assume the worst, shoot first, ask questions never, make things worse. Nailed it.
The despairing Jigsaw then finds a note left for him, saying if he wants to make real money, to attend a meeting. And then he’s at said meeting. The unseen host of him and several villains says he’s proud of them for showing up, and knows their frustrations.
Leinil Yu grew up learning from Whilce Portacio, and it’s crazy, because their art is so different, but once in a while, just once in a while, something really Portacio-esque comes out of Yu’s pencil, like the Hood at bottom of this page.
So, let’s see, we got Jigsaw, Griffin, some guy (Chameleon?), Cutthroat, maybe Tiger Shark in the back there, some lady, Mr. Hyde, Mr. Fear, Mandrill (The amount of Mandrill appearances on this blog is beyond comprehension), Purple Man, Grey Gargoyle, The Answer (!), is that Blackout?, some guy, some guy, and 3 more some guys. Hey, I don’t know everyone.
Well, that’s not Chameleon, it’s just some bald guy.
So… a lot of thoughts here. One, this is very similar to Mark Grunewald’s Serpent Society, wherein King Cobra organized all Marvel’s snake-themed villains into a union, with insurance and everything. Just less specific. Two, the thing about Bendis bringing all these new characters to a wider audience is… they rarely seem themselves anymore. The Sentry wasn’t such a basketcase in his miniseries. Echo was pretty different in her prior appearances. And Parker Robbins was just some shmoe in a found cloak. Last we saw him before New Avengers, he had faked the Hood’s death to try to get back to his life of small time crime. He had a pregnant girlfriend and a mom in the hospital, who he promised he was only going to do good things from now on, tho he was totally unreliable in that regard. Now he’s a criminal mastermind able to hand out $25,000 each to a couple dozen supercrooks. Who is this guy? Not the guy from the miniseries. Well, he tells Blackout there that this money is nothing compared to what they’ll acquire together, and says their organization will be like Murder, Inc. Bendis will later do a crime comic with his good buddy Mike Oeming called The United States of Murder, Inc., about an alternate reality where the mob runs America or something like that. I never read it, actually, it’s one of the few things B did that I didn’t check out.
John King was Parker’s cousin or brother or something, I don’t quite recall. Well, the next several pages of this book are tremendously unpleasant and were met with strong condemnation at release, as it finds the Hood catching Tigra at home and brutalizing her to send a message to the superheroes of the world. Beaten, shot, beaten some more, while she screams and begs, all while Jigsaw films the incident. And while her shirt magically pops open so her boobs can flop around. Not a superhero fight, but a grim assault, approaching the level of the still-infamous assault on Barbara Gordon in Batman: The Killing Joke. Which, I might add, was considered tasteless and gross by an ever-growing segment of comics readers at this time, almost 20 years after publication, and B drops this on us. I can see what Bendis is doing. This is the criminals sending a message. I get it. And it feels at home with his history in hardboiled crime stuff. But the optics are just gross.
So that’s how things got to the Owl being summarily dispatched, and now we hop to today, as the baddies are deciding what to do with Deathlok. For one, they’re not going to send it at the Avengers, because Parker is pretty sure Wolverine heard about that. Instead, Deathlok, aided by the Wrecking Crew, attacks a New Jersey branch of Brown Brothers, Harriman & Co, identified as “the oldest and largest partnership bank in the United States” with “$4.2 billion in assets.”
Man, no justice for Luther Manning.
Thunderball, we will recall from previous blog appearances, is the supersmart member of the Wrecking Crew, but modern writers tend to forget that. Well, now we’ve had no less than THREE stories end on the same cliffhanger. Maybe we ought to go see this symbiote invasion.