Time for yet another controversial Avengers moment from this period. As with Mighty 1-6, this’ll be as quick as I can make it. But quicker, since it’s half the issues, ha. First, we see that Dr. Doom has been traveling back in time to have some kind of romantic trysts with Arthurian sorceress Morgan Le Fay, while also letting her teach him some evil magic stuff. That makes sense to me. Very Doom-esque. We also learn he was in the past when his satellite accidentally launched Venoms at NY, and he comes back to a panic as the Avengers and SHIELD descend on Castle Doom. This is Dr. Who-style time travel, where you don’t come back to the moment you left, and it’s never really sat well with me. Why would you leave a gap in the present?
Battle is joined in no less than 3 consecutive 2-page splashes that find Bagley going absolutely nuts. While the Avengers fight a zillion doombots, Iron Man enters the castle and engages the main man. Over the course of their struggle, Iron Man begins to lose, and then the Sentry intervenes, and before long, wouldn’tcha know it, all 3 of them fall into Doom’s time platform. As the Mighty team wonders where they could be…
People have been trying to fake Ben Day dots since basically the moment more sophisticated printing came into being, and it never quite works. When are they? I don’t remember, but we’ll probably find out in Mighty Avengers 10:
It’s the 70s. But awkwardly. The kind of one-sentence advertising for other titles that used to appear at the bottom of some pages is tossed in here, which is fun, but Sentry meets some youths and one of them is a punk. So, especially if we take into account not just when punk happened, but how likely punks would’ve been to appear in a comic book after, it would have to be like ‘77-’79 at the earliest. But I don’t think they were doing those footnotes by then. I don’t know. Anyway, being the Sentry, always on the verge of cracking up, Bob is freaking out, and then he sees Thor fly by, which does not help (I think Thor is alive again by now, but maybe Bob doesn’t know).
Yes, Thor has been back for about 9 months, I looked it up. J. Michael Strackzynski and Olivier Coipel picked up the threads JMS put in FF to have Thor and the Asgardians slowly returning after Ragnarok, and also Thor moved Asgard to Broxton, OK to be closer to humanity. This was a big deal at the time, and I was pretty surprised to learn Dan Jurgens already did that move when we looked at Thor, Vol. 2 #51. But no one read that comic, I guess, so it was treated like a major status quo shift in this time. Coipel has given Thor a very cool costume redesign (briefly glimpsed at the end of NA 36) and the book is pretty good despite saddling Thor with Don Blake again. In 2009, JMS will abruptly abandon it mid-story, as he tends to do. He keeps doing this unprofessional stuff and they keep hiring him. Anyway, Bob watches the Void emerge from the bank with some goons and get in a fight with his past self and kinda loses it, crumpling on a rooftop. Meanwhile, Doom is trying to kill Tony, who finally gets him to stop by reminding him they could cease to exist in the present if they alter the past. Then he wants to know if Doom is “working with them,” but Doom doesn’t know what that means.
IM and Doom manage to get Bob to stop raging, and Tony explains what’s happening, and then asks who has a time machine in this period. Doom says only one man. It’s Reed Richards, who’s confiscated Doom’s own time platform. But that leaves them the trouble of getting into the Baxter Building without anyone knowing.
Bendis… not really doing Doom right. And that will get worse before we’re done. He’s trying, he just can’t seem to crack people with very specific speech patterns. Emma Frost, Beast, Black Panther, Thor, Doom… not in his wheelhouse. Well, poor Ben Grimm is about to enjoy a big cartoon sandwich when Sentry comes in, and when he wants to get into Reed’s lab without permission, it’s fightin’ time. He chucks Ben out a window, and then the gang enters the building.
Carol comes zooming at that, desperately trying to warn them, and then there’s a massive explosion. So, then, #11:
This time, we start with another flashback to Morgan Le Fay, now Doom asking her to show him how to “create an army” because he’s seen her do it. Then, in the present, the army:
The Avengers are quickly overwhelmed and everything goes black. When they wake, they’re hanging in some kind of magical field in an underground facility while Doom does some computer stuff with his back to them.
“Cow!” Nobody liked that.
Doing the classic villain monologue internally is kind of a funny move.
Yeah, this dialogue sucks. And is weird. Bendis tended to fall back on women calling each other fat and other type insults sometimes (even tho every woman in superhero comics is almost comically perfect, mind), but to have Doom getting all sassy about it is not great! Your cow-mouth and your whore’s heart. Could be an R. Kelly song. Not only is it not pleasant to read, it feels wrong for the character. Too personal. Doom can’t come up with insults that specific for Reed Richards, and he REALLY hates that guy. It just doesn’t play.
How, indeed? Spider-Woman blasts everyone loose, and now we got a fight. Ares dives into Doom, Carol gives some orders and flies out to find Iron Man and Sentry, and then we catch up to the end of last issue, big explosion.
Only 2 stories into this series and Iron Man has been disabled and maybe killed twice. It’s a bit much. The others are inside fightin’ it up still, until Sentry is suddenly right in Doom’s face, ripping his mask and chestplate off, immobilizing him.
Well, that’s not suspicious at all. The last page is Morgan Le Fay wondering where Doom is, like he was there and gone, which I don’t understand. Too late, comic’s over! Next time, we’ll see how the New team finished out this crazy day.