This month, we get started by flashing back to 10 minutes ago.
The Eye made a big, mystical powerpoint presentation from the Ancient One explaining he gave Strange his title, and now he’s given it up, and Jericho is the best choice to replace him.
So, he/they took it, the Eye stopped talking to them, and Jericho’s ghost brother predicted they would have a trial by fire 2 seconds before the explosions outside that brought Brother Voodoo into the fight last issue. That catches us up, so now Voodoo and Strange are fighting the thing that was the Hood on 2 fronts. The Avengers jump in, but they don’t add much, given that it’s a magic fight. Hellstrom tells Strange to put a defensive spell on him so he can end this, and then just stands there while the Avengers fight for a couple more pages.
“I can’t believe it was the guy I fight all the time!” Voodoo does some of Bendis’ really just not great magic gibberish and banishes Dormammu in 2 pages flat. Easy.
Well, then. Seems like Clint’s plan is working. Seems like we’re finally done with the Hood. Except…
We will never be done with the Hood while Bendis is at the wheel. And then we see that Norman’s TV appearance in Dark Avengers actually happens after all this, whoops, and Clint’s plan maybe isn’t working so well. Such that he is driven to say
Well, we know he won’t do that. But what will he do? We’ll see. This month saw the beginning of Captain America: Reborn, a miniseries wherein Ed Brubaker finally brought back Steve Rogers. Couldn’t keep him down for long. But, unlike all of Brubaker’s run on Cap to date, Reborn was… not very good. It featured art by Bryan Hitch, and since he was known for cinematic action, Brubaker said he was driven to do a more action-oriented conclusion. So, you wound up learning Cap was shot by some kind of ridiculous time bullet that had him bouncing through his own timeline, reliving his life, until the good guys were able to bring him back JUST in time to fight a giant robot of the Red Skull. Years of “grounded,” “realistic” comics about conspiracies, covert ops and intrigue winds up with… giant Red Skull robot. And then, Steve elects not to become Cap again, because he had a vision of the future where he was Cap and Bucky died, so he leaves Bucky in the role. This was one of the first visions of a future wherein the Earth was under attack by giant, War of the Worlds-type walkers, and despite being teased in many comics, some of which we’ll see on the blog, that never happened. Which sure is awkward.
What’s extra funny about the Cap thing to me is sometimes, Marvel and DC wind up on parallel tracks. Sometimes it has to be them copying each other, other times, it’s a coincidence. But the broadest strokes of what happened with Captain America and Batman in this time are so insane. Both “died” in big crossovers. Both were replaced by their old sidekick (Dick Grayson for Batman) for an extended run of comics. Both were revealed to be lost in time instead of dead and brought back. The actual comics were extremely different, but the similarities were kind of nuts. That’s just how it goes sometimes. Now it’s time for something of a detour. Well, several detours, in fact.