This one’s Avengers #57, the first appearance of the Vision. Sort of. There was a 40s character also called the Vision with a similar look. This month, it’s Khoi Pham, Danny Miki and Dean White on art chores. Koi Pham is a guy much like Billy Tan, both coming up around the same time, neither really ready for primetime, both getting pretty plum assignments, anyway.
Typical Sentry/Void stuff, now with weird faces. That thing was a Skrull spaceship, seemingly about to kamikaze into the Baxter Building. Which really doesn’t seem like it would elicit the reactions from Sentry and Void, there. Why is Sentry crying? I don’t know. He grabs the ship right before it can hit the building and hauls it back out into space, but it blows up before he can do anything else.
Pham is better than Tan, but still rough around the edges. Then we zip up the timeline to the day the New Avengers were to be revealed to the world, in NA 15, where Jarvis takes Iron Man aside and says he’d like to learn as much as he can about the Sentry. That he feels he should have seen what happened to Wanda, and doesn’t want to fail Sentry in the same way. Iron Man tells him it wasn’t his fault and he’s cool and etc, and that he never has to ask permission to read the Avengers’ files. And then Skrull Jarvis starts learning all he can about the enemy who stopped that suicide run.
Jarvis, Jessica Drew, Hank Pym, the Contessa, Elektra and various SHIELD and Hydra agents, all your revealed Skrulls so far hanging out. Civil War and World War Hulk, ideas that didn’t exist when Bendis started planning this, fitting so nicely into it is pretty great.
Rather than answering that question, we hop to the big fight in the Savage Land, and replay the Vision Skrull executing Jarvis Skrull’s plan, sending Sentry fleeing in a panic, and now we follow him off.
Boy, those are some faces.
Well, then. Sentry sucks. He’s so powerful that every major story involves figuring out how to keep him out of it. Which woulda been pretty easy if they’d just left him vaguely out of continuity. Now we move our scene to the Young Avengers fighting Skrulls in Times Square for a sec before focusing in on Sentry’s Watchtower, where something comes crashing into Lindy’s room. It’s a Super Skrull, and it’s apparently looking for Sentry. It’s about to settle for Lindy when…
The spectre of Todd McFarlane looms long after he’s gone. Look at those weird faces and tell me Pham didn’t grow up on Todd. Ok, next post it’s back to the main series.