Issue(s): Avengers #32, Avengers #33
Cover Date: Sep-Oct 66
Title: "The sign of the serpent!" / "To smash a serpent"
Credits:
Stan Lee - Writer
Don Heck - Penciler
Frank Giacoia / Don Heck - Inker

Review/plot:
I understand that Stan Lee liked to start off every comic with some action, but he shouldn't do it at the expense of his characters' intelligence. This issue the Avengers return home and get attacked by their own alarm system, something that seems to happen fairly frequently.

After they settle that, Captain America plays headgames with the insane and easily manipulated Henry Pym...

...which shakes him out of his funk and gets him ready to start looking for the cure to his inability to return to a normal size. He gets Tony Stark to send him a lab assistant (after belittling Jan for a while to get back at her for being there when Cap humiliated him). The lab assistant is Bill Foster.

Meanwhile, these Marvel Triple Actions must be cutting out pages of my subplots, because suddenly the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are being worked on by an unnamed doctor who is restoring their powers.

Back in the US, Bill Foster gets beat up by the Sons of the Serpent, a Marvel Universe analogue to the KKK. While they're definitely Silver Age cheesy ("After all the foreigners have been driven out, what will we do next?" "...remember, there will always be someone weaker for us to attack -- to use as stepping stones on our march to total power!"), it's still interesting to see Marvel taking on this subject in 1966. The Avengers decide to go after the Serpents.

Cap goes to look for Nick Fury using the card he received in Tales Of Suspense #78. After blowing his secret identity, he looks through SHIELD's files on the Serpents. Fury said that SHIELD was going to go after the Serpents once they finished up with AIM, but now he and "his boys" are busy with, uh, "some other stuff".

Later, Cap gets captured by the Serpents...

...and the rest of the Avengers decide to pretend to agree with the Serpents' philosophy in order to get close enough to get Cap back. This is a terrible strategy as it divides the country, lending legitimacy to the group. It doesn't matter if the Avengers reverse sides in the end; it still winds up confusing people and sowing doubt. Eventually the Avengers defeat the Sons of the Serpent with the help of the Black Widow (it's funny what passed for cheesecake in 1966)...

...and the leader of the group is revealed to be a General Chen who is the leader of a "hostile oriental nation" who set up the Serpents to show the flaws in American democracy. Which is an easy way out of dealing with the racism issue. Marvel really seemed to have a problem just letting the Sons of the Serpent be a group of straight-up white racists.

That said, i think the idea that as a country, we shouldn't allow ourselves to be divided by racism is a strong message, even if it's couched with "because it will make our enemies stronger".

Quality Rating: C-

Historical Significance Rating: 7 - first Bill Foster, first Sons of the Serpent

Chronological Placement Considerations: Nick Fury talks about AIM like they are an ongoing problem.

References:

• Cap received his SHIELD pin from Nick Fury in Tales Of Suspense #78.

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: Giant-Size Marvel Triple Action #2, Marvel Triple Action #25

A guide to what got cut out of Avengers reprints:

Avengers #33, 34 lost 2 pages each in Marvel Triple Action #25, 26.

#35-36 lost 1 page in Triple #27-28.

#37-54 lost 2 pages in Triple #29-44,46,47.

#55 lost 3 pages in Marvel Super Action #14.

#56-63 lost 2 pages in Super #15, 18-24.

The Scarlet Witch appears on the cover of #33, despite not being part of the team at this point.

Sons of the Serpent is a very real and contemporary threat to the globe. Perhaps Stan was only commenting on a KKK parallel but this prospective level of undermining of the Populace to augment a more sinister agenda is real at many levels right now. The fact that the Serpent is represented as the symbol of this draconian threat makes it even more involved than we may know! This may have been a stroke of complete genius that we are just today becoming cognizant of in our globalist society..Nuff said

The Scarlet Witch appears on the cover of #33, despite not being part of the team at this point.Or, more importantly, appearing on the pages within the book.

As the Marvel No-Prize Book put it: "And on the cover of Avengers #33, we have the Scarlet Witch. Which is nice, because she's not in the issue, at all."

The 'doctor' is an evil mastermind that likes to smoke while in a lab and experimenting with mutants!

Funny I thought it was the reincarnation of Mark Twain.

I feel the fear plotis highly relevant today, without starting a big political discussion

To me, the "doctor" is obviously Mr. Sinister. He's probably experimenting with them to confuse everyone in the future as to whether they're mutants or not (for his own mysterious purposes). I'd bet it was also he who caused them to reach the conclusion -by still unrevealed means- that they should go back to Europe in order to restore their powers.