![]() | |||||||||
Avengers West Coast #63Issue(s): Avengers West Coast #63 Review/plot: ![]() And this gives him more literal Living Lightning abilities than anyone in his father's group. ![]() Oh did i mention that Miguel is Hispanic? Ay caramba! Solamente papas! (Sorry, i'm just making fun of the way writers always pepper Hispanic characters' dialogue with Spanish, but i don't actually know a lot of Spanish.) Living Lightning immediately goes off on a "test" of his powers, which is actually a rampage in the city of Fullerton. Meanwhile, Scarlet Witch is given a clean bill of health. Quicksilver picks a fight with the doctor in the parking lot, though. ![]() ![]() USagent starts to soften, and almost makes an attempt to be friendly. ![]() Henry Pym and the Wasp then go check on the Human Torch, but they find that Ann Raymond has been staring in the lab where he's been kept for "hours", and he is gone. It's not clear why Ann has been comatose for hours, but the Torch is flying around to clear his head. He hears about the Living Lightning's rampage and goes to confront him. As he's flying there, a lot of people assume that the Torch is the guy that's been rampaging. ![]() Which is odd. I get that it's logical for people to mistake one flying energy guy for another. But probably the hardest thing about a character who is made out of lightning is to actually make him look like lightning. Pointing out how similar he looks to a fire guy makes it that much harder for your artist to distinguish them. It's a good thing we have a colorist, in any event. ![]() Pym and the Wasp were out with Ann, looking for the Torch in Rover, and they wind up at the site of the fight (the other Avenger are either looking for Tigra or are on personal business). ![]() The Wasp has had a lot of bad costumes over the years, but i find this one particularly bad. It's a bathing suit with thigh high boots and gloves. Anyway, the message of the day is "teamwork". ![]() Living Lightning is conducting along that wire into Rover, and the sentient ship explodes. It's unclear if Living Lightning survives (but he does, and will later become an Avenger). Rover is destroyed, but Henry Pym has a Quinjet in his pocket, and Jan just can't think why she ever divorced him. ![]() Quality Rating: C+ Chronological Placement Considerations: Tigra is still missing at the beginning of this issue, but this is meant to take place after The Terminus Factor. ![]() That seems to contradict Avengers Spotlight #38, which says that the other Avengers are away dealing with the Termini when Agatha Harkness finds and cures Tigra. I wonder if maybe Harkness has already found Tigra by the time of this issue but is giving her some time to herself, so she's not telling the other Avengers yet. Let's go with that. Also note the fact that the Human Torch revived himself for the annuals and then immediately became inert again. Cameo by Vision and Quasar in this issue. Wonder Man calls the Vision to tell him that the Scarlet Witch could use a visit, and the Vision emotionlessly says that he's not the same person that was married to Wanda and doesn't intend to go. References:
Crossover: N/A Continuity Insert? N My Reprint: N/A Inbound References (6): show Comments"and Jan just can't think why she ever divorced him." Posted by: clyde | June 25, 2015 3:00 PM He's not the first Avenger who started off as a bad guy, but Miguel's joining them is such a quick about-face from this issue. Posted by: Erik Robbins | June 25, 2015 5:08 PM "änd Jan can't think of why she ever divorced him" Which Henry followed up with a playful chuck on Jan's chin. Posted by: kveto | June 25, 2015 6:38 PM "It's a bathing suit with thigh high boots and gloves." Posted by: Michael | June 25, 2015 7:58 PM @Erik Robbins, Miguel's abrupt about-face is explained in-story though. There is reference to him being temporarily insane due to the accident that turned him into Living Lightning. After he is later restored to human form and stabilized, his mind stabilizes as well. Posted by: Dermie | June 25, 2015 8:42 PM So is this Agatha Harkness real or is she supposed to be a construct by crazy Wanda? (You've been joking about the Crossing, which is bad, but wow is Disassembled worse...) I still don't know when she is supposed to have died because she has so many appearances but she was dead for a supposed long time. Never likdd the Living Lightning, he seemed like a weird quick addition to the Avengers. Reaching out to the X-Men to add mutant diversity would have made more sense. Posted by: PeterA | June 26, 2015 1:14 AM According to what Brian Bendis said at the time of Disassembled, Agatha Harkness died in Vision and the Scarlet Witch #3 and never came back to life. Every appearance Agatha made afterward was a magical construct created by crazy Wanda. I think this claim by Bendis was absurd and I don't think the editors support it. Posted by: Steven | June 26, 2015 2:09 AM Children's Crusade made it sound like Wanda was sane until shortly before Doom got sent to Hell in Unthinkable, so it does seem to imply that most of Agatha's appearances were real. Posted by: Michael | June 26, 2015 8:01 AM The Agatha Harkness problem was so vaguely defined by Bendis that it's never going to make sense. His answer to continuity problems is generally different one sentence variations of "so what?" The new generation of writers and editors like him at Marvel don't care that much about continuity. And that's fine. It's actually a necessary move to get a new readership in my opinion. That said, I basically consider classic Marvel continuity to have more or less ended when the Quesada era started. Characterizations, past histories, etc all started to break down around there and there's no real order to be found. Posted by: Bizen247 | June 26, 2015 10:14 AM I like to think that Agatha is real and Bendis is imaginary. Posted by: Erik Beck | June 26, 2015 4:55 PM I found Disassembled every bit as bad and insulting to Avengers history as the Crossing. It read like bad fanfic from the 90s ("Let's kill everyone and replace them with Spider-man and Wolverine!" Apparently, Cable and Ghost Rider weren't available.) But having decent art, and the hype of Bendis' gimmicky dialogue caused a lot of people to mistakenly view it as some kind of quality story. Posted by: Bob | June 26, 2015 6:44 PM There was a Saga of the Original Human Torch book put out by Marvel around this time. It's been so long since I read it, I'm not sure how it would fit into a timeline, or if it was mostly recaps of other stories. Posted by: Bob | June 26, 2015 6:46 PM The only good part about Disassembled was the real-honest-we-mean-it-this-time Ragnarok story over in Thor. That was awesome. Posted by: Thanos6 | June 26, 2015 7:11 PM I really liked Living Lightning right from the start, for several reasons. 1 - He was hispanic, which there weren't a lot of at the time. 2 - His goal was to abolish war and he's gone a bit nuts from his transformation here, so it would be easy to have him move over into being a hero. 3 - He takes out Fullerton, which was the next city over from where I lived at the time and quite frankly, I'm okay with Fullerton being taken out. I was glad when they so quickly brought him back a few issues later. Posted by: Erik Beck | October 12, 2015 1:06 PM I wonder how much a Quinjet weighs. I wonder how much a handsize Quinjet weighs. I feel like it should still be too heavy for Pym to just be carrying around in his pocket, but I don't know exactly how Pym particles work. (Contrastingly, a few months before in Avengers #312, when Pym shrank Blob he plummeted through the Earth because he was too heavy at the reduced size, in which case Pym needs to reinforce his pockets, though that issue seems to be the one which is mistaken on Pym particles' effect on mass.) Posted by: Jonathan, son of Kevin | October 25, 2017 9:51 AM As I understand it, Pym particles shunt mass to or draw mass from an other dimension. So objects keep the same density when they are grown or shrunk, as mass is transferred to/from this other dimension to match the new volume. Thinking about it now, what happened to the Blob doesn't make much sense. Sure he had already used his own power to make himself ultra-dense, but his mass would have been reduced to an equivalent of the surface area of his feet, so the pressure he was exerting on the ground would have been the same. (I'm just thinking out loud [out-type], not 100% of the math/physics there.) Maybe just chalk it up to an unexpected interaction of volume-altering and density-altering powers. Actually, maybe the mass reduction in shrinking is not 1:1, and that's why Ant-Man retains full strength when shrunk. But then he'd be too heavy to ride an ant, and your point of his "toys" being too heavy for his pocket would be true. And if it's not 1:1 while shrinking, would it also not be 1:1 while growing? I believe I'm way overthinking this. Posted by: Erik Robbins | October 25, 2017 2:02 PM Yeah I agree with you on the Blob issue. And I also agree that this is overthinking it. :) I haven't done the maths so I'm not stating it with any certainty. I mean, I presume a Quinjet is made out of lightweight materials, but his just carrying around a jet aircraft made me wonder if Pym could (for instance) shrink a Boeing 747 and put it in his pocket. Obviously they are very big & very heavy, and while they would weigh much less if pocketsize, I imagine they would still weigh more than other things the same size, because they are made out of heavy materials. Though once they are so small, perhaps it's no different from carrying a small stapler or any other pocketsize metal object? (On a related note, he does shrink whales down in Avengers West Coast annual #5 & put them in a sterile beaker he had been carrying around, so that's another example of him shrinking & picking up something that was once big & heavy. I don't know what's the largest mass he has ever used his power on, but that's got to be up there.) Posted by: Jonathan, son of Kevin | October 25, 2017 3:31 PM Agatha Harkness was burned at the stake in VISION & THE SCARLET WITCH #3. She herself mentioned her resurrection, and one or two of the other characters (Pym was one of them, I think) mentioned their curiousness about how she came back in later issues, so it looked like Byrne had something in mind for a story later on down the road but never got to it because he left. Then later, Bendis made it turn out Wanda was responsible for her return. Posted by: Andrew Burke | December 13, 2017 9:14 AM The Bendis retcon has been undone. Agatha resurrected herself and V & SW #3. She was murdered again by Wanda at the time of Disassembled, which Agatha's ghost verified in 2016's Scarlet Witch #1. Agatha's ghost returned from the afterlife in the Vision series to warn the heroes of the threat posed by the Vision and his family to the world. She then hung out with Wanda in her series until her resurrection in Scarlet Witch #14. She is alive again as of 2017. Posted by: Steven | December 13, 2017 12:39 PM Ah, yes. I forgot about the SCARLET WITCH series. It's been a year or so since I read the first issue. Posted by: Andrew Burke | December 13, 2017 2:29 PM Comments are now closed. |
|||||||||
![]() |
|||||||||
SuperMegaMonkey home | Comics Chronology home |