Avengers West Coast: The Death of Mockingbird

Collects: Avengers West Coast #92-100, 102, Spider-Woman #1-4, and selections from Marvel Comics Presents #143-4 (1993-4)

Released: January 2016 (Marvel)

Format: 384 pages / color / $34.99 / ISBN: 9780785196891

What is this?: The Avengers West Coast fight Dr. Demonicus, the Lethal Legion, and the Power Platoon before disbanding; Spider-Woman learns the machinations behind her acquisition of powers.

The culprits: Writers Roy and Dann Thomas and artists David Ross, Andrew Currie, John Czop, Steven Ellis, and others

The first thing you need to know about Avengers: The Death of Mockingbird is that the title is a lie, a total lie, and Marvel knows it. Heck, by now, everyone knows it.

I suppose you can pull the Obi Wan route and say it’s true, from a certain point of view. But people who say that are, generally speaking, liars or weasels. It wasn’t Bobbi Morse, whom the Marvel Universe knew as Mockingbird, who died in Avengers West Coast #100; it was a Skrull taking her place. (As revealed years later, Bobbi was replaced during Avengers West Coast #91, which is reprinted in the Avengers: Ultron Unbound collection.)

Anyway, that’s for the best, because Mockingbird’s death is unsatisfying. A long-time Marvel character who was getting back together with her husband, Hawkeye, Mockingbird was killed saving him from a stray spitball tossed by Mephisto. The death seems random, something in the “kill someone for shock value” line of superhero deaths — it was an anniversary issue, after all. Mockingbird had just saved Scarlet Witch and Hawkeye, but her death seems more random than heroic; Mephisto didn’t have any specific hatred for her, didn’t even seem to be aiming at her. Anyone could have died. It just turned out to be Mockingbird.

The whole book feels of random — no, “unsettled” is a better way of putting it. Death begins with U.S. Agent and Hawkeye (calling himself Goliath at the time — just another bit of evidence that something is off) squabbling among the ruins of their headquarters; Scarlet Witch and Spider-Woman each go off to find less destroyed housing, and the Living Lightning leaves the team. The AWC doesn’t even have a quinjet, having to beg one from Stark Industries a few issues later. Everything feels like it is falling apart; ten issues later, the West Coast HQ is still rubble, and team has been officially ended.

The stories in Death don’t help; they’re not very good, first off, and the team never seems to regroup. The Demonicus storyline takes a previous story, in which the not-at-all-suspiciously-named Dr. Demonicus created an island nation in the Pacific, and removes any sense of complexity from it. Demonicus and his super-followers are mind controlled by the demon Raksasa, start acting evil, import a population of foreign criminals, and even hijack a passenger plane while waiting for Raksasa to enter the world. If they hadn’t drawn attention to themselves with the hijacking or breaking Klaw out of jail, they might have gotten away with their plans (whatever they are), but instead Demonica is sunk. Literally.

The Spider-Woman issues are standard for a mid-’90s limited series: inconsequential and forgettable. The mini lasts only four issues, and one of those issues is devoted to retconning her origin story. The villains (Deathweb) are forgettable, even if they shouldn’t be, and the story combines ‘50s monster movie science with post-Watergate antigovernment paranoia in predictable ways.

In #98-100, Avengers West Coast reaches a nadir. The team is opposed by the Lethal Legion, four evil souls brought back from the dead to kill them. The AWC lose every time, which is bad enough, but the worst part is that writer Roy Thomas makes the members of the Lethal Legion real people — not based on real people, but actual historical personages. Axe of Violence, a woman with an axe for a hand, is Lizzie Borden; Cyana, who emits poison, is Lucretia Borgia; Coldsteel, a giant powerhouse all in steel, is Josef Stalin; and Zyklon, who flies in a suit of armor and emits poison, is Heinrich Himmler.

Yes, that’s right: the Avengers fight a real Nazi, named after the gas the Nazis used to kill a million people during the Holocaust. Making Stalin, a man who killed millions of his own countrymen, into a comic-book villain is questionable, although I admit comics do this with Hitler all the time. “Zyklon,” a name that evokes the Holocaust, goes over the line. Also, equating Stalin and Himmler with Borgia, who probably played politics a bit hard but probably didn’t engage in mass poisonings, and Borden, who may not have killed anyone and killed two people at most, is a tone-deaf mismatch.

That unsettled feeling that saturates Death was planned, I think. In a narrative sense, it leads to the main Avengers team trying to get rid of the West Coast branch. The East Coast branch’s dissatisfaction with the West Coasters isn’t foreshadowed at all, so the decision to shut down the West Coast branch comes out of nowhere. But the dissolution of the team is a natural consequence of the poor planning and shoddy superheroics that led up to it. In a corporate sense, Marvel used the closure as part of their push to cancel Avengers West Coast and replace it with Force Works. Unfortunately, Force Works was a downgrade, and about a year later, that title was still drawn into The Crossing, Marvel’s worst storyline ever. The title never recovered, sputtering to a halt a couple of issues later.

Death does have a few positive attributes. I enjoyed the Power Platoon, a group of solar-powered aliens who can’t speak any Earth language. They show up during the Infinity Crusade, when most of the team is off dealing with that crossover’s foolishness, and battle Hawkeye, Mockingbird, and War Machine. The eight members of the Power Platoon look similar, but each has a different power; their alien language allows them communication the heroes can’t understand, and their teamwork is excellent. The story ends with a sputter — the Power Platoon achieves its goal and then wanders off, while the Avengers decline to pursue — but it’s an enjoyable issue up until then.

I also like the art of David Ross, who drew #93-5, 98-100, and 102. He shows excellent attention to detail, and action scenes are easy to follow. Unlike many of his contemporaries, his females aren’t gratuitous sex objects. Most impressively, he draws excellent demons; his Mephisto is nice, his Satannish is intimidating, and Raksasa — the only one of the three he designed — is truly impressive. In an era when Marvel’s demons tended toward Technicolor goblins of varying sizes, Raksasa is an alien, frightening, insectoid presence. With this facility for monsters, Ross would have been great on Conan, Marvel’s other Roy Thomas title. (He would have been wasted there, but he was wasted on AWC as well.)

The rest of the art — well, the less said, the better. You remember the ‘90s, and while none of this is as bad as the decade got, most of what is in Death looks like artists who weren’t quite ready for a big title. (To be fair, those artists drew a second-tier limited series, Marvel Comics Presents, backups, and fill-ins.) I’m sure they all did better work, in comics or out, and I’ll let it go at that.

Why reprint these issues? For completists. For those who want to see how a title that started so well finally ended, curling up on itself in a corner and dying. For those who like Ross’s art. But the resurrection of Mockingbird put an end to whatever emotional impact this book might have had, and it’s not recommended for non-Avengers fans.

And for Heimdall’s sake, don’t pick up the Force Works book. Death is the nadir of Avengers West Coast, but Force Works is even worse — and then it leads to The Crossing, which is the worst. Stop now. I beg you …

… although I admit if the price for a used copy drops low enough, I’ll eventually pick up Force Works. Completionism is my weakness, and I know it.

Rating: (1 of 5)

Avengers West Coast: Darker than Scarlet

Collects: Avengers West Coast #51-7, 60-2 (1989-90)

Released: January 2008 (Marvel)

Format: 232 pages / color / $24.99 / ISBN: 9780785130277

I think the kindest thing I can say about Avengers West Coast: Darker than Scarlet is that it gives background to Brian Bendis’s catastrophic Avengers: Disassembled and House of M. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to recommend Darker than Scarlet, unless you’re a really big Disassembled / House of M fan. (Or Avengers West Coast fan, I suppose.)

This is not John Byrne’s finest hour. Byrne is one of modern comics’ best writer / artists. Here, his art matches up well with the rest of his ‘90s work; not as inspired as his earlier output, perhaps, and with a slight tendency toward dated hairstyles,¹² but it’s still better than the exaggerated work of most of his contemporaries, who were being lauded as “hot artists.” (There is a coloring error of some importance on p. 35, but that’s not Byrne’s fault.)

The writing — more specifically, the plotting — is the problem. Part of the difficulties lie in crossovers. Darker than Scarlet runs through, and to a certain extent is intertwined with, the Acts of Vengeance crossover. Acts of Vengeance was a loose crossover in which Loki persuaded villains to fight different adversaries who didn’t know their weaknesses¹³; the West Coast Avengers fought Mole Man, a Fantastic Four foe, and the U-Foes,¹⁴ the Hulk’s sparring partners. Unfortunately, the Avengers issues in which the good guys unravel Loki’s plot aren’t included in this collection, so we go from the realization that someone is behind the strange attacks to the climactic fight, and the second half of the fight with the U-Foes is in an unincluded Avengers issue. Also missing is the Scarlet Witch’s part in the Atlantis Attacks crossover, which should come between #53 and 54. Byrne even has to apologize for allowing Tigra to be in Atlantis Attacks because her subplot wasn’t wrapped up in time. (He mostly ignores the subplot in Darker than Scarlet as well.) The Scarlet Witch’s story, chronicling her coming unwound mentally, is mixed with this, as are her reunion with her father, Magneto, and her brother and enigmatic scenes with Immortus watching alternate timelines. These don’t mix together well, leaving a heterogeneous mess.

Then there’s the manipulation of the Scarlet Witch. I don’t know if this qualifies for the Women in Refrigerators discussion — it seems the opposite to me, since it’s her male relations who are killed and she gets an increase in power — but there’s no doubt Darker than Scarlet sees the culmination of seemingly gratuitous trauma for a stalwart character, putting her through the wringer, turning her “evil,” and then making her a helpless pawn of Immortus. I don’t know if this oversteps the bounds of sexism in comics — I tend not to think so, since DC was doing worse to Hal Jordan at about the same time — but it’s close enough to make me uncomfortable.

The Immortus storyline and his plans for the Scarlet Witch are laid out by Roy and Dann Thomas, who wrote the final three issues. I’ve never been that interested in Kang’s less martial self, and his plan to use the Witch as an empty vessel (while calling her his “queen”) to control 7,000 years of human history doesn’t rise beyond the level of creepy. The Legion of the Unliving aren’t very compelling, given their unreality and the fact that they disappear while some of them are winning, and Tempus the Time Giant seems silly. (It’s like central casting sent over one of Thor’s frost giants for #62, and the Thomases had to quickly get him a slight costume change and shoehorn him into the plot.) Given that the storyline is wrapped up essentially by the Scarlet Witch saying, “No,” and the Time Keepers showing up to set Immortus straight as deus ex tempo, it’s a somewhat unsatisfying conclusion to the long buildup. Paul Ryan’s art is solid, if unspectacular, and meshes with Byrne’s work.

There’s a lot of things going on in Darker than Scarlet. Unfortunately, it’s too much, too ambitious a central story to credibly tell with all the other stories competing with it.

Rating: (1.5 of 5)