Avengers #16

Featuring: Avengers
Release: March 11, 1965
Cover: May 1965
12 cents
Dazzling script by: Stan Lee
Dashing layouts by: Jack Kirby
Darlin’ artwork by: Dick Ayers
Delicate lettering by: Artie Simek
20 pages

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“Avengers Assemble!” shouts Captain America. With quite the assemblage of heroes and villains behind him. Check out our pretty full cast list near the end.

A little annoyed with myself as I make this post. I screwed up. In the middle of a move and all my comics are in transit. I have this issue, my second oldest Avengers comic after issue 8, and I thought I had scanned this before I packed and shipped it. I remembered doing so. Apparently I only scanned the single page I used in my Wandavision post.

I considered pausing our reading for a bit until I could scan my comic, but who knows when that will be. So we’ll press forward with scans, err, found on the internet. We’ll call them temporary. I’ll come back in a month or so and replace them with my own. You probably won’t even notice the difference. I just prefer to scan my own comics when I can.

And this issue means a lot to me.

Had it since early childhood somehow. My cousin had borrowed it for an extended period of time, but I eventually got it back.

This is a pretty historic issue. For whatever reason, Heck chose this issue of all issues to take a breather, leaving Ayers to do the artwork over Kirby’s layouts… or perhaps Kirby’s loose pencils, or maybe full pencils for some of the comic.

Here’s an interesting post on the breakdown of artistic labor in this issue, including speculation that Carl Hubbell was involved: https://nick-caputo.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-unknown-art-of-carl-hubbell.html

First, we need to wrap up the story from last issue. Captain America had just fatally defeated Zemo, and now needs to get back to New York with Rick. He’ll have some trouble with Zemo’s henchmen. Meanwhile, the battle with the Masters of Evil continues in New York.

Let’s just say the Avengers win, though Enchantress and Executioner escape. The battle’s anyway over by page 4, and we have more important things to discuss.

It turns out this was these heroes’ final battle together.

Captain America isn’t back yet and Thor had to leave suddenly, so the remaining three Avengers have a meeting. Wasp notes Thor left in a hurry because of the Trial of the Gods. These references are how Stan advertises the other titles and creates a sense of continuity amongst them. But it’s not a sense that holds to the strictest scrutiny always. To find a moment in Thor comics where the Trial of the Gods has already been declared by Odin, and where Thor has time to run off and fight alongside the Avengers is tricky. But we’ll look closely for it. Our Avengers reading is now two months ahead of our Thor reading.

In the next post, we will jump back to the January issue of Thor and see his battles which lead to the Trial of Gods. This Avengers story must fit somewhere in between Thor’s adventures. To complicate it further, Thor’s adventures will tie into Daredevil’s latest adventure. But we’ll figure it all out as we go.

Wasp indicates her desire to take a break, to take a leave of absence from the Avengers, and it seems superheroing in general. We’ve still got a couple more Wasp adventures in Tales to Astonish to read. We’ll have to see if they can be reconciled with her desire to hang up the tights. Perhaps they better take place before this meeting. We’ll see. Again, it’s all complicated.

But it’s Iron Man who suggests the Avengers disband. He indicates he also needs a break. I find this somewhat counter-intuitive, as he clearly intends to keep superheroing. You’d think having the Avengers as backup would make superheroing easier than doing it solo. But I guess not. Too many meetings, maybe. I can feel that.

Just as the three are about to agree to break up, Hawkeye attacks. He ties up poor Jarvis.

Interestingly, this is Jarvis’ first appearance in an Avengers story, despite apparently having been their butler all along. He was introduced in Captain America’s solo title. This is a somewhat ignoble introduction to him in these pages.

Hawkeye tries to explain he comes as a friend. But the first rule of friends is they don’t attack friends’ butlers.

Hawkeye wants to join the Avengers. Little does he know the Avengers disbanded like 5 seconds earlier.

He tries to explain it was always a misunderstanding, that he never meant to be a villain. Partially true. He originally meant to be a superhero, but then got mistaken for a super-villain. But then he fell in love with a Soviet spy and agreed to work with her plans to commit espionage against America and kill Iron Man. I think a bit of jail time for high treason is in order.

We then get a pretty important story told in flashback. When last we saw them, Hawkeye and Black Widow had run off together after their latest failed attempt to kill Iron Man. Since then, Black Widow has been shot and nearly killed by the Soviets, as penalty for their failure. Hawkeye notes he avenged her, but the story isn’t clear what that means. Black Widow is taken away in an ambulance, critically wounded but still alive.

I see above again one of those script/art dichotomies. To my eye, the artists drew Black Widow being killed in those two panels. That seems evident. It’s only Lee’s dialogue that spares her life.

Now, putting aside whether he should face justice for his villainy, let’s talk about how good a boyfriend Hawkeye is. He stood by his love through all the espionage and evil, but now that she’s in the hospital, the heartache is too much for him. So rather than be with her, he’s come to join the Avengers.

Apparently, they’ve made a whole manual about being an Avenger and their by-laws. Very organized.

A plan forms. The Avengers will not disband, but these three mainstays do want a leave of absence. So they will find replacements. Hawkeye will be the first.

Demonstrating their continued good judgment after recruiting the Soviet agent who just abandoned his injured girlfriend, they seek out Namor to offer him membership in the Avengers. He just needs to agree to stop trying to conquer the world. No deal, Namor says. He intends to rule us all. By any measure his speech about being the rightful ruler of all Earth is crazy, but Iron Man finds his words worthy of a prince, and someone else notes he’d have been a great Avenger. The megalomaniac to go with the Soviet agent.

Namor also appeared in last month’s Daredevil, which we have not yet read. It’s not obvious how to order these two appearances, but we’ve decided to cover this one first. They must have happened in extremely close proximity to each other based on how they both connect with Thor’s story. For our purposes, we’ll declare the Daredevil story takes place just a couple days after these events.

Any other villains out there you’d like to recruit, Iron Man?

Wait… I was being sarcastic. Why is the scene turning to two erstwhile members of Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants?

This part’s a bit confusing, not just because of all the villainy these two haven’t answered for.

X-Men #11 was published the same month as this comic, just one week earlier. In fact, the mere appearance of Wanda and Pietro places this chronologically after X-Men #13, published 4 months later than this.

But that exciting day in the X-Men’s lives showed Wanda and Pietro retire from the life of adventure to go live in peace, presumably for some span of time. Yet that day was also very soon before the Fantastic Four wedding, which still has not happened. It’s all tricky to reconcile.

What we see is basically just that Wanda and Pietro changed their minds. After maybe a couple weeks of peace, Pietro decides he wants to join the Avengers. You can imagine a little downtime may feel like a long time to him. He seems the restless type. Lee recognizes the apparent character change, so has him explain. He didn’t want to join the X-Men because they were mutants, and he wanted to forget he was a mutant. Being an Avenger gives him an opportunity to be more than a mutant.

Wanda agrees because Pietro is the oldest. I can’t tell we learned their relative ages before this, but given how protective Pietro is, it makes some sense that Wanda is the younger sibling.

Anyways, Hawkeye passed some rigorous tests and got cleared by the Federal Security Agency. So I guess we’re going to pardon his pretty serious crimes.

Wasp jokes that it’s time to get married to Hank. He had bought her a ring once, but then never gave it to her, out of jealousy and confusion regarding some other dude. Presumably they’ve cleared all that up. Where’s that ring, Hank?

Iron Man would like Hulk to rejoin the Avengers. He’d fit right in with this team of outlaws being assembled.

Captain America returns to get the news. He will now be the senior Avenger instead of the junior one, and will thus be the leader. Thor remains missing.

Some time passes over the course of this issue. The X-Men are still recuperating from injuries received in battle with Juggernaut. Thor is engaged in the Trial of the Gods and related adventures. Captain America slowly made his way home from South America. Wanda and Pietro took at least some time to themselves. Hulk’s battles against the Leader are happening almost concurrently. The Fantastic Four were caught in an atomic explosion sometime in the middle. Dr. Strange isn’t doing much. His last several months of adventures must all take place at a later date.

I’ll wait until we finish the summary to ruminate on what this issue means to me. For the moment, let’s just take in this penultimate page, which I dearly love. Keep it handy. We’ll talk about it at length later.

“And yet, so long as I may live, I’ll never forget the words– Avengers Assemble!! I’ll never forget what they stood for!”

Iron Man gives the new team advice: to find and recruit the Hulk. They will seek to do so, which means it’s well past time for us to catch up with Hulk’s story… Right after we catch up with Thor’s.

But we left the Fantastic Four powerless and adrift at sea after being caught in a nuclear blast… oh well, we’ll get to all of it.

The crowd cheers on the new Avengers line-up. Captain America gives the crowd what they want to hear, what is apparently the Avengers official tagline at this point: Avengers Assemble!

Notice the Avengers are basically celebrities. The upcoming wedding will make clear the Fantastic Four are celebrities as well. Keep this in mind as it will form an interesting contrast with the upcoming X-Men story, which must take place almost concurrently to these events.

So there we have it. Once there were five Avengers. Then the temperamental Hulk resigned in anger, and there were four. Then Captain America joined and again there were five. Now three of the original five take a leave of absence, and one is missing. No original Avengers remain. Yet the final panel hints Hulk may not be gone forever. Now there are four, Captain America and three reformed super-villains. None as powerful as Thor or Hulk or even Iron Man. Will they be enough to keep the world safe?

If you think about it, this is a pretty wild comic. From now on, the Avengers will just be a totally different group of people, mostly old villains. No Iron Man. No Thor. It’s a radical shift in the title. Imagine if one day, the FF all retired and in the next issue the team consisted of Spider-Man and Hulk and one of the X-Men and whoever else.

Adding or dropping a character or two is one thing. This is a whole new team out of nowhere. For example, the Avengers analogue Justice League has been around 6 years and seen a few members added to its ranks, but it’s still pretty fundamentally the same set of characters it was in the beginning. The original 7 are all still around, even if there are 10 heroes now for the League to draw from. Heroes have joined or left basically one at a time. The team remains recognizable.

This new team is not at all recognizable as the Avengers.

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I’d like to reflect on my own history with the Avengers to understand just why this issue matters so much in my mind. As I’ve noted elsewhere, Avengers #309 was my first Avengers comic, published over 25 years into their history. And that history was such a huge part of the Avengers. I bought newer Avengers comics while also collecting backwards, my collection essentially spiraling out of issue 309. I found 308 and 310 and…

A couple years in came Avengers #329, which quickly became a favorite issue. If you look at the cover you will see some similarity to this issue’s cover. Captain America prominently in front of the visages of many super characters.

That issue also had a similar story to this one, an attempt to establish a new roster. In fact, this happens a lot in the Avengers, a single issue devoted to spotlighting the new roster.

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And these “recruitment drive” issues in particular make clear the sense of pride the newest recruits feel to be inducted into this hallowed institution. The deeds of the Avengers are legend, particularly the deeds of the original Avengers.

I continued in this vein for a while, reading forward and backwards, reading new Avengers stories as they came out, while slowly tracking down older issues. One day I realized I’d found every issue from 200 forward, so that seemed a good time to sit down and read every issue from 200 forward. And (on the whole) I loved them. But they all give this sense of being built on a foundation. That this is a team with history.

If I may digress a fair amount, a common critique of Tolkien’s Silmarillion is that it gives too much of a backstage peek. Lord of the Rings had created this complete sense of depth, like this world truly existed far beyond the glimpses into it we saw on the page. There was no edge to the page in sight, no stage walls. Because there was so much background and depth not exposed. When you look too hard into that background, you find the walls; you find the edge. The background detail in Silmarillion can’t create the same sense of depth as Lord of the Rings because it is the depth the main book only hinted at.

Recall the 1998 film Truman Show. His world looked real as far as he could see. A seaside town with ocean and sky beyond. Until he sailed too deep into the ocean and found the wall painted to look like the sky.

I’d not read the original adventures of the Avengers. They were mythical to me, as they were to the current members of the team in the 1990s then 80s then 70s comics I was reading.

Perhaps it was a mistake to pick up the Essential Avengers, which reprinted the first 24 issues in a cheap format that even college-aged me could afford. This was the foundation, the history, that created the sense of depth in the now hundreds of Avengers comics I had read.

And I found it wanting. Those first 15 issues, the triumphs, just don’t quite justify the awe with which later characters would speak of those days.

Looking at them again now, I see how much was lost in the transition from Kirby to Heck with issue 9. But I also see how all over the place those first 6 issues were. Not a lot of time for great stories (one notable exception, of course). Only Kang was really a threat worthy of my perception of the Avengers, and the Teen Brigade basically saved the day there.

I was pretty excited when the Avengers movie came out in 2012. More than any superhero movie prior, it just looked like Marvel superheroes brought to life on the screen. And it was a fun and thrilling roller coaster of a film. And the character moments were all spot on. But something was missing. Something was disappointing. It wasn’t quite the Avengers movie I had in my head. The Avengers movie in my head was more like the Lord of the Rings films, epic in scope with a big world and lots of characters and history. Perhaps more like Avengers: Infinity War.

Because by the time of my first Avengers comic, there were like a hundred Avengers.

But then I realized that this was where the movies needed to start. Small, with fate bringing together a small collection of heroes. Just like Avengers #1. It’s unfortunate that Avengers #1 isn’t very good.

I was much happier with the often maligned sequel, Avengers: Age of Ultron, which gave us more scope to the world, introducing characters and places. And whose ending brought to mind this very comic, Avengers #16. Where the original Avengers stepped aside for some new recruits. That moment at the end was how I see the Avengers. Not the adventures of a small group of heroes. But the adventures of those who came later, proud to join a lineage.

Back to that penultimate page of this comic, and the pride with which Iron Man speaks of the Avengers. Captain America refers to a “proud tradition”. I don’t know if the last 15 issues earned it; I don’t even know if it’s clear “Avengers Assemble” was even the catchphrase before this issue. But the nostalgic affection with which Iron Man speaks of Avengers history captures how I feel about Avengers history.

And so this issue is really the beginning of a notion of Avengers closer to the one I know.

That’s not to say that I love the coming issues, especially. They could use a new artist. And probably a new writer. And a couple new members. But they’ll get there. Within 40 issues or so, this will become one of the best superhero comics ever, like it was always destined to be.

It begins here. The sense of legacy that becomes the core of the Avengers.

Captain America reminds Iron Man, “You’ll never stop being an Avenger”. This will eventually inspire the popular Avengers phrase: “Once an Avenger… always an Avenger.”

The old order changeth yielding place to new,
And God fulfills himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me
I have lived my life and that which I have done
May he within himself make pure! but thou,
If thou shouldst never see my face again
Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Morte d’Arthur

Rating: ★★★★½, 83/100
Significance: ★★★★★

You can find this story in Avengers Epic Collection vol.1: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Or on Kindle.

Characters:

• Giant-Man
• Iron Man/Tony Stark
• Thor
• Wasp
• Black Knight
• Melter
• Enchantress
• Executioner
• Rick Jones
• Captain America
• Hawkeye
• Jarvis
• Black Widow
• Prince Namor/Sub-Mariner
• Scarlet Witch/Wanda
• Quicksilver/Pietro
• Happy Hogan
• Kang
• Mole Man
• Immortus
• Hulk

Story notes:

• Resumes where last issue left off.
• Thor executes Plan D; teleports combatants through dimensional space warp; Enchantress and Executioner escape.
• Battle resumes on barren world countless dimensions away, where certain natural laws are reversed.
• Captain America sets Zemo’s South American slaves free, even though they want to worship him.
• Cap battles Zemo’s soldiers, who want to escape on plane.
• Thor left for Trial of Gods, reference to Thor #116.
• Wasp wants a leave of absence, vacation, a normal life.
• Iron Man suggests disbanding the Avengers.
• Big time gap mid-issue.
• Hawkeye invades the mansion, ties up Jarvis.
• Black Widow shot for betraying Soviets; critically injured, perhaps dead.
• Iron Man gives Hawkeye Avengers manual to study by-laws.
• Namor refuses offer to join Avengers; still plans to conquer surface world.
• Wanda notes Pietro is the oldest.
• Hawkeye passed tests and been investigated and approved by Federal Security Agency.
• Hank notes this is a leave of absence, not a resignation. Wasp hopes they’ll marry and give up on superheroing.
• Captain America and Rick find way to seaport of Caruca.
• Cap has A-1 priority from Avengers ID card.
• Villains react to news: Enchantress, Executioner, Kang, Mole Man, Immortus. Immortus wants to destroy the Avengers.
• New Avengers. Captain America as spokesperson. Hawkeye, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch.
• Iron Man advises the Avengers to find the Hulk.

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