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Post by Crimson Cowl on May 28, 2013 4:45:50 GMT -5
Mention of Mantis in another thread reminded me of something that can be crippling in some older comics (not that it's without a certain naive kitsch charm).
Where Marvel is concerned I particularly associate it with 70's comics, although not exclusively.
The essential feature is massive coincidence. The protagonist just happens across someone or something in their daily life who turns out to be connected to their superheroic existence. The impression is created that essentially everyone is a superhero and the world of the comics feels very small, losing any real correlation to reality.
Classic examples that spring to mind are Brian Braddock just happening to get Peter Parker as a room mate at NYU. Even when I first read that at the age of 5 or 6 it seemed a bit fortuitous. Similarly Jean Gey and Misty Knight just happen to end up sharing an apartment. Both of these were written by Claremont incidentally. A little ironic given that in the ensuing years he would play a big role in smashing some of the cliches and absurdities of the superhero genre such as this (although I re-read X Men 144 the other day in which Cyclops visits Lee Forrester's home only to discover that D'Spayre just happens to have taken over the house by pure coincidence -I think maybe the disarray following the breakup of the partnership with Byrne may've been to blame).
Mantis is another case in point. Her story is essentially that a down on his luck Swordsman picks up a hooker in Vietnam who just happens to turn out to be one of the world's greatest martial artists, trained by the Priests of Pama and possessing empathic abilities. Aside from the hint of racial stereotyping (yeah, all orientals are martial arts wizards) its just loopy. Yet this kind of thing was routinely just swallowed in comics at the time. (I don't think the racial angle should be seen in too harsh a light -Mantis regularly uses the characteristic flying headlock with the legs which is the trademark of Vietnamese martial arts so its not as if they weren't making the effort to give her authentic cultural traits).
Stan Lee generally shunned this kind of thing, and so when coincidences did happen -such as Norman Osborne being the Green Goblin- they did genuinely feel shocking. I think Big Jim stomped on this tendency too when he became EiC as there's a marked move away from this kind of storytelling to one where things happen for a reason rather than just being domestic tales recast as super battles. But in between those eras this kind of lazy storytelling was not at all uncommon.
So, can anyone think of other good examples of this sort of thing? I'm pretty sure there must be loads and many of them hilarious (I suspect that the Hulk's comic was particularly guilty of this as his adventures were heavily reliant upon him just happening to run into some kind of supervillainy on his travels).
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Post by Crimson Cowl on May 28, 2013 6:13:46 GMT -5
Ah, another one did occur to me. It's not a direct connection with a superhero in this instance, but a variant of the pattern in which someone gets superpowers (or super tech) without any particularly good reason. In any event the impression of anyone and everyone being a superhero is certainly reinforced.
The origin of the Kangaroo is a case in point. Apparently he just hung around Kangaroos for a while and copied their behaviour and as a result learned to jump like them.
''What th'?''
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Post by tomspasic on May 28, 2013 7:02:44 GMT -5
It's much worse in the marvel movies, IMO. There every superhero is related to, works for, or with or shares an origin, or origin source with, their foes: Spider Man: gets powers from Oscorp radioactive spider, works with Doc Ock, Uncle Ben killed by Sandman etc etc Captain America: gets given same super soldier treatment as Red Skull. Fantastic Four have shared origin with Doc Doom, and are employed by his company, Hulks father is Absorbing Man and Abomination is a soldier from a task force intended to track him. Iron Man's nemesis Iron Monger is his dad's best friend and sort of surrogate father figure. Thor at least has Loki as his brother already, otherwise I''m sure they'd have written it so. Be glad the Wrecker wasn't in it as Don Blakes's step-dad.
It's like movie writers think an audience will be baffled by a story featuring unrelated characters fighting.
In the comics, I don't think it's nearly as bad. You cite Mantis and Swordsman, but he was quite the globe trotter, and probably used a lot of hookers (what? he was a bad guy), so that reduces the long odds on him just happening to meet up with Mantis, amongst the hundreds or thousands of bar girls in all the various countries he was wanted in.
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Post by Crimson Cowl on May 28, 2013 7:46:26 GMT -5
It's much worse in the marvel movies, IMO. There every superhero is related to, works for, or with or shares an origin, or origin source with, their foes: Spider Man: gets powers from Oscorp radioactive spider, works with Doc Ock, Uncle Ben killed by Sandman etc etc Captain America: gets given same super soldier treatment as Red Skull. Fantastic Four have shared origin with Doc Doom, and are employed by his company, Hulks father is Absorbing Man and Abomination is a soldier from a task force intended to track him. Iron Man's nemesis Iron Monger is his dad's best friend and sort of surrogate father figure. Thor at least has Loki as his brother already, otherwise I''m sure they'd have written it so. Be glad the Wrecker wasn't in it as Don Blakes's step-dad. It's like movie writers think an audience will be baffled by a story featuring unrelated characters fighting. I think that, with the exception of the truly dreadful decision to make Sandman Uncle Ben's killer, that's a misunderstanding of what they've done in the films. For the movies they are trying to maintain the illusion of super powers as a something really extraordinary -not something that is just falling off trees wherever you go. As a result one of the best solutions is to make the sources of the powers of both the heroes and the villains related (especially in a first movie). In these cases it actually adds to the plausibility rather than detracting from it. So, both Spidey and the Green Goblin get their abilities from a company that is already experimenting in genetic manipulation with a view to creating superhumans. That Peter should be interested in Octavius work and actually meets him is indeed a bit of a coincidence, but not that drastic a one as it is within Peter's established sphere of interest (admittedly in comic book logic this amounts to just 'science' rather than anything more specialized). Still, I think the impression created is that Octavius is doing something so momentous that the eyes of the world are on him and its no wonder that Peter would bend his best friend's ear for a chance to meet him. Also that the work and technology is so one of a kind groundbreaking that its not so unfathomable that it could result in super powers resulting from an accident. Cap always got his powers from from a German scientist so having the Skull as an earlier test subject made sense. Furthermore it solves the rather pesky problem of giving the impression that Cap is actually the Arian Superman who's beating up on the Skull who's a regular Joe fighting against insurmountable odds. Having the Skull as the underdog presents all kinds of dramatic problems (and I don't think it's any coincidence that the 1990 film made the same choice). I don't like that they gave Doom super powers, I don't even like his use of magic in the comics. He should just be a mad scientist. Still, in the context of the movie it made sense to have him as an objectionable money man and colleague to start with so super powers were a shortcut to explaining the change in his modus operandi. That he gets them the same way and at the same time as the FF is by far the most plausible solution under the circumstances. The cases in the Hulk movies are much the same (and the Abomination one also serves to prime the audience for the Cap movie). I didn't like the Banner's father story at all, but I didn't have such a problem with the explanation of where his powers came from. Stane? It made much more sense this way. It simply wouldn't have worked as part of an origin story if Stane had been an outsider. I actually much preferred this version much more than the original Obadiah Stane story (in which Stane just came across as a Justin Hammer stand-in). Similarly Whiplash's powers come from the same source, maintaining the impression that this kind of tech really is extraordinarily rare, rather than it being within the reach of anyone with a soldering iron. Well, for all the reasons given above I strongly disagree. Incidentally, the Swordsman doesn't fall in love with and marry Mantis because she's the one who is a martial arts wiz and would make a neat superhero and therefore he should pluck her from obscurity. He falls in love with a hooker who just happens to be the one who's got the superhero goods by complete chance.
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Post by tomspasic on May 28, 2013 10:54:56 GMT -5
Well our opinions differ considerably, CC. For me, a couple of dozen bad coincidences in thousands of comics is forgiveable, since it come out as something like 0.002% of what's happening overall. So it's about as frequent as real life, taken over 40 years of a dozen comics a month. But with the films there is an unlikely coincidence 100% of the time (OK, maybe 80-90% if we figure in Thor and Avengers), and that stretches my credulity. And to make the excuse that it's to preserve super powers as "extraordinary" kind of ignores the facts of a movie universe with already dozens of super-powered people, two separate alien invasions (Galactus and the Chitauri), a number of government sponsored mass-produced-super-soldier programmes(Cap, Red Skull, Banner(Sr. and Jr.), Abomination) or Iron Man armour-alikes (Stane, Hammer, War Machine), the Exremis Army programme (Killian plus what? a dozen others?) and also ignores the Avengers Initiative set up to get supers into teams, and so on. At this point in the Marvel Film Universe thgey are at about 1965 or so, in terms of superhuman/alien/enhanced human population levels. If everybody still cannot "buy" the extraordinary at this point, they should give up. And I haven't even touched on the dozens (maybe hundreds?) of mutants in all the X-men related movies. So I think you are on a hiding to nothing with the "no, getting powers is really special so the foes must share an origin" theory.
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Post by Crimson Cowl on May 28, 2013 11:30:17 GMT -5
But with the films there is an unlikely coincidence 100% of the time Hi, I think you're missing the point that, with the exception of the Doc Ock meeting (which is fairly reasonable) and the undeniably awful Sandman as Uncle Ben's murderer, these aren't actually coincidences. All the rest develop logically out of the plot.
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Post by humanbelly on May 28, 2013 21:02:25 GMT -5
Stan Lee generally shunned this kind of thing, and so when coincidences did happen -such as Norman Osborne being the Green Goblin- they did genuinely feel shocking. I think Big Jim stomped on this tendency too when he became EiC as there's a marked move away from this kind of storytelling to one where things happen for a reason rather than just being domestic tales recast as super battles. . Ha-! Ohhh, nononononononono, Crimson C, old friend. I'm afraid I'll have to take ya to task on your appraisal of ol' Stan, up there. The man was the KING of the hopelessly contrived, coincidental plot device! Many of them aren't particualarly memorable, and you only notice them happening a lot when you read a lot of old issues at a stretch. But even his narration captions were prone to using phrases like, "And then, in a coincidence so strange that it could only happen in real life, etc. . !" One HUGE whopper was the historically overlooked fact that early-FF-nemesis Puppet Master just HAPPENED to have a blind niece who was a DEAD RINGER for Sue Storm! A resemblance so uncanny that, with a blond wig on, she FOOLED REED RICHARDS (!!!). (One has to wonder how Reed missed that Sue had suddenly also gone blind. . . but I digress). The forward motion of that whole story relied on the fact that Alicia could convincingly pass as Sue. We've also ourselves, I think, discussed the fact that Rick Jones was, at the time, presented as being an uncanny twin to the late Bucky-- how ironic that the one person in the world w/ that resemblance would end up right there with the Avengers the very day Cap was fished out of the ocean! Ohhh yeah-- ol' Greenskin spent several years as a ridiculous loose cannon who seemed to be gravitationally attracted to trouble in remote areas where only HE had any chance of prevailing or helping or doing what needed to be done. And the unlikely way his path crossed the Abomination's over the years fell well into the realm of the absurd. Hulk gets press-ganged onto a stellar whaling ship for a certain loopy Captain Cybor, and who is the Bos'n, in charge of the personnel? Yep, Abomination. They both end up falling out of space together, and crash land in the desert. Abomination is buried and (presumably) in a coma. Three years later, Hulk falls out of the sky again, and pretty much lands SMACK IN THE SAME SPOT. . . which eventually wakes Bommie back up. Many years later, Hulk is facing some fiersome intergalactic gladiator-type-- one who has defeated a long line of champions (on some other world, even, I believe), and it turns out to be. . . Bommie yet again. In Hulk #179, he comes crashing down in some tiny, poverty-stricken little Appalachian coal town and finds some friendly folk. . . only to discover that the same kind family are ALSO housing the long-forgotten Missing Link from issues #105-107! Who I believe we had last seen falling out of the sky in Russia. . . Really? How does that work out, exactly?? HB
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Post by spiderwasp on May 28, 2013 22:11:58 GMT -5
I think that, with the exception of the truly dreadful decision to make Sandman Uncle Ben's killer, that's a misunderstanding of what they've done in the films. For the movies they are trying to maintain the illusion of super powers as a something really extraordinary -not something that is just falling off trees wherever you go. As a result one of the best solutions is to make the sources of the powers of both the heroes and the villains related (especially in a first movie). In these cases it actually adds to the plausibility rather than detracting from it. . Couldn't disagree with you more. That's always been my biggest complaint with the Spider-man movies. As a matter of fact, your point about things falling off trees leads to the worst transgression of the lot. When the symbiote crashes to Earth, it just happens to land a few feet from Peter and Mary Jane. I find it 100 times more believable that some scientist in Florida is studying lizards and Spidey gets involved when he goes to investigate as a news photographer than for the professor to be one of Peter's teachers. How likely is it that Aunt May would happen to be in the bank when Dr. Octopus robs it? The close ties, for me, makes the connections seem to have some sort of magical effect - as though Peter is the center of the universe. I find it that it detracts horribly from otherwise good movies.
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Post by Crimson Cowl on May 29, 2013 3:45:38 GMT -5
One HUGE whopper was the historically overlooked fact that early-FF-nemesis Puppet Master just HAPPENED to have a blind niece who was a DEAD RINGER for Sue Storm! A resemblance so uncanny that, with a blond wig on, she FOOLED REED RICHARDS (!!!). (One has to wonder how Reed missed that Sue had suddenly also gone blind. . . but I digress). The forward motion of that whole story relied on the fact that Alicia could convincingly pass as Sue. We've also ourselves, I think, discussed the fact that Rick Jones was, at the time, presented as being an uncanny twin to the late Bucky-- how ironic that the one person in the world w/ that resemblance would end up right there with the Avengers the very day Cap was fished out of the ocean! I think I'm going to have to bow to your wisdom on that one. I had completely forgotten that about Alicia. Spiderwasp wrote:Fair enough. To be honest Spider Man3 was so awful I've only seen it the once (I'd even managed to completely forget about Sandman supposedly having killed Uncle Ben until tomspacic brought it up). Granted the Doc Ock bank robbery is rather fortuitous too. Maybe I'm splitting hairs but I'm not sure that's exactly what I'm getting at. I'd view that more as a serendipitous encounter, much as you'd see in a Dickens novel rather than something so insanely contrived that it undermines the whole premise of the narrative being set in the real world. Superpeople just appear to be round every corner. Another good example would be in the Smallville TV show where, in order to be with Clark, Lana goes out and buys some super powers from an obliging mad scientist; because its that easy -if you really want super powers that much you can just go out and get them! OTOH that is exactly what I mean so maybe I'm just being awkward when I should really just accept that your own experience of that is entirely valid. I intended that this thread would be entertaining rather than argumentative, so maybe I should just shut up about this and deal. humanbelly wrote:Fantastic stuff. Thanks for sharing. I particularly like the falling on the same spot storyline -the author's clearly decided to shortcut any attempt to actually set up or provide a decent rationale for the encounter and just get down to business! I vaguely remember the interstellar whaling one -that was bizarre. Don't the Hulk, Bommie and the Night Crawler (who for some reason is in outer space in our dimension rather than his own) end up getting sent on some kind of mission together? Isn't it also one of those outer space stories where everyone seems to rather conveniently speak English.
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Post by tomspasic on May 29, 2013 17:09:25 GMT -5
Stan Lee Coinkydinks Dept. off the top of my head: 1. Johnny Storm happens to pick the bowery flophouse in which the amnesiac Submariner is hiding. But wait, it gets better! There also happens to be a 20 year old submariner comic lying in the very same room so that Johnny can correctly identify him! 2. Avengers #4: Namor just happens to drop by and bully some Inuit, the very ones worshipping a frozen Captain America. In a snit, he throws the Cap-berg into the sea, where it just happens to be spotted by the Avengers, just as all the ice is melted. The same issue has the already mentioned Rick Jones is Bucky's double coincidence. I'm not even going to bother mentioning Namor happening to stumble across a bunch of his missing subjects just in time to lead them in an attack on the Avengers, or the luck of Cap entering suspended animation rather than, y'know, drowning in his backstory... Neither shall I mention the coincidence that inbetween happening to find Cap in the arctic, and then finding the Atlantean patrol, Namor had time to just happen upon the Medusa alien, who managed to hide from humanity for 2000 years or so, but not form Subby. Alright, so I did mention them all.. Coinkidink piled upon coinkydink For these reasons, I nominate Avengers #4 as the Prime Coincidence Nexus of Marvel Reality!
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Post by humanbelly on May 29, 2013 19:05:08 GMT -5
Stan Lee Coinkydinks Dept. off the top of my head: 1. Johnny Storm happens to pick the bowery flophouse in which the amnesiac Submariner is hiding. But wait, it gets better! There also happens to be a 20 year old submariner comic lying in the very same room so that Johnny can correctly identify him! 2. Avengers #4: Namor just happens to drop by and bully some Inuit, the very ones worshipping a frozen Captain America. In a snit, he throws the Cap-berg into the sea, where it just happens to be spotted by the Avengers, just as all the ice is melted. The same issue has the already mentioned Rick Jones is Bucky's double coincidence. I'm not even going to bother mentioning Namor happening to stumble across a bunch of his missing subjects just in time to lead them in an attack on the Avengers, or the luck of Cap entering suspended animation rather than, y'know, drowning in his backstory... Neither shall I mention the coincidence that inbetween happening to find Cap in the arctic, and then finding the Atlantean patrol, Namor had time to just happen upon the Medusa alien, who managed to hide from humanity for 2000 years or so, but not form Subby. Alright, so I did mention them all.. Coinkidink piled upon coinkydink For these reasons, I nominate Avengers #4 as the Prime Coincidence Nexus of Marvel Reality! Oh man, I totally second that nomination, TomS. That Crustybelly's Kurmudgeon Korner thread I was workin' on awhile back? I haven't been able to commit to getting back to it simply because the REST of issue #4 (we got pretty much through Cap's re-awakening, I believe) simply piles further coincidence upon coincidence, large & small & in-between, into an enormous house of cards structure of shameless improbability-! Sure, we ALL love that issue (I know I certainly do), but barely a single panel goes by without some element that doesn't hold under the most rudimentary scrutiny and a muttered "now, wait a minute. . . ". It's clearly a multiple-post issue all on its own. . .! HB
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Post by Crimson Cowl on May 29, 2013 19:39:05 GMT -5
For these reasons, I nominate Avengers #4 as the Prime Coincidence Nexus of Marvel Reality! That is gonna take some beating. Now there's a challenge! I'm not sure if it's a match for that, but I have come up with another one. Shamefully enough it's another Claremont offering. The X Men get drawn into an interstellar conflict and journey into outer space. Of all the people in the entire universe that they could run into entirely by chance under the most unlikely of circumstances is none other than Scott Summers' long lost father Corsair who it turns out has been living as a pirate in outer space for the preceding two decades..
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Post by humanbelly on May 29, 2013 21:39:43 GMT -5
For these reasons, I nominate Avengers #4 as the Prime Coincidence Nexus of Marvel Reality! That is gonna take some beating. Now there's a challenge! I'm not sure if it's a match for that, but I have come up with another one. Shamefully enough it's another Claremont offering. The X Men get drawn into an interstellar conflict and journey into outer space. Of all the people in the entire universe that they could run into entirely by chance under the most unlikely of circumstances is none other than Scott Summers' long lost father Corsair who it turns out has been living as a pirate in outer space for the preceding two decades.. That's a good one-- that's a really good one. Oh, I distinctly remember saying aloud (to no one-- I was alone in my bedroom), "Oh, c'mon-! Come ON! You've GOT to be kidding me!!!"-- with that improbable revelation. And then I raised an eyebrow at the fact that Corsair seemed to have gotten well over any grief with his little chippie of a she-skunk girlfriend-! But yeah, untold octoboquillions of potential beings in the universe. . . and up pops Cyclops' dad at just that very moment. Hmm-- although it's been explained and revisited and justified and canonized to death, can I bring up how unlikely it is that TWO pregnant women would make their way to unbelievably remote Wundagore Mountain at the same time, and that both of them would bear twins? (If I'm remembering that whole sequence correctly-?). Then add to it that Magneto was the unknowing true father of the surviving pair, and would unwittingly take them under his wing again in different circumstances many years later? One has to admit, though, that that one almost kinda wrote itself. The resemblance between Pietro & Magnus alone seemed to take a remarkably long time for anyone to discover. . . ! HB
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Post by tomspasic on May 30, 2013 3:58:41 GMT -5
Me pitching for "no-way!" prizes by attempting to explain unlikely coincidences: Have you not heard about the Mt. Wundagore maternity clinic, specializing in the delivery of twins? And humans, like salmon, possess unconscious spawning impulses that led both Summers senior and Junior to go off into space in the exact same direction, facilitating their meeting. Namor didn't chance across those inuit, he's been going there for years, but had never been ticked off enough to smash the place up before. Rick Jones was actually Bucky's nephew, raised in an orphanage unaware of his true parentage, hence the resemblance. The Avengers Sub had sophisticated Stark built sonar and radar tuned to spot any man sized/shaped object more than 2 miles from shore, which is how they found Cap whilst trying to track down Namor.
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Post by Crimson Cowl on May 30, 2013 8:03:03 GMT -5
The Avengers Sub had sophisticated Stark built sonar and radar tuned to spot any man sized/shaped object more than 2 miles from shore, which is how they found Cap whilst trying to track down Namor. Ha! How about the sub was rigged to detect undersea sources for the rare and valuable Vibranium and thus Cap's shield set it off? I think there are possibly partial explanations for some of these, although my memory may be playing tricks on me. With Wanda and Pietro's parentage I vaguely recall that it was always hinted at back in their early X Men appearances that they were Magneto's children. Then later on someone (Roy Thomas? Engelhart? Don't remember exactly) came up with the Whizzer and Ms America alternative. Evidently it was decided to go back to the original story and the whopping coincidence had to be devised. With Cap and Rick Jones I'd always been under the impression that Cap is more disoriented and dazed after coming out of the ice and sees Bucky in Rick (initially in the dark) more because he's hysterical and 'wants' to see him rather than because they're really the spitting image of each other. I guess I've always viewed it more as a sort of 'fever dream' scenario. Perhaps I'm being too generous...
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Post by tomspasic on May 30, 2013 11:10:10 GMT -5
Your fever dream makes more sense than Rick being Bucky's doppleganger and Cap being the only one to ever notice it. Bear in mind pretty much everyone who saw Cap after a 20 year absence recognizes him straight away, but nobody else ever noticed the Rick/Bucky thing, not even Rick himself who was an avowed WW2 comics fan (see the end of the Kree/Skrull war for evidence).
However, I'm sticking with my Uncle Buck(y) theory because I loved that John Candy film, and am hoping Marvel remake it with Bucky and Rick in the main roles...
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Post by Crimson Cowl on May 31, 2013 3:12:34 GMT -5
Okay, another new offering. I'd never read this one before.
It's another Claremont effort, this time co-plotted with John Byrne (it's the walk of shame for you guys). It's from the back up feature to Marvel Team Up 100 and features Storm and the Black Panther. Anyway, it turns out that they'd known each other as kids. Well, they were bound to really weren't they? After all they're both from Africa and we all know what a tiny and poorly inhabited place that is.
Riiiiight?
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Post by tomspasic on May 31, 2013 4:53:34 GMT -5
More from Stan Lee's Avengers: Avengers #14: The Wasp is gravely wounded following a battle with the Maggia at Count Nefaria's castle in #13. The Avengers are told that only one man can save her, and they seek him out. But he just happens to have been abducted by a race of aliens hiding out in the arctic while they regroup for their massive interstellar war. The Avengers go after him, and while they are there, the second of the two warring alien races finally finds the ones hiding on earth. The first race (the Kallusians) then head off to their war among the stars, the Avengers take the Doc to fix up Wasp, leaving the Watcher, no less, to observe about what are the odds of this $%^& happening? (I paraphrase slightly). To summarise, the only man on earth who can save Wasp just happens to have been abducted by a race of aliens hiding on earth. Just as the Avengers go to get him, the foe of the Kallusians appears, conveniently freeing up the Doc to go save the Wasp. Coincidence? Or Fate? I'll let you be the judge, dear reader.
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Post by Crimson Cowl on May 31, 2013 7:52:00 GMT -5
More from Stan Lee's Avengers: Avengers #14: The Wasp is gravely wounded following a battle with the Maggia at Count Nefaria's castle in #13. The Avengers are told that only one man can save her, and they seek him out. But he just happens to have been abducted by a race of aliens hiding out in the arctic while they regroup for their massive interstellar war. Oh yeah, I remember that one vividly. It was one of the first back issues I ever bought. The plot is totally bonkers. In fact that might even beat Avengers 4 for me. No. 4 may have more coincidence but that's just a whole different level of quality to its contrivance. That's coincidence with unabashed style.
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Post by tomspasic on May 31, 2013 8:38:08 GMT -5
More from Stan Lee's Avengers: Avengers #14: The Wasp is gravely wounded following a battle with the Maggia at Count Nefaria's castle in #13. The Avengers are told that only one man can save her, and they seek him out. But he just happens to have been abducted by a race of aliens hiding out in the arctic while they regroup for their massive interstellar war. Oh yeah, I remember that one vividly. It was one of the first back issues I ever bought. The plot is totally bonkers. In fact that might even beat Avengers 4 for me. No. 4 may have more coincidence but that's just a whole different level of quality to its contrivance. That's coincidence with unabashed style. I agree. #4 has such brio and panache, coupled with all out action and major changes, that the reader is left too overwhelmed and delighted to quibble too much about all the unlikely stuff. #14 tries for gravitas, pathos and human drama. While it does not fail completely in it's efforts, it's alien plot elements feel contrived, and tacked on to provide action and conflict. If #4 had let up the pace for even a few panels it might have felt as creaky and contrived as it was, but the blistering pace and gusto carry it past all obstacles unscathed. Whilst #14 catches it's metaphorical trousers on the barbed wire fence of incredulity. But I have said too much...
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Post by Crimson Cowl on Jun 1, 2013 14:32:46 GMT -5
I remembered one of my all time nemeses on this front. Indeed it's one of the truly classic examples of Superhero Room Mate Syndrome (and it's from the pen of Stan the Man so I really should've been more aware on that front).
The Juggernaught.
So Charles Xavier, who happened to be born with the freakish abnormality of being a mutant with the abilty to read minds has an evil stepbrother. This stepbrother just happened to stumble upon super powers as well, entirely separately, and by complete chance when he violated an ancient tomb in the far east and encountered the Jewel of Cyttorak. Who'da thunk?
What a revoltin' development.
This could've been handled so much better. Brian Xavier and Kurt Marko worked together. Stan could've made Cain a mutant too and then the two nuclear scientists could've worked together trying to understand the abnormalities their sons had developed. It'd have provided a rationale and back story to Professor X's expertise in mutants if his father had already laid the groundwork of study. It all would've made sense.
But no, instead we got the whole mystical jewel thing. Huh?
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Post by wundagoreborn on Jun 3, 2013 11:53:43 GMT -5
Ugh - I had blocked the whole Prof X/Juggernaut thing out of my mind.
I guess this is one of the blessings of being a comics writer. Fans build their own psychic barriers against events they would rather exclude from the universe.
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