Avengers West Coast in the 1980s

As I’ve previously stated in my primer for Vision and the Scarlet Witch, the 1980s saw a growth in comic book titles due to the creation and expansion of direct market sellers. Still, an idea getting its own title was still carried some risks. They weren’t just handing out titles all willy-nilly — that was the 1990s. Previously, Marvel had a number of anthology books that would rotate characters to see if readers would be interested. This model later changed to limited series in the 1980s.

The most successful limited series were usually given their own on-going series. This was relatively rare, however, especially when it comes to the Avengers. It’s kind of crazy to think that 40 years ago, the Avengers weren’t very popular. In the 1980s, Marvel appeared to be trying really hard to give Hawkeye a solo title. They tried a limited series which only ran four issues but for whatever reason, they decided that Hawkeye couldn’t fly on his own and needed his fellow Avengers, hence a second Avengers title was churned out.

The series started off as a back-door pilot in the Avengers when then-leader the Vision decided that the team needed a second branch on the west coast to be more effective at answering national threats.

West Coast Avengers started off as a limited series that ran for four issues written by Roger Stern with art by Bob Hall. It was a four part story that established the new team and pitted them against Graviton and a new foe called the Blank. The new roster featured Hawkeye, his wife Mockingbird, the new Iron Man (Jim Rhodes), Wonder Man, and Tigra. Not exactly a team of heavy hitters or experienced Avengers, but pitting them against Graviton — a foe that was able to hold his own against heavy hitters like Thor — proved that they could hold their own even against a more powerful foe.

The limited series wasn’t exactly a game changer, but it was decent for what it was. Roger Stern told an interesting story and the artwork by Hall was well done. The limited series proved popular enough that Marvel then green lit a regular on-going series. That’s where things start going downhill for a bit since they went with a different creative team.

Taking on writing duties was Steve Englehart with art by Al Milgrom. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I am not a fan of Al Milgrom’s work. It’s tries to do the Marvel Method of drawing characters but is some how more bland. Also, Milgrom’s work is prone to sloppiness, particularly when he is juggling more than one book. It appears as though he is prone to rushing through his work. His covers are all ugly. They seldom have backgrounds, usually feature floating heads or some character being presented larger than the rest of the people on the cover. I can’t understand how someone who has an entire page to work with will leave so much empty space and so many uninspired and repeated designs and tropes. Milgrom’s art style looks like a cheap bootleg trying to copy Jack Kirby’s work (Sorry, Al!) Unfortunately, we’re stuck with Milgrom’s artwork for 40 whole issues. I’m not going to lie, it was a challenge for me to read. Steve Englehart’s prose doesn’t really help either…

Englehart is a dense writer. Lots of dialogue, and lots of referential work. While I usually love this sort of continuity dense material, Steve doesn’t stray far from picking up threads of things he started in other titles, notably his run on the mainline Avengers title the decade earlier. Particularly the on going dynamics between Wonder Man and Vision. At least to start. He focuses a lot of his 40 issues on a sweeping plot involving Tigra, her origins, and a new villain called Master Pandemonium. The story is plodding and doesn’t have a whole lot of meat to it. Pandemonium is trying to find the fragments of his soul and Tigra is trying to tame her dual nature. There are also sub-plots involving Ultron becoming a good boy and getting killed by an older model, and another about Firebird of the Rangers trying to become an Avenger but finding God instead.

We learn that Tigra is DTF, like all the time, as she tries hooking up with nearly every male Avenger. While a woman having agency over her body and choosing to have more than one sexual partner is pretty empowering but it’s done on a backdrop of “I used to be a feminist, now I just want dick.” which is some weird messaging. Also, I’m not sure what he was trying to do with Firebird and her faith, but she comes off as condescending and pious. Thankfully, other writers (named Fabian Nicieza in Avengers Spotlight) take her down a few notches and make her realize her own hubris.

Another winding plot thread is a sub-plot where Hawkeye was trying to convince the Thing — then on the outs with the Fantastic Four — to join his team. This runs from issue #4 to 9, with the Thing ultimately dropping out in the following issue. I think this was partially due to the editorial mandate to reset the FF back to the status quo after years of She-Hulk being on the team during John Byrne’s legendary run on the book. The sudden about face seems like something that was editorially mandated.

There is a winding time travel story that interweaves the West Coast Avengers into the already busy time travel story involving Rama-Tut first seen in Fantastic Four #19. It also has a particularly disturbing sub-plot where Mockingbird is kidnapped by the Phantom Rider, a western hero from the American Frontier, who uses a love potion to make her forget her past and love him. It’s about as close to a rape story as you can get from back in the Comics Code days, where the rape is implied. Bobbi will later get free and have her revenge, leaving to the Rider to fall to his death. This is followed by a story where the Avengers learn the truth and Hawkeye — rather than being understanding of the trauma his wife went through — gets upset with her and threatens divorce.

All I’m saying is that Steve Englehart really misses his mark when trying to write about women trying to maintain their own agency. I have to keep reminding myself that these stories are almost 4 decades old and a product of their time. So on the one hand you can’t be that critical of how tone deaf they were. I don’t think Steve was going out of his way to write something this problematic, but as a man writing about a women’s issue — particularly subjects like sexual autonomy and dealing with rape trauma — comes off as something written by a man who knows what those things are, but doesn’t really have the insight or experience to really understand the subtler nuances of these things. A lot of that is the era in which these are written, I suspect another component is the Comics Code as well. This is also from an era where Jim Shooter was editor-in-chief at Marvel. You know, the guy who co-wrote the Ms. Marvel rape story who has a long history of problematic attitudes about female characters in comics to start with. So I’m sure it’s a mixed bag of reasons why these stories haven’t aged particularly well.

To put it into perspective: This story was a defining moment in Hawkeye’s marriage to Mockingbird and spelled the end of their marriage. However, it took about 20 years (not to mention Mockingbird “dying” and coming back from the dead) before these issues were really looked at without a more realistic lense when Jim McCann wrote the Hawkeye & Mockingbird limited series in 2010.

Speaking of problematic situations, we also have another overly long Hank Pym plot that happens over these issues as well. After being disgraced and retiring from costumed heroics in the mainline book, Hank went on to join the West Coast team on a support capacity. As I mentioned above, Ultron comes back but in his 12th iteration and is reformed and tries to strike a bond with his creator. This is all abruptly ended when Ultron-11 — the previous model that is still homicidal — kills off U12. This hits Hank pretty hard and he actually mourns for Ultron-12 after naming him Mark. While this is an interesting idea, it wasn’t given much room to breath. It also starts off pretty bizarrely, where Ultron keeps on making harassing phone calls with Hank before suddenly deciding to have a change of heart. Again, this is kind of an odd choice because from what I’ve experienced when it comes to harassing phone calls, they don’t tend to morph into a mutual understanding and affection between the victim and the abuser, at least not in a way that’s healthy or ends well.

This then snowballs to Tigra deciding she doesn’t want a serious relationship with Hank and for an issue and a half, Hank contemplates suicide. He is stopped by Firebird — now calling herself Espirita and dressing like a priest, because religion — and uses the power of faith to convince Hank to see his life has value. Which she somehow does without forcing him to become religious, which — while not impossible — doesn’t seem very likely when it comes to “Christian Charity”, but I digress, I’m not going to derail things by going into a length rant about the toxicity of modern Christianity. However, for the second time, they hit on another serious topic and don’t spend the proper amount of time to expand upon it. Suicide is a complex issue that I have dealt with personally for many years and I don’t think the proper amount of care was used in dealing with the issue. But again, this was most likely a product of its time. What people knew about mental health in 1987 and the taboos about getting psychological help are probably at play here.

Near the end of his run, Englehart attempted to bring back Mantis to an Avengers title after the character went mostly unused since his run on the mainline book in the 70s. This didn’t come to be because the title featured an abrupt change in creative teams. Issues #38 to 41 were fill in issues used to wrap up dangling plot threads written by Mark Gruenwald and Bob Harras before the change over. I can’t really find much on this abrupt change, Steve Englehart states that his removal from the title was about Marvel not wanting to do “unique” stories at the time and makes (quite the bold) statement that this is what led to Marvel’s bankruptcy in the 1990s. Which is a pretty interesting take given that there is a mountain of evidence that the issue stemmed from the comics reseller bubble bursting while companies were churning out books that didn’t sell, but sure Steve, it was the lack of “unique” stories. I think the truth of the matter is that Steve had a long history of butting heads with editorial and his removal from West Coast Avengers coincide with his rather messy departure from Fantastic Four a few months later and his abrupt departure from Silver Surfer around the same time.

Steve Englehart is a decent writer — his original run on Avengers and his run on Silver Surfer are great examples of this — but from what I can gather from his history is that — for whatever reasons — he regularly found himself in conflict with editorial resulting in him quitting books and usually jumping ship from Marvel over to DC. Other than some time working from smaller publishers like Valiant and Malibu, that was Steve’s career for 40 years.

At the end of the day, I think the crown jewel of his run on West Coast Avengers were issues #17-24. It was an interesting take on a time travel story that split the narrative up between seven different time periods. It was probably inspired a little bit by the popularity of the Back to the Future franchise that was hugely popular at the time, but it makes its own mark. It’s an interesting story, even it bloats up the events of Fantastic Four #19 (which had been done once before in the pages of Doctor Strange and will be revisited again in the Rise of Apocalypse mini-series in the 90s.)

That said, I don’t think this is Steve’s best work. There are some memorably moments for sure, but some of the plot threads are either to dense or not explored enough and that art by Al Milgrom just makes this a tough read. In addition to this, the new villains introduced in this run are ridiculous at best, particularly the Desert Dwellers which include a living rock and cactus among their numbers. I get that this was supposed to be a more light hearted title, but these villains were just awful and not very inspiring. The only memorably foe is Master Pandemonium, and even then his whole thing doesn’t have any high stakes. He’s just a guy trying to get his soul back. It won’t be until John Byrne took over the book that there were some high stakes involved to make Master P. a reasonable threat.

Speaking of John Byrne, that’s who wraps up the first decade of West Coast Avengers! This was after a 2 year hiatus where he went over to DC to work on the reboot of Superman. Dissatisfied with his time at the Distinguished Competition, Johnny Boy returned to Marvel and jumped onto West Coast Avengers, primarily so he could tell his own story about the Vision, the Avengers resident android and what a shake-up that was.

Byrne accepted this book if he was able to tell his Vision story. Basically, he wanted to undo the fact that the Vision was built out of the android Human Torch from the 1940s. Byrne has a love for Marvel’s golden age characters and I guess this was to bring the character back the way he originally was. However, the execution was pretty clunky. It wasn’t just a matter of undoing what was previously established since — in the 1970s — there were multiple stories that went out of their way to identify the Vision was built from the Human Torch, on top of the stories that flat out state it. To his credit, Byrne does address these various instances and he tackled this retcon a lot better than a lot of writers today.

Ironically, Byrne’s plot would get revisited by Kurt Busiek when he wrote the Avengers Forever limited series in the late 1999. Rather than do the back-and-forth about which origin was the better one, Busiek came up with a way for both stories to be true. Which is way better than constant retconning or reconning stories, but I digress.

One interesting choice that Byrne made after his Vision story, was doing away with the Scarlet Witch’s children. I don’t know what John Byrne’s thing was at the time, but he really didn’t seem to like babies overly much, at least that’s how it appears since you know he also infamously had the Invisible Woman have a miscarriage during his run on Fantastic Four. It is part of a larger trend of stories from this decade and the next were babies were routinely gotten rid of.

The method in which he got rid of Wanda’s kids was also particularly brutal. They are written off as imaginary beings created by her powers and end up getting merged with a demonic sorcerer before being sucked into a mystical black hole. On top of all that, Wanda is made to forget she ever had children to begin with. This loss could have had some fantastic story telling potential but it seems to me that the intent was just getting rid of parts of continuity that the writer at the time did not want to have to deal with. It would take 20 years — during Brian Michael Bendis’ run on Avengers — before the ramifications of this story were ever approached in a serious way. Bendis would, of course, pen the game changing Avengers Disassembled storyline that saw Wanda go bat-shit insane and decimate the Avengers. However, this is another digression that we’ll tackle later, lets get back to Byrne.

Another addition he made was the creation of the Great Lakes Avengers, who were a play on DC’s Justice League of America. I am not sure what Byrne was trying to say with these characters. Was this a commentary on his treatment at DC Comics or what, but I never particularly liked these characters. A running joke that nobody remembers the punchline to, the GLA would end up being tossed into less serious books (notably various runs of Deadpool) whenever a writer wanted to make a joke that would age poorly after it was printed (Leather Boy anybody?) I think John was trying to at least come up with an underdog team for Hawkeye to train into a well-oiled fighting team but that kind of fizzled out after their appearance in issue #46.

After that same issue, the title changed from West Coast Avengers to Avengers West Coast, and when it comes down to preferences, I like the latter name better. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that I started getting into comics well after the book did the title swap and it just sounds better to my ears. It’s kind of like the first run of Uncanny X-Men, even though it did not take on that name official until issue #142, I still refer to the entire series as Uncanny X-Men since the book was better known by that title than when it was not.

Other than that, there’s not really much to say about Byrne’s run here because it was just getting started at the tail end of this decade and it also didn’t last very long as he left the title early into 1990. He put US Agent onto the team, where he didn’t really do much of anything. There was a plot about sentient bacteria that lives in all humans that didn’t really go anywhere. The big stories here were centered around the Scarlet Witch and Vision and everyone else kind of took the back seat, including the characters Byrne put on the book because he wanted them there.

Whatever the case may be, the West Coast Avengers/Avengers West Coast books of the 1980s is a real mixed bag. It is a series that was needlessly dense with continuity regardless of who is writing it. The book wouldn’t fare very well in the next decade thanks to the state of the comic book industry in the 1990s, but that’s a story for another time.