The Avengers (Comic Book)/Headscratchers

• The recent Avengers vs. X-men story line (thus far) am I the only one who thinks Cyclops' position is the least stupid? (Note I said LEAST Stupid, ergo it's still dumb.) Breaking it down:
  • Cyclops wants to control the Phoenix: It's pretty lofty to say the phoenix can be controlled but it's not unheard of nor impossible.
  • Captain America and the Avengers want to stop the Phoenix: Pretty vain if you ask me. This is an extremely powerful cosmic entity. Not something you can just "stop" any more than you can stop Galactus (the Phoenix is stronger than even him).
  • Wolverine wants to stop the Phoenix by killing it's projected host: Yeah, kill the host of an entity that can come back to life (and is pretty tough in her own right no less).
    • Defeating impossibly powerful enemies that cannot be defeated is the entire reason the Avengers exist. This is what they do, no different from any other impossible threat to the Earth. Sure, stopping the Phoenix is as impossible as stopping Galactus, but remember one very critical thing: Galactus has been stopped before. Hell, Galactus has been overpowered and chained up to the power source of a doomsday device before. Additionally, the away team have already proven that the Phoenix can be hurt and, potentially, killed or contained, which means that defeating it is entirely within the realm of possibility. Again: this is what the Avengers do. They face down the impossible, and they win. Scott's plan can more or less be summarized as classic supervillainy, having completed his descent into becoming Magneto: a man trying to harness and control forces far beyond his control for his own personal gain, ultimately oblivious to the fact that his attempts will ultimately mean the doom of everything, including himself. It's a classic supervillain ploy, and whining about oppression of his people every time people try to talk sense into him doesn't change that. Scott fell in love with the race card a long time ago, but screaming, "Stop oppressing me, you nazis!" when people try to tell him that Evil Is Not a Toy only makes him a particularly whiny supervillain.
  • So it would seem that it's not Cyclops' plan that bad so much as it's coming from Cyclops. Yeah the "Avengers face the impossible" but even if they are "successful" the Phoenix will return, especially considering it specializes in resurrection. So you'd just get a cycle of the phoenix returning and there being a "close call" each time the killing/containing process goes forward. Or some kind of cosmic balance event will require them to release it anyways. With Cyclops' position you accept the Phoenix is coming and you let the chips fall as they may. The Avengers are prolonging the inevitable and Wolverine is just an idiot.
    • No, the problem is Cyclops's position. You might as well say the same for everything else that's ever threatened the Earth: should Ultron be permitted to wipe out humanity because, after all, if you defeat him, he'll probably just come back eventually? How about next time Galactus thinks Earth is starting to look a bit appetizing? Should everyone just "let the chips fall as they may" there? Sure, if the Phoenix is defeated, it may just come back some day. The same is true of Galactus, the Skrulls, the Beyonder, Thanos, the Phalanx, and every other celestial/cosmic entity that has ever threatened the Earth in the history of its existence. What makes the Phoenix so special, that the Avengers should just roll over and die for it?
  • Ultron was created by humans (an Avenger no less) they are responsible for his/its actions. The Skrulls aren't a Cosmic entity, Galactus and the Beyonder can be reasoned with. Not to mention the Phoenix is on a level that exceeds Galactus in terms of its unlimited power source. That's what makes the phoenix force so special. If nothing else it could be argued that killing the Phoenix force would likely have negative reprocussions in the 616 universe. If they were to contain the Phoenix they probably should allow it to take it's host instead of removing her from it.
    • You know what else exceeds Galactus in terms of its unlimited power source? The Infinity Gems. Six gemstones of absolute cosmic power that, when brought together, make one God. The fabric of the universe itself bends in submission to the Gems. The wielder of the Infinity Gems will dwarf the Phoenix in both power and scale; even a single gem is enough to make a person into a living avatar of a fundamental element of the universe. Likewise, there is no reasoning with Thanos. He desires nothing more than the absolute death of the universe, as a gift to woo his beloved Death. If the Avengers wouldn't roll over and die for Thanos or anyone else who has ever possessed the Infinity Gems, again I ask, what makes the Phoenix so special that they should? It brings the same promise as Thanos: absolute death of everything. There is no reason to believe that it will not simply purge the Earth of life, like it does to every other planet it visits. What they are doing now is a play for time; take Hope offworld and play a game of cosmic Keep Away with the Phoenix's host until a solution can be found. There has already been progress towards finding that solution, all they need is more time. It's not perfect, but it's certainly a better plan than "Let the Phoenix do what it wants, and hope it doesn't want genocide, despite the fact that genocide is the only thing it does."
  • Oh the infinity Gems, you mean the things that Namor, Mr. Fantastic, Iron Man, Professor X, Doctor Strange, and Captain America all have in their possession? If they are so much more powerful than the Phoenix why are they using other (uncertain) means of trying to stop it? Why are Tony and Beast making special devices to contain/kill the phoenix respectively? If they haven't thought to use the infinity gems maybe it's because it wouldn't work.
    • Dear god, why would they use the Infinity Gems against the Phoenix? That's like defending yourself from a tiger by blowing up the universe. The Infinity Gems are infinitely powerful and extremely attractive and making their location known with something as flashy and public as destroying the Phoenix with them would tell everyone in the universe who's looking for them, "Hey, the Gems are here, come take them and become God Incarnate." The point was not that the Gems should be used against the Phoenix, because they absolutely should not be used for anything ever again and should remain hidden where no one will ever find them. The point was that the assumption that the Phoenix operates on a scale above anything the Avengers can face is a faulty assumption. The Avengers regularly handle things like the Infinity Gems. To the X-Men, sure, the Phoenix is an ungodly cosmic force the likes of which cannot ever be confronted or defeated, but to the Avengers, it's just another day at the office.
    • Sorry misunderstood what you said, (basically the infinity gems would be overkill). Even so, the Avengers are acting uncertain about their ability to stop the Phoenix. Not to mention in the most recent issue Tony said they need to essentially use the power of the Big Bang to stop it. Adding the fact that they said the secret Avengers are on a suicide mission. Maybe they should use the infinity gems (if they are strong enough). Really all they'd need is the mind gem, the reality gem, the space gem, and MAYBE the soul gem. The reality gem could solo and the space gem could by some time. IF the gems are really above the phoenix in power. Otherwise you can't say this is just another day's work for the Avengers.
    • Which is worse, one Phoenix host or five of them?
      • Honestly? One. Assuming in the absolute worst case scenario that none of the Phoenix's energy was dispersed in that attack, that all of it made it into the five hosts, we are still not dealing with five Phoenix hosts. The Phoenix only has x amount of power, regardless of how large x may be. What we have here is five people who are each 20% of a Phoenix host, and 20% of a Phoenix host is significantly more manageable than a fully empowered Phoenix host could ever be. Whereas before, the Phoenix's host may have been unstoppable, right now, simple application of divide and conquer could very easily win this battle.
      • To me this is an example of Nice Job Breaking It, Hero for the Avengers, illustrating that they really weren't that prepared to face off against the Phoenix. I think we can assume that none of the energy dissipated but was rather split into smaller "pieces" as so to speak and said pieces found a new host. I have a feeling that this particular event demonstrates that the Phoenix force cannot truly be destroyed. Ergo any action the Avengers took would be prolonging the inevitable. Now you have five sub-hosts to the Phoenix making the world a "better place" and preparing Hope. Not to mention the sub-hosts aren't pushovers either, particularly Colossus (Phoenix force+Juggernaut powers+Standard powers) and Magik (Phoenix force+mutant Dark Magic user). Granted Hope with the Phoenix force would have been a bigger threat.

• In an issue of Avengers: The Initiative, the leaders of Camp Hammond basically give up on The Boulder because he's incapable of losing weight or gaining muscle because he can't be worn out thanks to his powers. Thus, his invulnerability keeps him in the body of a slow, overweight weakling. However, in an earlier issue, technology that is capable of shutting off superpowers makes a prominent appearance. Why is it, then, that not one of the people on the base once considered using the ability to turn off superpowers to make Boulder no longer invincible long enough that they could get him into shape and then give him back his superpowers so that he'd be both invincible AND be in shape?
  • Because the administrators at Camp Hammond are morons.
    • Or he could be invulnerable regarding that too.
      • If that was so, it would have taken only two or three lines of dialogue, and one panel, to tell us this. The writer can thus be legitimately faulted for not addressing it.
        • Or better yet, just give him a gun. I have this same gripe with Mr. Invincible of the Great Lakes Avengers. Why does he insist on being utterly useless in a battle?
        • First of all, that's Mr. Immortal. Second of all, he did once use a gun. He shot himself in the foot.****** It was Skrull Pym who decided to keep the invulnerable guy out of the camp before it was invaded by Skrulls.** While the Initiative did have read access to power-nullifying SPIN technology, the change is permanent and they'd never be able to break his skin anyway. That aside, none of the staff members knew someone who nullified powers or could find one reasonably soon (hell, the only one I can think of is Leech, and I know none of the Initiative staff would be familiar with the Morlocks since none of them were X-Men).
    • And for that matter hunting down a power nullifier and spending what would probably be years and thousands of dollars training him would be a grossly poor allocation of resources considering the wealth of incoming recruits. They aren't going to be any worse for the wear if they're missing one guy.
      • And consider what Yellowjacket told Butterball/Boulder, that he has a bright future ahead of him in any one of dozens of dangerous professions (like search and rescue). The Initiative doesn't have too pressing a need for his talents, but some people do.
      • Butterball is in the Avengers Academy now, so I guess they found some way for him to become a superhero.
  • The power nullifying technology in question costs half a million dollars to produce. They can be forgiven for not wanting to drop half a million dollars on a single cadet, especially when that solution is supposed to be permanent and irreversable, rendering the entire purpose (turning his powers back on after he's trained up) pointless.

• Related to the power nullifier tech and Initiative. Armory was an early character who controlled an obscenely powerful alien Arm Cannon called the Tactigon. After a training accident, she's depowered and kept under watch while the Initiative tries to connect the tactigon to other test subjects. Despite the fact that every other person either cannot activate it or goes insane, nobody seems to consider reconnecting Armory to the device, even after World War Hulk and Secret Invasion, two situations where a weapon rated just below Thor's Hammer would have been damn useful.
  • It was probably considered at one point or another, but the entire point of the Initiative and the SHRA was accountability for superheroes; it would render the whole thing meaningless to bring her back. That, and when they accidentally kill people on their first day, you're only inviting Stamford 2.0 by keeping them around.
    • The only problem with that is that it was more the training staffs fault in that instance, since they clearly had no clue what Trauma's power was, but they forced Armory to stand next to him so he could use it. They never brought her back because that would be admitting they made a mistake.

• Why do the Avengers just sit back and let members enter the worst possible marriages. We've had Mantis & the Cotati so she could become an intergalactic brood mare. There was Ms. Marvel & Marcus, which was actually lampshaded. Lastly, they had no problem with Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne getting married, despite the fact that he'd just suffered a nervous breakdown and that she had no problem marrying him when he didn't know who he was (but she did).
  • They only work together for the good of Humanity - personally,they all hate each others' guts, so they let each other get into horrible relationships purely for the schadenfreude.

• Why the hell did the New Avengers recruit Wolverine (aside from the obvious, that is)? I mean, the excuse given in the story was that they needed someone who'll kill people. But at the time the team included Captain America and Iron Man - both of whom have killed when they deemed it absolutely necessary - as well as Spider-Woman, who an issue or so before had been boasting to Maria Hill about having a license to kill (which presumably you don't get given if you're not prepared to use it). What, exactly, does a guy notable for slaughtering anyone who even pisses him off mildly add to a supposedly iconic hero team?
  • I'll see your question and raise you one: why was Ares picked for the Mighty Avengers? He isn't just the god of War, he's the god of mindless slaughter; the god of people who actually enjoy waging a war; (for strategy and basic sanity, take a detour towards Athena). Wolverine could still be handwaved as a basically decent person who became a victim of circumstances twenty million different brainwashings and schemes, but for Ares, there is no in-story excuse I can think of.
    • This was a bit of a change from the typical Marvel depiction of Ares, particularly as he was seen in his own miniseries, all told. The issue with Wolverine is that he had always, always been depicted previously as pretty much wanting to kill Spider-Man for his sanctimonious goody-two-shoes attitude, and Spidey has hated him right back every step of the way. And Spider-Man is a notoriously poor team player to begin with. The entire team's make-up was extremely ill-advised; the real reason it happened is because Brian Michael Bendis had this idea since he was in sixth grade and nobody was going to tell him he couldn't write it.
    • "He's like a Wolverine AND a Thor". Or, to try better reasoning (not that it's hard) they wanted Hercules, but they couldn't get him due to his Anti Reg deally, so they got the next best thing in the field of Greco Roman gods who get hammered after work and beat dudes up.
    • Objection! Ares has as good strategy and tactic skills as Athena, with thousands years of first-hand experience.
  • There are times when killing someone is not absolutely necessary in the moment, but is likely to become absolutely necessary in the future. To put it another way: it's easy to kill Hitler. It's harder to see a tiny little baby crawl across the carpet, struggle to climb up onto its pudgy little feet, take its first unsure steps towards its mommy, and give her a kiss; and then be told that that baby will grow up to be Hitler and it's your job to kill it. Wolverine can kill baby Hitler.
    • Except the super-heroic solution to that is to kidnap the baby and bring it up to be a good person. They actually did that as a plot in Exiles (and as it turned out, it didn't work. So they killed teenage Hitler. But they did it very deliberately and in full knowledge, not with Wolverine-style casual stabbity).
    • In the end, Wolverine doesn't LIKE killing. He tries to avoid it.
      • Except in his own comic, where Depending on the Writer he'll often slaughter every mook in an enemy base, just to get them out of the way. Hells, a couple of years back there was a run of stories which were basically: Wolverine meets some ordinary, human, could-be-dealt-with-by-the-police, nasty criminals. Wolverine kills the nasty criminals. The End.

• Do the Avengers ever actually do any Avenging? Most of the plot relating to the present-day characters in Avengers/Invaders lampshades this--the New Avengers can't do any superhero work because every other fucking superhero team is trying to capture them, and the Mighty Avengers can't do any superhero work because they're one of the fucking teams.
  • And when they did try to do actual Avenging (killing the villain that killed billions of Kree) half the team went and tried to smack down the other half.
  • The name was chosen just for the sake of sounding cool. Their name never had anything to do with who they were.
  • You're using too narrow a definition. From Merriam-Webster: "to exact satisfaction for (a wrong) by punishing the wrongdoer." Are the Avengers bringing down wrong-doers? Then they're avenging.
  • The movie brings this up: Coulson's implied to be saying "they needed something to (avenge)", the bracketed part implied as he's Killed Mid-Sentence. Iron Man later brings him up before shooting Loki with a repulsor.

• Hank Pym, period. There comes a point in time when you have to say, 'Sorry, Buddy, we just can't rely on you'.
  • To be fair, his track record for going insane/evil and having experiments do the same is about on par with several of his other teammates. He just gets it brought up a lot more often because the writers think he makes a good chew toy.
    • Which other teammates? And are these teammates continually invited back into the lineup again and again, or are they people who eventually got the 'Don't call us, we'll call you'?
    • Iron Man, Hulk, Scarlet Witch, The Vision, Quicksilver, to name a few. Also, in the early years, the Swordsman, who kept been called to the Avengers despite his criminal career which he only gave up to be killed.
    • Yes on both counts, because it apparently either takes multiple accounts of doing stupid and/or amoral things before the Avengers finally give up on anyone, especially when insanity and/or mind control come into the picture, or a massive rewrite of reality (like in Scarlet Witch's case in Disassembled, and even then, the Avengers were the ones arguing for leniency, compared to some of the X-Men's insistence that she just be killed).
    • Hank Pym is responsible for Ultron, one the most dangerous Marvel villains - and is a wife beater with multiple personality disorder. In Marvel Universe, Peter Sanderson describes him as "...Reed Richards without the foils for his personality, a dry, unemotional scientist with little audience appeal." He should have been kicked out long ago.
      • No foil? What does he think the flighty, romantic Wasp was?
      • To be fair, Hank Pym was insane when he hit Jan and that was the only time he ever did it. Hank Pym is just a neurotic jerkass in the mainline-616 universe. Not a wifebeater.
      • Ah. They covered this. This may take a while... It's all based on low self esteem, exacerbated by a dead ex-wife and brain-envy of Reed Richards, Tony Stark and Ultron. And the guilt of building Ultron, causing him to get his first major bout of costumed crazy. His girlfriend took advantage of this to get him to marry her. This led to low self-esteem, which led to him hitting his wife, which led to more low self-esteem, which led to near suicide, which led to him retiring to the post of Mission Control for the West Coast spinoff team, which led to a stint with the main team again. Then his powers went wonky and he split into two people ("Yellowjacket", the fun-loving side who doesn't plan ahead and acts spontaneously... and hits wives, and "Goliath" who is, well, a dry, unemotional scientist), then he had the world's weirdest therapy session, in which his wife pointed out that he was basing his life around her and that's not cool. So he wised up, re-integrated himself into one person, gave his spot to someone else, and left for a bit. His current bout of low self-esteem is because he got replaced by an imposter who was actually better at his job than he was. He seems to be responding to this by taking his dead wife's costume and getting a new improved super-scientist MO.
    • Oh, for God's sake, now you're just demonstrating exactly why he's the image boy for Never Live It Down.
    • It is truly unforgivable for Hank Pym to be exactly as much of a wife-beater as Peter Parker and Reed Richards
    • Hank Pym is on the Avengers so they can keep an eye on him. If they kicked him out, he'd be even more dangerous, with far fewer restraints on his behavior, and no one looking over his shoulder when things go bad.

• Jarvis IS completely awesome, but in the end he's still human. Having an entire mansion where all the background chores is done only by one person is a bit cuckoo-bananas. Justice League of America has many stories showing the heroes doing general maintenance. I was going to suggest 'Have a staff with powers' but then the question of 'Why not bring them with when aliens invade Florida' arises. So I'm lost.
  • He was able to do all the work because he was a Skrull. Well probably not but Skrulls are the new/old/new again "Superboy-Prime Punched Time".
  • The Avengers Mansion has a staff. They appear on several occasions. Though Jarvis is also known to put whomever happens to be around at the moment to work, like the Guardians of the Galaxy during one of the Infinity crossovers.

• Grabby tentacles and stun lasers in the lawn as a security system? Weak.
  • Well, anything strong enough to stand a chance of stopping high-powered supervillains by itself could easily kill a normal human who sets it off for whatever reason (possibly by accident). Or used against your own team if a villain does manage to infiltrate your base or the computer goes berserk (or both). There are good reasons not to go overboard, especially when you're a card-carrying superhero with actual superpowers in your own right already...

• Someone PLEASE explain to me why both Avengers have Hawkeye, Wolverine, and Spider-man. I can kind of see why wolverine can be on both teams (since he's so used to being on EVERY TEAM EVER), but how can Hawkeye juggle Avenging, New Avenging, and mockingbird's counterterrorism group all at once? And how does Spider-man juggle both avengers and all the shit in his life?
  • Maybe Spiderman got cloned again.
  • Well, they answered your question, at least in regards to Hawkeye. He's NOT on the New Avengers team, just the main one and his team with Mockingbird. He was just hanging around with the New Avengers the first couple of issues of the new volume for old time's sake.
  • While it is a bit silly for people to be on multiple Avengers teams (why not just have one really big team if half the lineup of both teams is the same?) it doesn't necessarily require that much juggling. Bear in mind that each books comes out monthly, and a given issue often continues the story of the previous issue. Sometimes six months of real world time will cover only a few hours of comic book time. Since they rarely tell us how much time passes between issues that aren't part of the same storyline, it's entirely possible any given super team only has one or two missions per month.

• The Secret Avengers team line-up is just plain crazy. You not only have the most famous human on Earth in your "secret" team (Steve Rogers), you also have one of the, if not THE, most famous mutants on the planet (Beast) and the most famous human in the ENTIRE UNIVERSE (Nova). One of the other members (Valkyrie) refuses to actually do any infiltration and can only speak shakespearese. War Machine is easily recognisable, hardly stealthy and has become very famous in his last appearance before secret avengers: Making international news for several days as a war criminal. This leaves Black Widow, the most famous spy in the world, and Eric O'grady as the remaining members, which begs the question of a team of 'secret' avengers only containing two members fitting the description.
  • True. This lineup looks like a standard Avengers lineup, not a super secret spy team. Guys like Wolverine and Spider-Man would fit better, oddly enough.
  • Because each member brings something necessary to the team. Steve Rogers has excellent leadership abilities and is supremely skilled in combat; Beast is a genius at damn nigh everything and also a doctor, so he can treat injuries; Nova (though not in the is powerful and serves for interstellar missions; Valkyrie is basically the muscle, she's there to kick ass; War Machine is highly skilled in technological stuff and useful in long-range combat; Black Widow is a highly skilled spy and fighter. As for Eric O' Grady, well, your guess is as good as mine.
  • You forgot to list Moon Knight! On the other hand, so did the writers. It is, in general, one of the worst new mainstream series. Nova was removed from the team in issue ONE, Moon Knight has shown up in under one panel per issue since the start of the second arc, Eric O'Grady regularly disappears, War Machine shows up when it's convenient, and Valkyrie just makes no sense whatsoever. On the other hand, considering how horribly inept the writers are, this is almost a good thing (seriously. If one could Butcher Moon Knight any harder...)

• The Red Zone Series, about two years before Disassembled. The Big Bad is revealed to be The Red Skull who is posing as the U.S. Secretary Of Defense. The process in the US for getting a cabinet-level position is not a simple one. This isn't a guard position in a warehouse. The press, the opposition party, and the President's own party members in Congress can make the candidate's life a living hell for any number of reasons, and the scrutiny will be unrelenting. A Big Bad's usual methods, say murdering a nosey reporter or stubborn member of Congress, really only the Senate for confirmation can only slow the process down. Such candidates have been opposed historically on the most ridiculous basis imaginable. In short, the Big Bad's hiding place was not one you could sneak into, even with an astounding amount of people at your beck and call, especially when the RL Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was a known if controversial figure, whereas the text in Red Zone says no one knows much about Dell Rusk, the Skull's false name. Geoff Johns Did Not Do the Research.

• In an issue of The Initiative, one of the members was Crusader, a skrull. There was actually some backstory about his arrival on Earth and how he wanted to be a hero. He even defeated a really powerful villain in order to save his friends and home. And what does he get in reward? 3-D Man, one of the heroes, shoots him. There's absolutely no justification beyond the fact that he was a skrull. Nobody even seems upset over this. I know that the Marvel Universe really hates skrulls, but he was on the good side. What the hell?
  • It was shown shortly afterwards that several of the Initiative recruits were pissed off at 3-D Man for having shot Crusader like that, because they were open-minded enough to realize Crusader was one of the good guys despite being a skrull, since, you know, he just freaking saved them all. 3-D Man, of course, could not have given less of a crap and was basically a dick all throughout.
  • Also, it was in the middle of battle, during a skrull invasion where they tried to destroy most of the US. 3-D man never saw the crusader do his heroic thing IIRC, and thought he was just another infiltrator.

• Why hasn't the Punisher ever been on the Avengers?
  • . . .because he's a homicidal vigilante wanted by the police?
  • If you want to get technical, he was on Cap's team during Civil War, and I'm fairly sure that team is considered an incarnation of the Secret Avengers.
  • And during this time, it didn't go well between the Punisher and Captain America. Cap threw him out of the team not long after he came in.

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