Avengers 219

Today I was a bit at a loss as to what to do. My time feels very limited as to what I can devote to this blog/YouTube channel as well as learn how to try to make a few dollars off of it.

I had plenty of ideas when I woke up this morning but nothing appeared in my mind as that shining diamond of light to actually take action on.

After doing some of my daily chores, I thought I might go over the Planet Hulk Omnibus I made a video about the other day, but that didn't feel quite right. Partly because I have a few chapters left to read in Age of Apocalypse and partly because I wanted to look into some of the more business aspects of being a YouTuber.

At any rate, in between my chores and deciding what to do with the free time I had, grabbed the Planet Hulk and pickup up some of the Marvel comics from that big box of comics I opened in my first video on this channel and I picked out the oldest Avengers comic in the box, Avengers 219.

I chose this issue for a number of reasons, the biggest one being is I was very actively reading comics at the time, which I judged to be the early 1980s based on the cover price and the shape of certain things on the cover.

I remember reading Avengers at some point so I approached the video from the POV that I might have actually read it back in the day. When that didn't turn out to be the case, I stopped the video, now confident in my ability to edit two videos together thanks to my iPhone app which is called Perfect Video. I have no idea of what makes good video editing software except that this one is very easy to use for what I have used it for so far. Nothing fancy just either putting images or two separate videos together.

At the time of this comic, which was written by a personal hero of mine, Jim Shooter, Janet van Dyne aka The Wasp was the leader of the Avengers. Janet was the leader of the Avengers for a good number of years as, she was the leader for when I was reading and then when I dipped out due to joining the army, she was still the leader in Secret Wars 1984.  Avengers 219 came out in 1982 so she was the leader of the Avengers from some point prior to this to at least 1985.

What happens in this issue is very similar to what will happen to many Marvel heroes a few years later, they will feel an impulse to head to a certain geographic location where some sort of transport is waiting for them.

What I found most humorous in this particular issue is Janet was at the hair dressers at the time in her regular everyday fashionable clothing and when the impulse to leave is felt, she shrinks down to the Wasp and is totally naked, except she hangs onto her handbag which, fortunately, has a handkerchief she can cover up with. To me now, this was brilliant! Could it even happen today?

While you never actually see any nudity, there is something both titillating (there's a word that has almost lost any relevance in the Internet age), humorous, and embarrassing. Janet remarks on how she wished she had worn some clothing with unstable molecules that would shrink with her. What is so brilliant about his, and how it is handled in the story is, yes, what happens when a shapeshifting superhero isn't wearing the proper costume? Do we ever see Reed Richards without his costume? I know we see The Thing wearing civilian clothing in the lead up to Secret Wars 1984 but I cannot thing of very many times where heroes transform and they are left buck naked! The Hulk always has his amazing purple pants (which I, in my childish imagination, always put off as a result of the gamma radiation transforming whatever the Hulk was wearing into a purple molecularly unstable sort of state, especially if he was wearing denim).

At any rate, at the core of Avengers 219 is the question of manipulation. The main villain isn't revealed until the end even though we can guess that it is Moondragon long before she is revealed to be. But that is where the issue ends. We don't know what her motivation for taking over a planet is. In spite of violating so many being's free will in this issue she may have a very good reason for doing so. In fact she states as much as she mind controls Thor to be her lover.

This issue is very good and contains the Wasp, Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man on the Avengers, we get a very sweet Jarvis cameo. And then we get Drax the Destroyer, who is quite a different version that in the current and exception Guardians of the Galaxy films and his daughter, whom most filmgoers will not expect at all, Moondragon.

The whole story is great fun, Janet's character is particularly developed and through her character Captain America is fairly well defined.  Both Thor and Tony Stark/Iron Man are allowed to shine but at the heart, this is a Janet van Dyne/Wasp story. Even though she faces the most humiliation, she is both the most heroic, vulnerable,  and most fully fleshed out characters in this book.

I highly recommend this book and will be looking for Avengers 220 and the conclusion of this story.