gc8's The Avengers #23 - Once an Avenger review

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    Kang is Back for Revenge Against a Bunch of People He's Never Met

    One of the lesser issues of early The Avengers comics. When Captain America quits the team, the group has been whittled down to just Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. Most would hardly call that an Avengers team, but it's good enough for our old friend Kang (you remember the guy from the far future who wears ladies' thigh-high boots and gimp mask who we last saw in The Avengers #8). Never mind that none of these three were even in the Avengers when he last faced them, Kang decides the team is weak and it's time for him to get his revenge.

    Kang creates a fake floor on top of the Avengers Mansion, which the Avengers are dumb enough to just walk into. Then he whisks the team off to the far future where he attacks them with a series of pseudoscientific devices, all for the benefit of the Princess Ravonna who he's trying to impress so she'll agree to marry him.

    Frankly the writing here is pretty lazy. Kang talks in grandiose statements that are even cliche for a supervillain. The future is less futuristic or interesting than the Flash Gordon serials of decades before; and Kang doing all this to impress a girl, who he's already coercing into matrimony anyway, is almost laughable. The thing is Stan Lee knows his writing here is lazy. At one point Hawkeye even says to Kang, 'you know what always happens to the wicked villain that tries to marry the old king's daughter', and in another panel the caption box reads, '(You can write your own caption for this one! Any reader who can't guess what's happening just isn't a true Marvelite)'.

    On an up note, the art by Don Heck and John Romita is some of the best looking art in The Avengers so far. But that alone cannot save the comic from being drearily average in most respects.

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