5. The Fall of Hank Pym

Avengers # 211-230
Writers : Jim Shooter plus others
Artists- 8 in all


When I started to read comics back in the late 60’s , My team and my heroes were the original Avengers. The founding 5 were all great to me but I always had an attachment to Giant-man/ Hank Pym. I never saw him as weak or inferior, I saw him as one of the equal members of the assemblers and a powerhouse in his own right. Add to that, his scientific knowledge and the great storylines that he was a part of, and I always enjoyed seeing him in the book. Along comes issue #211 the return of Jim Shooter to the book and things are about to change.
That book is a recruitment drive book of which the Avengers have from time to time and it was a fun book weeding out the heroes that wanted to stay and leave. When the dust clears ,the founding 5 plus Tigra are left. There’s a seemingly throw away line in that issue where Hank says that his research is going nowhere. This will loom large in the following issues.



Starting with the next issue we see that Hank is a troubled man that is angry and has resentment. This is a new one for me. On several occasions he lashes out to the others about his place in the team and the respect he’s not getting. It Turns out he feels inferior and has something to prove, but it goes all wrong when he attacks an opponent that stopped fighting , while in his first mission back, and reignites the conflict. The following issue has him undergoing a court marshal for those events but , in his paranoia, he feels he’s going to be kicked out of the team and he builds a robot to attack them during the hearing so he could save the day. Jan finds out what he’s planning and tries to stop him and then what happens next is the slap heard around the world.




Of course the hearing goes badly as a unhinged Pym raves like a nutjob and when the Avengers see that Jan has been given a black eye, he unleashes the robot. No one is able to subdue the adamantium creature and even Hank is blacking out from the onslaught until Jan saves them all by hitting the off switch which was built into the robot. A disgraced Pym leaves and thus starts the nightmare for poor Hank. Jan divorces him, He’s jailed for stupidly trusting a former villain and all the while, the rest of the Avengers are heart broken and don’t really know what to do.



Despite this run having a revolving door of creative teams, I couldn’t wait for the next months issues. From June 1981 to January 1983 these were the people that worked on the title:

Writers- Jim Shooter, Steve Grant, Dave Micheline, Alan Zelentz, Roger Stern.

Artists- Gene Colan, Alan Kupperberg, Bob Hall, Alan Weiss, Don Perlin, Greg Laroque, Sal Buscema, Alan Milgrom. There were an army of inkers but the names that I mostly saw in the credits were Dan Green, Brett Breeding and Joe Sinnott.

I dare say that most of the picks in this years 100 best sagas have great creative teams that stayed on for the entire run, so despite the army of people on this story, I loved it and still seek it out every few years.

Lucky in Love Book 1: A Poor Man's History

Script by George Chieffet
Art by Stephen DeStefano



While I don't know anything about George L. Chieffet this bio in the book states he mostly is a poet), DeStefano is one of my favorite aftists, one whom I collect every single piece of comics I can lay my hands on, a good chunk of his work being published by DC within their cartoon books publications. Him and Bill Wray (another favorite) are frequent collaborators, all sharing a love of the animation craft rarely seen since the first couple of Ren & Stimpy seasons, to which they collaborated if memory serves right.
So when Fantagraphics announced this book, I was extatic! You could say that his style stands right at the crossroads of Harvey Kurtzman and Tezuka, which for me is a dream come true!

The story follows the life of Lucky throughout three decisive times of his life, with war often being in the background. It's a bittersweat tale, iften taking dark turns, but it's always highly entertaining. A volume 2 was supposed to happen, but I guess that after a decade of silence or so, I must have been one of the few readers who cared about this. As sad as that is, this volume remains to be cherished years after years, so I hope some of you like it too.






Hence the title, the book contains some nudity and sexual acts (mostly non explicit felatio), and it's a shame I can't show some exemple here, since those pages are probably the most stunning. Anyhow, I hope you'll enjoy this.

I'm familiar with DeStefano but not this work.  It looks really good ! 

The fact this is now 10 years old and eligible boggles my mind and makes me feel even older than I usually do. I didn't even think of it because I had no notion it had been 10 years since it came out. Ugh.

-M

5 Sandman
by Neil Gaiman & friends
Sandman #1-75 and some tie-ins



“The Lord of Dreams learns that one must change or die, and makes his decision.”

It's a story about change. It's a story about dreams. Including the dreams of what you think you want.

"But he did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize, their heart's desire, their dream... But the price of getting what you want, is getting what you once wanted."

And it's a story about stories.

The story told in microcosm can be found in issue #19, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", in which Shakespeare performs his play before the fair folk on whose stories it is based.

The other stand-out story, which again jumps straight to the heart of the themes of the book, is issue #50, "Ramadan", in which the Sultan of Baghdad realizes that he is presiding over the greatest era of his kingdom, and that all things must change.

But is it actually his? I seem to have already read those sentences


Edit : oops, yes actual Gaiman quotes, but I'm sure the the rest is his.