Patricia highsmash
The Wild Ride of the Avengers Unplugged
by Travis Hedge Coke

I don’t know of another Marvel comic as free as Unplugged avengers. A series of six inexpensive issues from the late 1990s, Unplugged avengers was instantly infamous for his misattributed dialogue, bizarre artistic choices, patchy backstories, misinterpretations of left field, and Black Widow referring to go-go dancers at a club as “rocking Amadeus.”

The series featured heavy hitting villains, almost every issue contributed to the long-term continuity in surprising ways, from the marriage of Titania and Crusher Creel to Monica Rambeau fighting with Captain Mar-Vell’s son for the Captain Marvel name. . The themes were heavy, the intensity was high, and each number was superfluous and bouncy, so why is it so disappointing?

Pencils by MC Wyman, written primarily by Glenn Herdling, supported by a wide variety (and varying quality) of talent, Unplugged avengers would feature: a massively jacked Johnny Storm, who in most cases is slender and at best, twink; a Giant-Man who, while being a genius and a veteran superhero, was slow-witted, naive, and did not understand gravity; art and dialogue that do not corroborate; a cohesive mix of unusual information just enough to make the matter still confusing to anyone who isn’t versed in dozens of related stories, and if they are, they’ll just be baffled.

Even at ninety-nine hundred Americans, you could not help but be disappointed by these comics, and yet, at the same time, approached with good humor and detachment they are all funny as hell . These comics are absurd and circle around like a carnival merry-go-round cradling you in front of plywood murals and deceptive mirrors. Some comics feel like the writer plotted them while playing with figurines, and I suspect some comics are really written that way, but Unplugged avengers comes closer than any comic book to the sensibility of a child who, knowing only parts of a character’s story or abilities, just does the rest on the playing field with veracity and clarity determination so that other children do not find out that everything is made up.

Wyman’s exaggerated forms, wild layouts and emphasis on an extremely vibrant male gaze reinforce the absurdity, giving us a human vision or torch that exists in deadpan, straightforward face. Megaton man meets Ren and Stimpy universe.

Anyone who thinks I’m laughing at Herdling and Wyman, I’m not. They are both talented and intelligent and there is a story here waiting to be told. Neither is responsible for, say, a misallocated dialogue, but there is so much wrong, on every page, consistently, so awkward or absurd or random or oddly truncated or abbreviated that we can be assured something happened, we just don’t know what.

What prompts a comic to turn a kitten into a teddy bear, one child into another, on the same page of adjoining panels?

A likely stumbling block is that the stories seem to be twisted on their own, in that bizarre, horny teenage indulgence that the comics were and are known for. The first issue spends a considerable amount of time with psychiatrist-turned-supervillain Moonstone, who superhumanly hits Black Widow in the face without even causing a shrug or shiver, being disturbed by Widow, ending in the line of Giant-Man, “Not too shabby, considering Moonstone is a master psychologist herself.”

It’s an awkward line, giving us no information except to point out that the writer / creative team knows this twist has been spiritual or at least at the center of their history. Is it self-congratulation or is it to get kids to read comics? I lean for the latter.

The whole race of Unplugged avengers will leave you wondering how or why they made these comics. Whether by accident or circumstance. Sexism is unfortunately an integral part of some comics in all eras of superhero comics, although it is reaching lower echelons for its time and Marvel. It is to highlight that Fantastic strength around the same time, managed to keep the buttocks of his female characters completely uncovered via dental floss stockings or skirts that look like belts, as this comic sometimes indulges, and it has been reported that there was edicts, in particular with comics intended for young people, to comply with an imaginary demography.

Issue # 5 features the bizarre line of being a comic about rape, abuse, domestic violence, and misogyny, and being a comic about a young white man just belittling his mother and fighting a black woman who has suffered a brainwashing that culminates in Captain Marvel renouncing his superhero name. on the vague basis that doing so is empowering.

How to write a comic about rape for 15 years and under? Rape and abuse are coded as forced slobbering kisses, forced braiding of hair, while women are first built with cleavage and lingerie and everything else after the fact.

In issue 3, a comic book centered around a club with male go-go dancers serving pizza (pretending to be the only one, which seems odd), has Black Widow’s entire bare butt in sight for us readers, while the go-go dancers are so dressed up that we’re wearing a superhero costume from toes to throat, covering all limbs, torso, complete with gloves.

Choices have been made.

While this may all have been a catch for some of Image’s larger audience, and Image – a rival Marvel publisher if you walked around here without that knowledge, and welcome – some of Image’s founders, like Jim. Lee, at least tried to titillate their eroticism. Jim Lee tried to draw sexy men, when they were sexy, not just tall, powerful men surrounded by T&A objectification.

Reading Unplugged avengers from a critical point of view, criticism also turns almost immediately to the interior of the critic. Where are your limits? What are your gauges? Why can I be an enthusiastic fan of Mirka Andolfo or Matt Baker, yet bothered by MC Wyman in this comic? Why am I bothered but not offended or concerned? I know these comics were marketed to kids or teens, and to those who probably couldn’t afford the increasing price per issue of what were nominally more serious comic book endeavors. Wyman and the writers are definitely trying to make each of these comics to count. They try to give more content, more quality per comic than the lower price can imply. I am not ethically or aesthetically opposed to a bare background in a comic book. I’m not riding on the characters drawn on the model, so that their size or their muscles or their characterization or their dialogue tics are rigid and unified like many comic book fans can be.

The cover of the Titania & Creel wedding number, # 4, has She-Hulk in a bustier with a bow tie and disconnected cuffs that feature Playboy bunny cufflinks. Everyone wears their suits except Creel in a white tuxedo and high heeled Titania boots which are also her stockings and plenty of thigh highs on display as she threatens her husband to be with a wooden rolling pin , as do all brides. John Statema replaced the pencils in this issue and he brings a whole new twist to the title. In the pages, we have a Mr. Hyde wearing an A tie for anarchy, the nebulous Molecule Man wearing an “I hate everyone” badge and picking his nose at a wedding ceremony, and when She- Hulk gets beat up immediately, I mean her hair got tousled and it ripped her skirt into straps that hung from her waist.

When Volcana, the bride’s best friend, chooses a random Avengers fight, she says she loves her Avengers, “extra crisp” and tries to burn Crystal, who replies, “You don’t mean to lick you the fingers is good? “

Yes, folks, if you’ve been dying for a comic book where Molecule Man cures her nose and Crystal of the Inhumans says she licks her fingers well, this 99-cent beauty is for you!

All in all, the actual wedding or married characters about four and a half pages of the story, the rest a selection of characters only achievable by a simple nerd callback from the comic book or by randomly flipping through the numbers in the comic book. Official Marvel Universe Manual.

Unplugged avengers is neither trivial nor inconsequential. In terms of continuity, in terms of the social and psychological effects they would have on both readers and the overall vibe of their era of superhero comics is, if not measurable, palpable. Display the warped figures as blankets on a shelf of similar blankets, seeing some of these traits stand out stronger and more immediately, perhaps, than in many other Marvel superhero comics in those same months. , has a psychic and atmospheric effect. .

But, like the similar distortions in Megaton man Where Red & Stimpy, they can feel harmless, especially if we were young at the time of release. The atmosphere they help create feels elevated in dense smog, as the air should be. If a factory expels smoke banks at night for twenty or forty years, after a while people remember it as a simple change in the weather and even stop associating the faint fogs or yellow haze with industrialization. .

And, the excitement of the entertainment, the foolishness of the presentation, can always foster a sense of harmlessness, of the impossibility of being threatening. There’s something new in every issue of Unplugged avengers. These are comics that one cannot fully anticipate, because of their absurdity, their novelty, the unusual interpretation of the characterization, the discontinuity between the image and the scene, the dialogue and the person. .

New relationships and dynamics are often welcome, and it’s fun to see Black Widow take out Crystal for a night or Hank Pym, as Giant-Man, attempting to guide teenage alien Deathcry as she tries to ‘be more adult than adults. and avoid any real work. Innovative uses of powers and abilities would be welcome. Crystal, who has control over the basics, now being able to use the to transform party dresses into superhero costumes and fancy weapons isn’t much of a new or innovative use of her powers, however. , it is only a convenience of intrigue which makes no sense.

The fights are enormous and only end in inconsistencies. The Avengers can spend eighteen pages trying to strike a skeletal nightmare that assassinates the suicidal or the unlucky, but once they beat him, they simply let him ride a magical horse and fly away, because too bad.

A wedding party assaults our heroes, causing property damage, hitting people, but too bad.

A supervillain they chase dies because of their thoughtless actions, but too bad.

You have to laugh.