Friggin magnets, how do they work?

Hi, Everyone

For the entire month of October “True Believers”  has been focused on Black Widow adjacent issues which will tie in to the upcoming MCU Film coming out in May 2021. This week the comics are Avengers #111, #196 and Champions #7 Now I am not really a fan of the character, haven’t read that many of her comics and the whole cold-war spy thing is not my favorite genre, but suprisingly that really doesn’t matter with this week’s issues as they don’t really have that much to do with Black Widow.

This is actually kind of a trend with True Believers! Often the issues reprinted have only loose connections to the character they are supposed to be tied into. Though in  the case of this week’s issues, part of that is because this is the third batch of True Believer comics released under the True Believers label this month and the earlier issues covered a bunch of key character moments.

The formula for how I am going to cover these issues is that I will provide a brief synopsis and then give my opinions and a grade afterward. 

Avengers #111- Written by Steve Engelhardt and Drawn by Don Heck-May 1973

In the issue previous to this, Magneto had used mind control to gain power over the X-men and most of the Avengers and the surviving members, Black Panther, Thor and the Vision must fight back before Magneto completes his dastardly plan to hijack some nukes. 

The three remaining avengers Black Panther, Thor and the Vision recognizing the need for more numbers recruit Daredevil and Black Widow  and after some love triangle nonsense between Black Widow, Daredevil and Hawkeye, they attack Magneto’s base and defeat him, with Black Widow deciding to break up with Daredevil and join the Avengers.

Honestly, kind of Mediocre. I’m not the biggest fan of what I’ve read of  Engelhardt’s run on the Avengers, but at least it’s usually so far out there, that it’s pretty interesting, but this is pretty meh overall. The same can be said about the art. I like a lot of Don Heck’s Silver Age stuff but this isn’t his best work. Overall, though the main thing this issue has in its favour is its historical significance. 

 2/4

Avengers #196- Written by David Michelene and Drawn by George Perez – Cover date June 1980

This issue doesn’t have Black Widow in it all, instead being the first full appearance of Task Master. The story is fairly simple. It begins with Wasp, Ant-Man and Yellow Jacket captured by this mysterious new villain Task Master after investigating his organization, while the rest of the Avengers (Beast, Miss Marvel, Jocasta, Iron Man, Vision, Wonder Man and Captain America) prepare to make their assault and rescue him. After a brief bit of monologuing by Task Master the Avengers break in and after initially facing some stiff resistance by Taskmaster, they defeat him and he flees.

 As I said before the story is simple but it works, it works a lot! There are two main reasons for this. First, Taskmaster is just a cool villain. His whole gimmick is that he has photographic reflexes, wherein he only has to see something once in order to imitate it. As a result of this by watching the Avengers on TV he has learned to use their own techniques against them. While this is not exactly a new villain archetype (Amazo being the most obvious predecessor) it’s cool as hell and makes for some good fights.

What makes him even more compelling is that he has a bit of the ole’ genre awareness, he knows that the success rate for supervillains in the Marvel Universe is not exactly stellar and so he has specialized in training mooks and goons for other baddies, more low key, but still very profitable.

But honestly, the most compelling thing about Task Master is that he just looks cool as hell, with a striking blue, white, orange, colour scheme, a sort of mummified looking skull mask and a whole bunch of toys. He is the kind of character you just want to buy an action figure of.

 This brings us to the other reason this comic works, George Perez’s artwork is great. I’m honestly not the biggest fan of Perez’s work (I like him, but I don’t think he is one of the all time greats like a lot of people do), but this is damn good. As mentioned before his design for Task Master is stellar, he has his usual gift for doing complicated battle scenes and there are just some striking panel designs.

Overall 3.5/4

Champions #7- Written by Tony Isabella and Drawn by George Tuska-August 1976

As this is the first installment of this series on the blog, I can’t really say that installment is running long, but I am going to make it quick anyway. The Champions are not a team I am even remotely familiar with and I really don’t have that much familiarity with any of it’s members which include Hercules, Black Widow, Angel, Ghost Rider and Ice Man. Combine that with the fact that the plot for this is kind of convoluted and it is no surprise that it didn’t really leave much of an impact at all. Which is a shame, because I think this may actually be a better issue than I am giving it credit for, but I can’t in all honesty say that I liked it at all. The only thing worth adding is that I did like the art, I am not sure how good it is on a objective level, but it has a very rough hewn look with a lot of heavy inking that I really enjoyed.

2/4- The weird thing is that even though I enjoyed this less than Avengers #111, I strongly suspect that this is a better comic, I would just need to do some more background reading. So I’m just going to rate it the same.

Anyway, I hope all of you enjoyed this and would appreciate any feedback.

Next week’s issues are “True Believers: Black Widow & The Thing #1” (Marvel Two-in-One #10) and “True Believers:Black Widow-Yelena Belova”(Black Widow (1999) #1). The latter is the Marvel Knights series I think? I plan to have the next entry out on either Friday or Saturday