15 hour Avengers Party.

The idea was simple.  For twenty American dollars plus tax apiece, Mr. So and I would partake of fifteen hours of comic book movies.  The offer stood as Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America, and finally, at midnight, the long-anticipated Avengers (in 3D), written and directed by this summer's cinema success story, Joss Whedon.

I got this swag.

When the first film (Iron Man) ends, a sweaty female attendant with a broken voice informs the theater that parking will only be validated for four hours.  A mild panic rises in the crowd when a rumor passes around that the show is going to exclude The Avengers itself. A quick check on the cell phone confirms the film is indeed playing.  Calm returns.

The crowd consists of much as you might expect: largely male population, with standard skinny bespectacled nerds, geeks that choose to wear their Captain America hoodies or thrift-store condition Avengers t-shirts (thus being the guy at the concert that's wearing the t-shirt of the band that's playing at the concert), a handful of stoner stereotypes, dorks that bred and brought their precocious children, and of course, samples of America's grossly obese, providing the sour milk fat flesh fold smell that over the course of the day sinks into the theater like scared-skunk stink.  Swag in the form of buttons and posters are passed out.

We're all sold on it.

What's not to like?

Admittedly, the only movies of the bunch that I go into the event having already seen are the Iron Man films, due in one part due to an odd affection for Jon Favreau, in another part because of an active attempt to avoid the genre of superheroes as much as humanly possible.  So often one gets burned. Ask anyone that has ever seen Spider Man 3.  In the cocaine-fueled executive rage for commercial success, many comic book adaptations could easily be viewed as escapism done wrong, a less refined, mostly immature attempt at pandering to the lowest common denominator, resulting in critical flip-floppers.

Most of all what I never enjoyed was the preening sense of inevitability concerning militarism that the Marvel franchise seems to endorse in each film it makes, while simultaneously (and only sometimes) pretending it does the opposite.

The Edward Norton version of Hulk doubles down on the concept of military run amok to the point of absurdity, blowing up a college campus with no accountability, while the Thor movie mythologizes it with a sanitized and shiny Asgard run by Anthony Hopkin's master Kenneth Branaugh (and in this you could extrapolate Thor being the brutish America proxy, Loki being the snotty British Gog, and the entire Middle East as a frosted mirror-glass land of the Frost Giants).

This uneasy feeling of being sold a toy of the military industrial complex is reinforced as we are treated to the same opening sequence of commercials six times at the event.  An ad for the Navy, an ad for the Navy-sponsored boardgame-turned-film Battleship, an ad for the same film, this time sponsored by Coke Zero, an ad for the Marines, an ad for the Hatfields vs. the McCoys on TNT (Kevin Costner in a bloodfeud), an ad for the new remake of Dallas (the words BLOOD and FEUD and BATTLEGROUND flash on the screen, almost subliminal), then a review of each preview, plus an oddly racist Ultrabook ad.  All of that, six times over.

Imagine an army of Purple Hulks.

So the twelve hours and five movies pass, with twenty minute breaks between films, and we devour the food we snuck in, sip on caffeinated beverages loaded with vitamin B and Guarna and Taurine, and I can feel myself becoming accustomed to the changing eye-patches of Nick Fury in each post-credits teaser, and I can see that the people involved are attempting to make something more than a two hour long advertisement for the military industrial complex, but at the end of the day, they're stuck in a system they never named, but were made by, much as in the Captain America movie, where after being dosed as a super-soldier, he spends the first stretch of his career spinning propaganda on the newsies.

When a true subliminal flashes after the word "compassion" at a certain point (Thor, I believe), I recall the recent Star Trek remake, where James T. Kirk's older father-proxy tries to convince him to join Star Fleet after a bar fight. I flash across the crass, commercialized, and crypto-fascist overtones of 300 and the Transformers franchise.  Michael Bay conditioning pods.  Though certain elements of Captain America call to mind the best elements of Star Wars as well as the quality of film making from the era it depicts.  Captain America is the best, most refined of the Marvel movies leading into The Avengers.

About midway through The Avengers, when the S.H.I.E.L.D Hellicarrier raises out of the ocean, I find myself compelled to join the Navy, for some reason.

I also find myself cheering with the crowd around me.

The Avengers, it should be said, calls forth all the elements of a comic book superhero team, and paces them in an order that should be just complex enough to satisfy critics and just simplistic enough to appease brohams.  It's a crowd pleaser. It will break box-office barriers.  I love comics. I know comics.  My conscious attempts at avoiding comic book movies came after a dissatisfaction borne out of constant disappointment.

The Avengers gets it right, in a big way.

[Perhaps that lengthy an exposure to such materials was never intended for public consumption. Perhaps I have overdosed.  I need to start a blood feud, right after I join the Navy.]

I'll admit, all of my resistances were worn down to some degree in the twelve hours leading up to The Avengers, but this is a first rate A+ film for being a comedy, an action movie, and a superhero movie that puts all others to shame.

The Tesseract (which sounds better than Cosmic Cube, perhaps) is our movie's objective correlative, first introduced in Captain America, a limitless power source, and a source of interest for the villain Loki and his unnamed benefactor Thanos (who we only see in the first of two post-credits scenes).

The entire film, I wanted Samuel L. Jackson, playing Nick Fury, to start screaming a litany of curse words, out of nowhere.  SHIELD Agent Phil Coulson (calling to mind Charles Colson) played by Clark Gregg, is the thread running from Iron Man through the rest of the films and on up into The Avengers, where he plays the part of Captain America's biggest fan and, later on, "the avenged".  Scarlett Johansson manages to explain why Black Widow is essential to the team dynamic by being the world's best interrogator.  Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye gets only a few spots to shine in the film, but he uses them effectively.  Bruce Banner is played for the first time by Mark Ruffalo, who does a bang-up job playing the eccentric gamma-irradiated scientist.  Better by far than any previous actor that filled the role, if you want to come down to it.  Tom Hiddleston is the core of the movie as Loki, and in the final analysis is one of the best actors in the film.  Something about Chris Hemsworth as Thor strikes me as a little too simple. Maybe that's the point. He has a good laugh for Thor, it's just that he walks with just the wrong degree of swagger to pull off "god of thunder", in my humble opinion.  Chris Evans, on the other hand, manages to sell Captain America's soldier boy appeal effortlessly, and of course, Robert Downey Jr. embodies Tony Stark to the extent that at certain points it doesn't feel like he's bothered to read the script, he's just channeling a genius billionaire philanthropist from a parallel reality.

Part of what can tell you how good a band is is how well the audience responds to their performance. By that measure, and given that the entire theater withstood fifteen hours of cinema for The Avengers, the movie is a rousing success. Big laughs from the audience.  Spontaneous applause. Bigger action.

Joss Whedon has proven something great about himself this summer.  He's the current nerd king of Hollywood, and we shall all bask in his light until the cycle of cinema degenerates again, in a new flashier more gimmicky Tour de France.

I want to give him a firm handshake for a job well done, right after I sign up for basic training.

Second Impressions of Avengers vs. X-Men

Now that the first optic blast has been fired and the first American-flag-shield-related concussion has been dealt, we can explore and critique and tweak the orientation of Marvel Comic's most recent "company-wide" crossover, Avengers vs. X-Men.

Something tells me this will end up being two pages of characters for each team.

It starts, as with any good hero vs. hero brawl, with a differing of opinions and a misunderstanding. The so-called mutant messiah Hope has manifested the Phoenix force at the same time as it seems the firebird itself is flying directly to Earth, laying waste to planet after planet along the way.  Captain America and the Avengers wish to take Hope into protective custody, and show up on the shores of mutantkind's Utopia to take her.  Cyclops does not react well to this. Cyclops sends a previously written and sternly worded email to the world via Val Cooper when everything starts to go down.

Did you know that Magneto has the ability to count millions of metal thingies in a split second? Me neither. 

The initial fight is broken up between the main event book and several other titles.  We see Magneto fighting Iron Man (not the foregone conclusion you may think, since Tony Stark's superpower is cash mixed with genius) the everlovin' Benjamin J. Grimm, the Thing, squares off against Namor (hasn't happened in years, actually).  After a magnetic fastball special with Colossus, a Red Hulk oriented fight ensues. When Wolverine and Spiderman infiltrate Utopia to nab/kill Hope, she goes all Phoenix voice on them, flash-fries Wolverine like he's a chump, and leaves, running across the water of San Francisco Bay.  Precisely 3:45 PM Eastern Standard Time.

They'll place bets on the Planet Sin until it heads their way.

Overall the series so far ranges comfortably from writer to writer. At a certain point little factoids will spring up. Some annoying, others less so, and some actually amusing. The way it plays out calls to mind a certain cross-company crossover event from my younger days reading comics.  DC vs. Marvel Comics, headed by Ron Marz and Peter David, artwork from Dan Jurgens and Claudio Castellini.

Old school like Aztecs but new in other aspects.

I'd estimate that the younger generation of writers and artists were similarly impacted by that series, which was interactive insofar as you could vote for the characters to win, similar in some respects to DC's hotline to determine whether or not the Joker kills Jason Todd, the second Robin.  As in that series, the various legends of Marvel Comics Universe, the Avengers, the X-Men, going against one another, that can be a problem, logistically.  As writers and editors on such a title, you have to play it relatively safe with the characters, they're money makers more and more, but you also don't want to treat them with kid gloves and openly pander to audiences or whatever expectations have been thrown around.  The big blockbuster movie event this summer, at this point, is going to be The Avengers. So in this concurrent series where that movie's characters are implicated in the title, who do you really think is going to win? Or is there actually going to be a winner, officially?  The answers to these questions lie in the way that the different group "money pots" are interacted with on a regular basis.  Avengers and X-related titles both hold the lion's share of titles in Marvel, especially considering how many once-solo characters are now one one or in some cases many teams.

Funny how planetary histories are often only told to narrate their fiery destruction.

The Avengers have been dominating center stage since the Civil War, the power-death knell of most mutants coming in House of M, and their overall relevance, outside of Wolverine, being downgraded.  In the movie world, the rights to the X-Men films is still being held outside of Disney, the absorbing entity, the Tron Mickey, hence the stream of movies culminating in Joss Whedon's The Avengers.  So even the movie universe, contracts and negotiations, are reflected in the focus of the comic universe.  The Avengers will win the battle.  Iron Man left Magneto in space.  Thing beat Namor down.  Colossus demanded Red Hulk smash him when he nearly lost control of his "Juggernaut persona".  The most powerful member of the Avengers, Thor, is fighting a giant bird made of fire in space. Actually, the Secret Avengers contend with not just the Phoenix but are forced to set down onto Hala, home of the Kree, and deal with a Phoenix-resurrected Captain Marvel.

Asgardian God vs. Primal Fiery Force or: "Thor, c'mon. Seriously? No way."

Unless the revelation of the Phoenix that results in the giant golden Celestial standing in San Francisco's parks district finally, after long last, doing something, we can expect that Cyclops may, shock, discover he is right and wrong, that maybe the whole world is not to be destroyed, or mutantkind saved, but perhaps the constant resurrections of characters will finally end! Remember, the Phoenix is the force of Life and Death fused.  This means someone has to die, and guess what? It's not going to be an Avenger this time. Imagine a scorched Cyclops being cradled in Wolverine's arms, replayed in flashbacks for decades to come.  Picture Hope sacrificing herself to restart the mutant gene via the Phoenix Force.  Perhaps the Celestial, guarding the Celestial egg that Earth houses, fights the Phoenix. Or maybe that's only a thing in the Earth X universe, designate 9997.

Now, all the mutants not housed in Wolverine's school (Cyclops will visit there next issue of Wolverine and the X-Men) will be facing not just the Avengers, but also SHIELD and the US Military.  Sentinels? No.  Sentinels are terrorist weapons (and the most hackneyed X-plot in existence), and the terrorists of the Marvel Universe are so often children lately it's somewhat disturbing. The all-tween Hellfire Club is but one example.

Even though the Avengers will win, the X-Men, the ultimate underdogs, must win the moral fight.  The spirit fostered in Marvel at the start was that characters should possess a certain pathos that the reader could recognize.  Now we delve deeper, but only in certain books geared towards certain readers.  Otherwise the status quo must be maintained, to a degree, and the likability of a character is informed by one's nostalgia surrounding it or one's ability to relate to it.  Pulling a strip from Spider Man's double cross back in Civil War, we can expect Wolverine to flip sides, as Storm already has. What will push him to that point?  Will Jean Grey be resurrected? Will the Phoenix Egg featured in Here Comes Tomorrow be laid on the Blue Side of the Moon?

The new weeks will pass on, and fights between these titans will reach levels of hyperbole hardly espoused since the conflicts of characters from different companies.  But this is Marvel, pitting its best teams at odds with one another. What are the long term effects, if any?  Will it end in confused cringes like Secret Invasion? Or the range of rage comic expressions that sprang up after the finish of Fear Itself?

The series seems to want to pack the most into itself as possible, which works for a reader seeking more than twenty four splash pages and some badly characterized dialogue mixed with contrivances.  The idea behind this is a bit rushed, but the actual follow-through feels like it was a fun project to work on. Each cheesy line's also an opportunity, and this series should provide some doozies.  At this point, expect one turncoat in #3, a minor twist or two in #4, and a major twist in #5.  See you next Wednesday morning.