THE AVENGERS BATTLE THE EARTH-WRECKER by Otto Binder
Although the company was originally founded under the name Timely Publications in 1939, Marvel Comics as we know it really emerged in 1961, when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby revived and revolutionized superhero comics with the creation of The Fantastic Four. Then Marvel started tossing classic character after classic character out into the world. Spider-Man, Thor, the Incredible Hulk, etc. They even brought back characters like Captain America and Namor, the Sub-Mariner, who had been introduced during the World War II era and then put on ice (literally, in Cap’s case) for a while. Several of their characters were brought together to form a team called The Avengers, with the first issue being published in 1963. Five years later, the Avengers characters branched out from comic books into prose books with the novel The Avengers Battle the Earth-Wrecker, written by Otto Binder. And while this doesn’t feature the cool illustrations that usually bring the characters to life, it does tell a fun, action-packed story.
Realizing that some of the people who would be reading this book would have never looked at an Avengers comic book before, Binder starts off by having the group of heroes hold a strange, nationally televized event in which they introduce themselves, show off some of their abilities, and pay tribute to members of the team who weren’t able to attend the event for one reason or another. So while describing this TV production, Binder lets us get to know Avengers members Captain America, who wields a fancy shield and gained extraordinary strength and speed when dosed with a super soldier serum back in the days of WWII; Hawkeye, a highly skilled archer and a motor-mouthed quipster; Goliath, who uses technology to grow to ten feet tall or shrink to a tiny size (and when he’s tiny, he’s called Ant-Man); and Goliath / Ant-Man’s beloved Wasp, who can shrink to a tiny size and fly. Binder also pays tribute to absent members Thor, who is off in his homeland, and Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, with no explanation given for why Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver aren’t in attendance even though they're featured on the book’s cover.
Iron Man – who, unbeknownst to his teammates is also millionaire playboy and weapons inventor Anthony Stark – is also part of the team, but he’s apparently terrible at time management. He’s supposed to be present for the TV show, but has chosen this moment to test out his latest flying system-equipped suit of armor by swooping around the Himalayas. His bad choice actually turns out to be good luck for the planet, because while he’s flying around the mountains he crosses paths with a maniacal alien called Karzz the Conqueror. This guy comes from a world called Vega in the seventieth century. He started out by conquering his own planet, then he built a space warfleet and went on to conquer ten thousand more inhabited worlds, with his sights set on twenty thousand. But then he made the mistake of trying to conquer a planet called Earth... and was defeated. So now he has come back in time to the 1960s to set off not just one but four separate apocalyptic events, which will make sure that Earth is destroyed long before it can cause trouble for him in the future.
Iron Man can’t beat Karzz on his own, so he reports the issue to his fellow Avengers, and they spend the entire book trying to figure out how to thwart this alien’s evil scheme. It’s quite a challenge for them, as Karzz is very crafty and has future technology on his side. Readers are going to be rooting for our heroes from the start, but Binder gets us even more invested by making Karzz frustratingly difficult to outwit or outmaneuver. He’s several steps ahead of the Avengers at every moment, and each time they think they have accomplished something important, Karzz pulls the rug out from under their victory.
Battles take place in the mountains, under the sea, in the desert, near erupting volcanoes. Karzz even has Captain America fight an android version of himself at one point, and at another the other Avengers have to fight a hypnotized Goliath. The book is almost non-stop action from beginning to end, which made it quite an entertaining read. It was written with younger readers in mind, but if you’re a fan of this characters The Avengers Battle the Earth-Wrecker is still a blast to check out as an adult. It’s also delightfully dated in some ways, especially with some of the lines Hawkeye drops in his banter.
No comments:
Post a Comment