{"id":8306,"date":"2022-09-29T22:02:01","date_gmt":"2022-09-29T21:02:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8306"},"modified":"2022-09-29T22:02:01","modified_gmt":"2022-09-29T21:02:01","slug":"a-x-e-avengers-1-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8306","title":{"rendered":"A.X.E.: Avengers #1 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A.X.E.: AVENGERS #1<\/strong>
\nWriter: Kieron Gillen<\/strong>
\nArtist: Federico Vicentini<\/strong>
\nColourist: Dean White<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Cory Petit<\/strong>
\nEditor: Tom Brevoort<\/strong><\/p>\n

Although it’s billed as a separate one-shot, this is essentially\u00a0A.X.E.: Judgment Day<\/em> #5 1\/4. Note though that it doesn’t have the Progenitor’s narration from the regular series.<\/p>\n

COVER \/ PAGE 1.\u00a0<\/strong>Iron Man in the shadow of the Progenitor.<\/p>\n

PAGES 2-3.<\/strong> Recap and credits.<\/p>\n

PAGES 4-6.<\/strong> Inside the Progenitor, the team make plans.<\/em><\/p>\n

“For an Avengers, Eternals and X-Men get-together, this Avenger is feeling distinctly outnumbered.”<\/strong> This feels like a nod to the Avengers’ somewhat peripheral role in the crossover, which only has a peripheral tie-in issue in Avengers<\/em> itself. It might be said that so far, this is more of a story about the Eternals, the X-Men, and the Avengers’ house.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Sersi<\/strong> was indeed an Avenger in the 1990s, as was Wolverine in the 2000s.<\/p>\n

“It killed Thor. It killed Carol… Steve is out there trying to hold things together.”<\/strong> In\u00a0A.X.E.: Judgment Day<\/em> #5.<\/p>\n

“We built this… and it’s based on your nervous system.”<\/strong>\u00a0A.X.E.: Judgment Day<\/em> #2.<\/p>\n

“I’ve made myself incapable of feeling bad about anything.”<\/strong> Given Gillen’s take on Mr Sinister as an endlessly self-revising man, it seems highly likely that this is literally true, at least if “feeling bad” means guilt. Sinister is clearly capable to some extent of panic and anxiety.<\/p>\n

PAGES 7-10.\u00a0<\/strong>The team fight the Celestial antibodies.<\/em><\/p>\n

“[W]hen I first plundered the Dreaming Celestial…”<\/strong> In\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #1-3 (2011). The mechanics of precisely how are new, I think.<\/p>\n

“I have a bad habit of being attracted to redheads who are mean to me…”<\/strong> Iron Man is presumably referring mainly to his long-time\u00a0<\/em>supporting character Pepper Potts, and his current partner Hellcat.<\/p>\n

PAGE 11.\u00a0<\/strong>Iron Man and Yinsen.<\/em><\/p>\n

Ah, Iron Man continuity. Not exactly my strong suit, but I’ll see what I can do.<\/p>\n

Ho Yinsen<\/strong> was the imprisoned scientist who helped Tony Stark to build the first Iron Man armour in his origin story from\u00a0Tales of Suspense<\/em> #39 (1962). The details of the story have changed over time due to the wartime setting and Marvel’s sliding timeline, but the basics are consistent: Yinsen heroically sacrifices himself to buy Tony time to finish the suit. The original Iron Man suit was the big lumbering thing seen here, and it “kept [Tony] alive” by keeping his heart beating despite his shrapnel injury (an angle \u00a0long since dropped).<\/p>\n

PAGE 12.<\/strong>\u00a0Iron Man and his suits of armour.<\/em><\/p>\n

These are all recognisable Iron Man suits from various points in history, but I’m not going to try and identify them more specifically than that.<\/p>\n

PAGE 13.\u00a0<\/strong>Iron Man and Captain America.<\/em><\/p>\n

PAGE 14.<\/strong>\u00a0Iron Man and Jim Rhodes.<\/em><\/p>\n

“Rhodes” is referring to the most recent\u00a0Iron Man<\/em> #17 (2022), from the Christopher Cantwell run. In that storyline, Iron Man gains cosmic powers while defeating Korvac, and returns to Earth declaring that he’s going to use his godlike powers to redeem the world. That goes about as well as you’d expect. At the end of the issue, Iron Man does batter a bunch of characters, including Jim Rhodes, who are trying to rein him in.<\/p>\n

PAGE 15.\u00a0<\/strong>Iron Man and Thor.<\/em><\/p>\n

“You tried it with me and you saw what happened.”<\/strong> Iron Man cloned Thor in the 2006\u00a0Civil War<\/em> crossover, accidentally creating a violent lunatic. As far as I know, the clone is still out there somewhere, going by the name Ragnarok.<\/p>\n

“If only you had held it together for a few more weeks…”<\/strong> Whether Iron Man would have been powerful enough to take on a Celestial even with his cosmic powers is debatable, but you never know. The Cantwell arc actually ends with Tony being packed off to rehab for several months, so he’d have had to hold on to his cosmic power for a bit more than a few weeks. (Longer than that, in fact. Cantwell’s\u00a0Iron Man<\/em> arc ends around the time that Ben Reilly becomes Spider-Man – it says so, and Ben appears prominently as the Scarlet Spider earlier in the run – meaning that vast swathes of Spider-Man continuity must have happened since Iron Man lost his god powers.)<\/p>\n

PAGE 16.\u00a0<\/strong>Iron Man and Hulk.<\/em><\/p>\n

PAGE 17.\u00a0<\/strong>Iron Man and women in his life.<\/em><\/p>\n

Specifically, the Wasp, the Black Widow, Pepper and Hellcat.<\/p>\n

“With Whitney Frost shaped exceptions…”<\/strong> Madame Masque, another recurring Iron Man villain.<\/p>\n

PAGES 18-20.\u00a0<\/strong>Iron Man’s parents die in a car crash.<\/em><\/p>\n

As best I can tell, Tony first mentions his parents’ deaths in Iron Man\u00a0<\/em>#104 (1977), and\u00a0this car crash was first shown in a flashback in a back-up strip in\u00a0Iron Man\u00a0<\/em>#288 (1993) – though it might have been mentioned earlier. The lighting makes his mother look a bit like Madame Masque, but that’s probably just a coincidence.<\/p>\n

“I always hoped it was an assassination…”<\/strong> This being the Marvel Universe, several stories have tried to introduce the idea that it wasn’t just a car crash. Iron Man: The Iron Age<\/i> #1 (1998) claims directly that Roxxon had them killed, but that’s a statement by one Roxxon employee to another, and he might be lying. In\u00a0S.H.I.E.L.D.\u00a0<\/em>#5 (2010), Howard tells Nathaniel Richards that “They’re going to fake my death. I believe an automobile crash is the plan that was eventually settled on.” Since this scene is presumably based on Iron Man’s own knowledge, it doesn’t actually contradict either of these. Nonetheless, Kieron Gillen’s approach in this scene is closer to Len Kaminski’s original approach in\u00a0Iron Man<\/em> #288, which was simply that Tony is driven to master engineering because his parents died in a machine failure.<\/p>\n

PAGE 21.<\/strong>\u00a0Howard Stark appears.<\/em><\/p>\n

Howard is evidently the Progenitor, given the “you pass” and Howard’s glowing eye (although it’s a different eye effect from the one that we’ve seen up to now when the Progenitor appears to characters). But up to now, the Progenitor has failed characters who don’t believe that they’ve achieved what they ought to have achieved, especially where it’s a result of their own shortcomings. This seems like a change of approach.<\/p>\n

PAGES 22-23.<\/strong>\u00a0Iron Man reports back.<\/em><\/p>\n

As he points out, if the Progenitor is still judging him, that’s inconsistent with the Progenitor having already made a final decision to destroy the world. Is it trying to scare people into improvement?<\/p>\n

PAGE 24.<\/strong> Trailers. The only tie-in issue this week is\u00a0Amazing Spider-Man<\/em> #10, which has no importance to the crossover, but is a very good issue in its own right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. A.X.E.: AVENGERS #1 Writer: Kieron Gillen Artist: Federico Vicentini Colourist: Dean White Letterer: Cory Petit Editor: Tom Brevoort Although it’s billed as a separate one-shot, this is essentially\u00a0A.X.E.: Judgment Day #5 1\/4. Note though that it doesn’t have the Progenitor’s narration […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8306"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8309,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8306\/revisions\/8309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}