Duck Season

I'm thinking of quitting the Avengers.

Summer season is convention season in the comic book world, and today Comic Book Resources has an interview with the recently announced new scribe of Avengers, Chuck Austen. Here are a few utterly depressing quotes from their interview:

For a team called the Avengers, some fans have lamented the fact that the team doesn't do much, well, avenging.

"Oh, yeah [there'll be some avenging]," reveals Austen. "There will be some changes and tension in how jobs are handled in the post 9-11, post Gulf War II world. Are we proactive or reactive? Do we avenge, or do we strike before the need to avenge?"

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The Avengers are loved by the world, mostly. In my first arc, we find that Captain American is not so loved outside the US.

Chuck spent part of the interview praising 'The Ultimates', a quasi-Avengers revamp set in a different universe where writer Mark Millar gets to explore such fun stories as Captain America being a tool of the american military, Hank Pym having a nervous breakdown and attempting to kill his wife ('The Wasp') with bug spray, and Thor having a snooty anti-war/European alter ego. Chuck also praised the current scribe Geoff Johns, who, with July's really late issue, is in the middle of a story arc where a biological weapon was deployed from a secret American research facility under Mt. Rushmore. The ensuing red vapor cloud has devastated huge parts of South Dakota.

I'm not so much disgusted at the politics, i'm on the fence as to whether or not I think Geoff and now Chuck are telling their stories from a particular anti-american viewpoint, or if they're just bad stories about touchy subjects, but i'm definitely not happy that this material is being explored at all. Doesn't anyone understand the word "fantasy" any more? I have the 9-11 Spider-Man issue, it's touching and poignant, but Chuck has earned my ire because I don't understand why everying in the world up to and now including comic books have to be reunderstood through a new lense.

It's kind of a stupid point, but worse things have happened in the Marvel Universe than 9-11. Summer of 2001 saw Kang the Conqueror declare war on the Earth, starting with an invasion of Europe. In October of 2001 Kang destroyed Washington D.C. (after which The Wasp surrendered to Kang on behalf of the United States), while he later built huge camps filled with large portions of the Earth's population. I'm not trying to be a continuity cop, but why aren't issues ever discussed through the lens of a post-Kang world? (Or, for that matter, a post-Onslaught world. 'Onslaught' being a story which culminated with robot Sentinels destroying huge parts of Manhattan.)

I'll tell you why, because its a freakin comic book. The status quo is continuously reset. Is it really so much to ask that issues like terrorism and american foreign policy are also reset, so that I can have twenty minutes away from these things, even if it's only in the sanctity of my imagination?

And that, boys and girls, is why i'm considering dropping the one comic that's kept me a collector all these years.