La Veuve Noire par Jester
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La Sorcière Rouge par Stuart Sayger
Vision par Brett Wood
C est kitty qui lui a fait son costume ?
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Thanos par Yevgeny Sokolov
AVENGERS WEST COAST #63 :
Dans Avengers West Coast #63, les scénaristes Roy et Dann Thomas font d’abord le point sur la situation après la longue « Dark Wanda Saga » débutée par John Byrne. La Sorcière Rouge est en convalescence après l’affrontement contre Immortus, ses pouvoirs sont réduits mais elle va mieux. Vif-Argent fait une nouvelle démonstration de sa légendaire mauvaise humeur après une remarque du docteur, U.S. Agent aimerait bien s’intégrer un peu plus mais il ne sait franchement pas comment s’y prendre et Wonder Man se débat toujours avec ses sentiments pour Wanda. Quant à Hank Pym et la Guêpe, ils découvrent l’absence de la Torche, qui se reposait depuis quelques numéros dans un cylindre pour en quelque sorte « recharger ses batteries » et partent à sa recherche en compagnie d’Ann Raymond, la veuve de Toro.
Tout ceci se déroule parallèlement à la présentation d’un nouveau personnage qui explore les ruines de ce qui ressemble à une base de super-vilains. Le lieu était autrefois le Q.G. d’une certaine Légion de l’Eclair Vivant. Les Thomas se servent bien de la continuité pour fournir le contexte avec un résumé de ce qui s’était passé dans de vieux épisodes de Hulk datant de Tales to Astonish (période Stan Lee & Marie Severin), les explicatifs se chargeant d’expliquer ce que recherche ce Miguel Santos, désireux de poursuivre l’oeuvre de son père, qui était le leader de cette Ligue (je n’ai pas plus de détails, n’ayant toujours pas lu les épisodes en question). En rebranchant deux câbles, Miguel acquiert des super-pouvoirs (c’est que c’est dangereux, ces choses-là) et devient un véritable éclair vivant !
Le dernier acte de l’épisode fait s’affronter l’Eclair Vivant et la Torche. Le premier expérimente ses capacités de façon maladroite et le second est encore un peu déphasé après son réveil. Hank et Janet arrivent au bon moment, ce qui donne un final un peu plus porté sur l’action, dans la tradition du « on se bat d’abord avant de poser les questions ». Dans sa première apparition, Miguel Santos ne s’est pas vraiment conduit de manière sympathique et pouvait très bien passer pour un vilain. Mais les Thomas avaient d’autres plans pour lui après sa disparition subite à la fin de ce numéro…
Le Avengers West Coast #64 est resté inédit (un fill-in dessiné par Chris Wozniak, donc je comprends qu’on pouvait s’en passer) et au #65 débute un arc narratif en quatre parties avec le retour du Moissonneur.
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Miss Marvel par Mike Deodato Jr
Héhéhéhéhé
Jim
Ouais, je suis presque déçu que ça réagisse pas plus. Tant de kitsch en une page, ça mériterait pourtant !
Tom Brevoort à propos d’Avengers #71 :
Another Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date
This issue of AVENGERS , #71 , was released on October 15, 2003 and hasn’t been reprinted in its entirety in years. And that, my friends, is a story. So, first off, it’s worth knowing that, as I believe I detailed in a previous Newsletter, Marvel President Bill Jemas had been growing steadily more and more dissatisfied with the writers then working for Marvel , to the point where he started up the Epic Comics program in the hopes of bringing in some fresh talent that he could mold in his image. Bill certainly didn’t like my books—we had history that went back to his earlier days working on trading cards at Fleer , so ours was a complicated relationship. To try to improve relations, at a certain point when he was trying to get stories paced out more in the manner that he preferred, I wound up having new AVENGERS writer Geoff Johns speak directly to him, and to get his notes on the long arc we were planning, “Red Zone.” Bill’s opening line to Geoff was typical of him, “You don’t know how to write.” But Geoff had been trained in Hollywood and he’d taken aggressive notes from executives before, and so rather than being cower by Bill , he met each challenge head on, and in doing so, while Bill never entirely came around on his writing, he did gain a little bit of Bill’s respect. Now, at this time, Bill was pushing for our material to be edgier. THE ULTIMATES had been launched which featured more extreme versions of the Avengers characters—more violent, more sexualized, more dangerous—and it was a huge hit. Bill wanted to push the envelope in these directions a lot more. He felt that any attention was good attention, even if it was seemingly negative. And he made these preference known to Geoff through their discussions. Consequently, Geoff plotted a sequence in AVENGERS #71 , the first issue after “Red Zone” , designed to steer into what Bill said he wanted. The issue focuses on Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne, who had been estranged for years but who had been coming back together across the length of this run. The scene opened with a shot of a Las Vegas hotel with shouting coming from inside one of the rooms, shouting that made it apparent over the next few panels that the persons involved were Hank and Jan, and the misdirect was that Hank was striking her as he notoriously had in the past. But at the page turn, we find that Hank and Jan are rather in bed together, and that Hank has shrunk down to his ant-size in order to pleasure her more directly. It’s a dumb, adolescent shock-scene, the sort that really doesn’t have a place in a book like AVENGERS . But when Bill heard about it, he loved it, and pushed for it to be even more graphic and shocking. So these were the marching orders. End of the day, though, none of that abdicates me from my part in allowing all of this, I could have stopped this page at any point. There’s also a digression I need to talk about to give you some context for a bit of what came next. Bill was in his final days at this point, though nobody knew it yet, and he was growing more regularly erratic. Upset at the artwork in some recent issue of some title—I don’t recall which one—he decided that, going forward, EIC Joe Quesada would have to sign off on every page of every issue that was being produced. It was a tremendous bottleneck, a waste of time and resources and this only lasted for as long as Bill remained in charge, which wasn’t long. But this nonsense provided me with some good fortune. Because by the time AVENGERS #71 hit the stands, Bill was out, and so the shitstorm over this page fell directly on me alone. Fortunately, I had both the e-mails from Bill expressing his love for this scene and the sign-offs from Joe proving that everybody involved had both seen and blessed this sequence before it went to print, and so I wasn’t solely responsible, Marvel had approved the sequence. In the end, the decision was made to drop the offending page from the collected edition, and it hasn’t been reprinted since that initial printing so far as I know.
On a more prosaic note, cover artist J.G. Jones included the likeness of editor Lysa Hawkins on the cover of this issue, behind that big die in the foreground.
Tiens, un Marvel vs DC que je ne connaissais pas !
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La Sorcière Rouge par Chris Delara
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La Veuve Noire par Chris Delara
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