#kang the conqueror header | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sineala · 5 years

Text

Avengers: The Man Who Stole Tomorrow

Now we come to the 1970s Marvel Comics prose novel that I was most excited to read -- Avengers: The Man Who Stole Tomorrow by David Michelinie. If you're familiar with the comics you can probably guess why I was excited, which is because, unlike all the other authors of these books, Michelinie was an actual writer at Marvel at the time he was writing this. He's probably most famous for his two Iron Man runs with Bob Layton -- the first of which was already ongoing in 1979 when this book was released -- but he also wrote actual Avengers issues during this time period. He didn't have a continuous run but he did about 25 issues total.

So I was really looking forward to this one, because I figured that, surely, if anyone could write a good Avengers novel it was going to be the guy who was literally writing actual Avengers comic books at the same time. And furthermore, I figured, given how beloved his Iron Man run is (Doomquest! Demon in a Bottle!), I might luck out and get some really good Tony characterization.

(I should say right now that if you're reading this hoping for Steve/Tony, there really isn't any. Sorry. I think they might exchange a couple words in the middle of an action scene at some point, but it's very sweet that they appear together on one of the chapter header images. That's about it.)

What I found was... complicated.

Michelinie isn't a bad writer, exactly. He's written some amazing comics, and he's very good at the banter here. He's not so great at writing prose and there is a lot of unnecessary exposition (like, there are three paragraphs about how Tony's repulsors work before he fires them the first time, which really slows down the action scene) and so many epithets, oh my God, so many epithets. So, I mean, he's not really a great novelist, but I have read a lot worse, and he's good at making the Avengers feel like the Avengers, which is what I wanted.

The problem here is everything else.

I know I haven't usually bothered going through the plots of these novels in a lot of detail because I've been reading them for character rather than for plot, but this is a very plot-motivated book. And so I think I'd really better summarize this whole thing, because it's basically two books shoved together. The first book is basically everything I wanted this book to be -- tense, dramatic, anchored in canon with a nice deep dive into canonical history that actually works, and it had me very, very excited to read the second half. I was really loving where this plot was going.

The second half of this book is where this book proceeds to go completely fucking off the rails.

Let me explain.

Okay. So the Avengers team these days is Tony, Steve, Thor, Vision, Wanda, Pietro, and Beast. We open with some team bonding in Avengers Mansion, a lot of exposition about who everyone is, Tony's secret identity, how Pietro still hates that Wanda and Vision are married, how Beast is a ladies' man and will crack jokes at every available opportunity. You get the idea.

They then decide to start the debriefing about their most recent mission. They are taping the debriefing, which is relevant because they are interrupted by a guy who shows up, calling himself Aningan Kenojuak, and he summons a magic bright green polar bear, knocks out all the Avengers, steals Steve, and disappears. When the Avengers wake up they conclude he is an "Eskimo shaman" who is probably from Alaska (okay, yes, there is some race fail here, but there is a reason that this specific guy is what he is, because this is one of those things that's gonna come up when you're dealing with Silver Age comics) and when they review the tapes (that recorded the whole thing) they hear him talking about someone "wing-footed."

So you remember how, in Avengers #4, there was that whole thing where Namor finds "an isolated tribe of Eskimos" who are bowing down and worshipping the frozen body of Captain America (not visible as Captain America at the time) as a god and Namor gets mad about that and throws the whole iceberg into the ocean and that's where Steve is when the Avengers find him?

So this Kenojuak, it turns out, was the guy who found Steve in the ice, and he really wants his god back, so he uses his magic String of Stones -- touching his string was also what summoned his magic polar bear -- to cover Steve in ice again. So now he has him here in Alaska covered in ice. Yep. Captain America has gotten iced again. Imagine how he must feel.

Meanwhile, Tony and Vision go to Atlantis to see Namor, who admits that maybe once upon a time he might have done something like that to a body he found, but what's it to you, land-dwellers? Also, fuck off. That's when Kenojuak comes to Atlantis and attacks Namor with his polar bear. They fight him off, he retreats to Alaska, and Namor agrees to help out. I guess he cares about Steve too.

We have some fun team banter on the Quinjet as Beast insists on playing Devo, while Pietro is no fun and would prefer some nice classical music, like Dvorak's New World Symphony. (The lyrics to Devo's "Jocko Homo" appear to be quoted without permission.)

Anyway. Kenojuak gets back to Alaska, hauls the Capsicle out of his igloo and goes looking for his village -- I guess it's been a few years since he's been home -- which has apparently been destroyed by a pipeline and replaced by a town and this makes him very angry and he's going to use his magic to destroy it. The Avengers show up and stop him, earning the gratitude of the town's residents, and they finally get Steve back.

This is when they find out that Steve... isn't melting. Uh oh.

Kenojuak, defeated, hands over his magic String of Stones to the Avengers, at which point they find out that it is not in fact magic but Sufficiently Advanced Technology. The Blue Totem gave it to him, he says, to accomplish his task. Can he describe the Blue Totem? Sure, he had a blue face and he wore purple and green and the Avengers are starting to have a really, really bad feeling about this because...

It's Kang. It's obviously Kang the Conqueror.

So what they have to do now is find Kang -- an explanation of who Kang is that is actually pretty comprehensible then follows -- and get him to unfreeze Steve, and the problem with finding Kang is of course that he could be anywhere in time.

So at this point in the book I was very excited. I mean, Steve's in peril! We have this fun plot thread linked to his actual canonical history! The Avengers are going to have to travel through time and save him from Kang! It's going to be just as dramatic and amazing and make me feel all the feelings as the Avengers strive to save Captain America!

I regret to inform you that this, alas, is where this book gets really fucking weird.

Beast picks up Steve's frozen body -- he'll be the one holding onto Steve here, pretty much -- and the team gathers together and apparently Thor can just time-travel by swinging Mjolnir around over their heads? Was anyone going to tell me this or was I supposed to find it out for myself?

Anyway, they end up in the year 3900, on an Earth where everything seems to be made of plastic (even the grass) and the first guy they meet is jealous of Beast for having so much fur and jealous of Tony for having so much metal. Everyone has stupid future slang. They are apparently all in some kind of theme park for humanity, and this guy is happy to point the way to Kang, who lives in a giant building with his name on the side. That was easy.

The building is basically a maze, and Beast gets split from the main team twice, and the second time they don't even bother going looking for him, even though he is the guy carrying Steve. It's a little weird. But they all make it to Kang's HQ just fine; Beast comes in through a service door because apparently he asked directions? It is really weird.

And Kang is all too happy to help them. He explains that he basically just gave Kenojuak the technology for the lulz once he found out what the guy wanted to do and he figured there was no way he was going to manage to ice Captain America. So the Avengers ask him to please bring Cap back and he does and Steve is perfectly fine.

So, you know... so much for narrative tension.

They leave Kang's HQ and are hanging out in the theme park, about to go home, and they're talking about how that was all too easy... when a Tyrannosaurus Rex attacks them.

Yeah.

The Avengers save everyone from the dinosaur but not before the nearby Richard M. Nixon Memorial Massage Parlor nearby -- look, I said this book was fucking weird -- is destroyed and its angry owner comes running out and she is a sexy, scantily clad woman, which the book makes sure to tell us. She is happy to tell them that they all agreed to live here under Kang's rule because otherwise he would destroy them because his plan... is to rule all of history!

I have no conceivable idea why this should come as a shock to the Avengers because it is pretty much the only thing Kang has ever wanted (except for the times he wants to try to kill one of his selves).

Nonetheless, the Avengers are shocked! And they realize that Kang only let them get away so easily because it was a trap! And now they have to go back and actually fight Kang! But first the rest of the team has to tell Beast he can't have a quickie with the massage parlor owner before they fight Kang. Yes, really. I had to read this with my own two eyes.

Anyway, they fight their way back to Kang and it is a lot tougher this time because they are dodging, among other things, pterosaurs and Messerschmitts (did you know that one model had a jet engine? I did not know this!), but Steve is good at tactics and the Avengers are all good fighters. This time when they make it back to Kang, he just says he can open time portals to anywhere and send them through and kill them all. Except he's not gonna kill Beast because Beast is blue and I guess Kang likes that in a guy.

So it's a good thing he's not going to kill Beast because while the Avengers are distracted with the time portals fighting samurai or whatever, Beast creeps around, figures out all the portal controls, eventually traps Kang, and then scatters him across, like, seventeen time portals so he's not going to be a threat any time soon. So that's how Beast saves the Avengers from Kang in, like, one page.

Anyway. All the Avengers go home and live happily ever after, except Steve, who feels guilty for letting down that one guy who thought he was a god so he's gonna go hang out in Alaska for a bit and talk to him.

So I think you can see why I'm kind of conflicted about this book -- I loved the first half (modulo the Silver Age racism) and thought it was going places and I was really excited about this dramatic story of the Avengers rescuing Captain America and then the second half was... I don't even know how to describe it. It was like they were two different books, and the first one was a four or five star book and the second one was, like... one. The characters were good, though, I guess. I just... what the fuck. I don't even know what I just read.

I also feel like fandom would be able to do a lot better than this -- like, "Steve is frozen and stolen by Kang the Conqueror" would be a great prompt and would make for some great stories and none of them would be this one. I feel like if this had been a comic and more people had read it we would have a dozen AUs. I just wanted... angst and feelings, I guess.

Of all these books so far, it's the one I paid the most for, and I'm not sorry I bought it, but I also definitely don't think it's worth the prices it's going for on the used market, because the actual plot is... really a letdown. Given Michelinie's comics work, I was expecting a lot more from this. I think I'd rec the Iron Man book, and then the Cap book, and then this. (I also have the Doctor Strange one, if anyone wants me to read and review that.)

But, hey, it does have a great title.

#posts i actually wrote

14 notes · View notes