<TABLE border=0><TBODY><TR><TD>[font=verdana,helvetica]AVENGERS #503[/font]</TD></TR><TR><TD>[font=verdana,helvetica]Not with a bang, but with a whimper[/font]</TD></TR><TR><TD><HR>[font=verdana,helvetica]Dateline: Tuesday, November 9, 2004[/font]</TD></TR><TR><TD>
[font=verdana,helvetica]By: TONY WHITT[/font]</TD></TR><TR><TD></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
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<CENTER>WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!</CENTER>
Doctor Strange reveals to the assembled Avengers of past and present that the attacks that have taken the lives of the Vision, Ant-Man, and Hawkeye are all magic-based, and that he knows who's behind it all. But the revelation turns out to be too much for the group to bear, as they discover it's one of their own.
It's not surprising that there's been such a negative buzz about the resolution of the "Avengers Disassembled" storyline, especially when one considers the curve balls that Bendis has thrown readers in order to achieve it. The revelation that it was Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch, the entire time is not necessarily the thing which rankles most – though I'm sure there's a legion of fans out there who are more than a little miffed that one of their favorite characters has been shown as so radically unstable that she'd destroy her friends in order to bring back the children she never really had. The thing that rankles is that, much like J. Michael Straczynski in the recent AMAZING SPIDER-MAN storyline, Bendis has changed some major parts of established history to pull all this off – but unlike JMS, the ends have not justified the means.
I have to give credit to Frank Gembeck of the GLA list for bringing to my attention two of the major problems underlying this issue. One centers on the idea that the existence of Wanda's children was kept from her by Agatha Harkness, only to be revealed by a surprisingly ditzy Wasp out by the Avengers Mansion pool. It's a characteristic Bendis character-building moment, despite what it does to Janet Pym: how often do we get to see our heroes just relaxing by the pool, really? But not only is the slip out of character, the need for it is unnecessary – Gembeck points out that Wanda had already learned about her kids again, and from Agatha Harkness, back in WEST COAST AVENGERS ANNUAL #7. (Of course, no one else really read that series, either, so why should Bendis pay attention to it?) If the previous story occurred, then not only is the poolside revelation an invention to bring the current story along, it also makes Agatha's eventual fate as revealed here highly problematic. Then there's Dr. Strange's revelation to the group that, despite what Wanda has said all along she's tapped into, there is no such thing as chaos magic – despite the fact that, according to Gembeck, the good doctor himself used chaos magic, and specifically called it that, in his own book some time back when his usual powers fled for a bit. Ouch.
But given that Wanda's motivation for what she's done has all been about rewriting history, one has to wonder if Bendis should be cut some slack. This revisionism and the darkening (some would say "trashing") of Wanda's character results in a gripping if talky story, and it's hard to say, without the aid of news leaks and so forth, whether any of us could've predicted this. Whether it's the sort of thing that justifies a complete rebooting of the Avengers from top to bottom, though, is still an open question. If the implication is meant to be that the Avengers as they had been were too dumb to see the problem in front of them until it had almost destroyed them, necessitating the deus ex machina of Stephen Strange to sort it all out for them, then yeah, they probably should disband. But isn't that a bit of a straw man argument, really? And is it worth alienating a vast number of Avengers fans to do such a thing in the first place? I guess only time will tell, because I sure as hell can't.
