Avengers #1 Preview - Wanted, Heroes for Heroic Age

[flidgetjerome]

CBR has a seven page preview up for Avengers #1. A couple of pages were floating around the net already but now there's lettering and some of the dialog is pretty cute.






So Steve's the voice for "Forgive and Forget" and Wonder Man is the one going "We can't pretend we can just go back to how it used to be, these last five years have been really messed-up!"?

What a balanced presentation of both sides!

And it's working. (Stupid Wonder Man, talking back to Captain Rogers. Who does he think he is? Screw him!)

Suggested Tags - title: avengers, char: captain america/steve rogers, char: wonder man/simon williams, creator: john romita jr., creator: brian michael bendis, publisher: marvel comics

Comments

[valtyr]

It's rather easier to tell if a medical doctor is botching his surgery than if a Nazi is implanting hypnotic suggestions.

[crabby_lioness]

Nope. you use the same technique for both -- observation.

[valtyr]

I'm not sure if you're saying someone should observe the therapy, or that if Steve turns up dead again, we'll know the therapy didn't work.

[crabby_lioness]

The most highly-recommended form of infant grief counseling is peer group counseling with others who have had similar experiences. It's rare for anyone present at a child grief counseling group to have lost their children in the same way, but the shared experience of loss and grieving is enough to get them started.

[valtyr]

But... if the counsellor was a brainwashing Nazi, he'd recommend treatment that allowed him maximum opportunity to brainwash.

[crabby_lioness]

Contrary to popular opinion, most counsellors are not brainwashing Nazis. If you're worried about getting one who is for a superhero, you could do what the rest of us do and call either the local hospital or the local crisis center hotline for a referral.

[valtyr]

No, but in the MU some are, and I can see that being a legitimate source of worry.

(Oh, and the MA Avengers don't have Leonard on retainer, they went to him once on Banner's recommendation. And it didn't help.)

[crabby_lioness]

The thing about problems is, you're supposed to solve them. If the Avengers don't know who to call when one of their own falls, they need to find someone instead of just leaving her (and it's usually a her) lying in the dirt.

I disagree. It articulated the problem and showed them where the answer did not lie. One could also say that the hundreds of trials Edison made to perfect the light bulb "didn't help" either.

[valtyr]

Yeah, and I've never said otherwise. I'm just saying it's not as simple as "putting Leonard on retainer".

You feel that making an incorrect diagnosis and prescribing an ineffective treatment is helping? I feel we have very different expectations of our medical personnel.

[crabby_lioness]

After 40 years of dealing with medical mis-management, including my own decades-long misdiagnosis and their culpability in the death of my own son, I expect little else.

Just because some (or in the case of America, MANY) of the practicioners are bad doesn't make the science underneath it bad or all the practicioners bad.

HOWEVER, I still don't see how a Nazi is supposed to brainwash an infant peer group counseling session.

[valtyr]

Never said the science behind it was bad, either.

By, as I said, recommending a different form of treatment in this complicated and unusual case, or having one-on-one therapy sessions in addition to group sessions.

[crabby_lioness]

So? You're assuming a theoretical Bad Guy might have interfered if they tried. My point is, they didn't bother to try. Big difference.

One might as well say that we shouldn't call the Fire Department to put out a fire because a terrorist might hijack the firetruck, but instead let the building (and the neighborhood) burn to the ground.

[valtyr]

You said: Goddess knows what cosmic clusterfuck they'll cause NEXT by their failure to put Leonard on retainer. At least the MA Avengers have sense enough to do that.

So I assumed, from your sweeping statement, that we were talking in general terms, and addressed the general difficulty of counselling for superheroes in the MU.

On the specific matter of Wanda's issue, as I have said above, at length, they did not seek help because they did not think she needed help; they had legitimate reason for thinking it was resolved. They were wrong, but I don't think they are at fault for believing Harkness when she said it was all right.

[crabby_lioness]

Riiiiiiiiight. Because of course what Harkness did made perfect sense. Such perfect sense that even reading it as a teenager I knew that if there was any emotional realism in the MU AT ALL (and they have claimed to take pride in that) Agatha's actions were going to blow up in their faces and do incalcuable harm.

And if I could figure that out as a teenager and all these supposedly grown people with so much more experience with traumatic experiences than I had could not, they had to be either blindly stupid or just not care at all about Wanda. There was no other possible way to read the scenario. The stench of that bullshit was unavoidable to anyone with half a brain.

[valtyr]

Well... given the writers originally wrote it in the belief it was fine, and the majority of readers thought it was okay, I'm going to have to go with you being an unusually perceptive child.

If I'd just been bitten in the head by my friend's baby that was a dude's arm, I think I'd be inclined to trust the person who said they knew how to fix it, especially if that person was someone my friend trusted very much and regarded as an authority.

[crabby_lioness]

John Byrne didn't care if it was fine or not. He simply wanted to write the twins out of existance. He said at the time that they offended him.

Why he simply didn't retire Wanda and the twins instead is the real mystery. Instead we got a hysterical story from an out-of-control writer who was offended by something another writer had done.

[flidgetjerome]

As I recall Byrne's main objection was to the Vision/Wanda pairing, getting rid of the twins was step 2 of his bid to destroy it beyond all attempts at recovery.

[valtyr]

Well, I think we can all agree it was a bloody stupid story.

[crabby_lioness]

Amen.