Avengers #394

[brerrabbit]

Comments

[lordultimus]

Is it weird that I kind of like this design? Like, not as a permanent thing, but as kind of a weird one-off "Franken-Castle" period of Jan's history.

Of course, the problem is that this was the 90's, so a) the design itself had a lot of useless padding, for the lack of a better term, and b) there was so many plots happening all at once there was no time to explore how Jan actually felt about this change.

[deh_tommy]

Not gonna lie, I kind of like that too.

[zylly]

It was explored exactly once in what I think was a Marvel Team Up with the Ben Reilly Spide-Man. The bad guy had trapped the Avengers in some kind of temporal memory thing reliving some of their worst moments. Jan’s caption about hers ended on something like “or feel relief that at least she’s human again.”

Ah! Found it: https://comicvine.gamespot.com/spider-man-team-up-4-webs-of-time/4000-42798/

[remial]

was this the story arc that f*cked up the marvel universe so bad that they had to do a reboot?

[lordultimus]

More like an "All these characters died, reborn in an alternate universe, got brought back, and now we're not going to ever mention the event that happened before their death".

[coldfury]

I'm not sure if the die was cast with the Image series or not by the time the Crossing was out, but if not it wasn't much long after that everything went down.

The Crossing was monumentally bad. So many random character assassinations, literal assasinations, time travel, TEEN TONY, and I still have never actually read the ending because I couldn't find it back then.

TEEN TONY.

[obsidianwolf]

You know IMO the handful of stories after the crossing ended with Teen Tony were actually kind of interesting in a Teen Tony faces what he grew up to be and didn't like it kind of way. The he attends the reading of his adult self's will issue for example is one I still remember rather fondly

Problem was it came from such poisoned soil (The crossing was as you said monumentally bad) and happened just before the whole Heroes Reborn thing it never had a chance.

[scorntx]

... I'd ask if Teen Tony really was that bad, or at least worse than the rest, but having just seen... well, whatever that was, not sure I actually want to know the answer anymore.

[icon_uk]

I like the design of the new Wasp, but didn't see any point in making it Jan.

And I sort of liked the idea of Teen Tony.

At this point Iron Man was NOT a major character and the movie was something like fifteen years away. He was a second stringer at best, he had his own title, but that seemed to be as much by inertia than anything else.

He was a middle aged corporate bigwig who worried about his stocks and shares from his military industrial complex he'd owned since the 60's. He also had a rogues gallery that was either dull (another guy in some sort of armour) or painful (depending on how much of a stereotype the Mandarin was being at the time).

Even as a kid I thought: Cool armour, but Tony is just... not an engaging, likeable or relatable character in any way. He had the alcoholism arc (if you hapened to have read those issues, which I just managed to miss out on) but that didn't make him innately interesting, it makes him a recovering alcoholic.

Teen Tony, growing up living in the world that Tony had made, and with the expectations he world had for him (for better or worse) had a lot more potential to me. Someone who could grow up and have a more innate familiarity with modern tech made more sense than Tony, who I couldn't really separate from reprints I'd seen where he was going into paroxysms of delight at the awesome power of the "top hat transistors" in his armour and popping out the roller skates because it made him go faster.

To be honest, I'd much rather they had simply address Tony feeling he was becoming dated, and have him take an up and coming tech genius under his wing and then watch THAT person become a new Iron Man (or Iron Woman)

[obsidianwolf]

Teen Tony also had a lot of potential cause it was a kid seeing all the fuck ups his future self made and facing the fact that he didn't like or want to be him.

[icon_uk]

Yup, and I think that concept showed how good it could be in the case of kid Cyclops coming forward to a world where he had to deal with the fall-out of adult Cyclops choices.

[mazway_75]

Kurt Busiek's retcon of this entire mess in "Avengers Forever" is notable.

Then for how Tony comes back to life and Wasp human again, he just does a near-literal one-panel handwave of "oh, Franklin just brought them back to fix things."

[cainofdreaming]

If you could bottle this you could call it Distilled 90s.

[zylly]

If I remember right, it was in this form that Jan got her first action figure, in a bug-themed Spider-Man line with Beetle and the Tarantula.