Avengers #39

[lordultimus]

Comments

[silverhammerman]

This is some classic Jason Aaron content in terms of its treatment of humanity and small connections that outweigh a dim view of humanity. You can draw a straight line between this and his work in The Goddamned, and not just the principle characters wear a lot of furs.

That said, I still really dislike everything that Aaron has done with the Phoenix. The Phoenix as a member of the Avengers One Million BC completely undercuts what makes it alien and aw-inspiring in the context of the X-Men, and having the old Phoenix just look exactly like Jean Grey really does frame her as an interchangeable woman. Moreover, Aaron's treated the Phoenix as more or less the cosmic equivalent of Venom, and has seemingly completely divorced the character from its associations with Jean and Rachel Grey, and with feminine power and expression as a whole. People have literally written academic papers about the Dark Phoenix Saga as a story about female sexuality! Aaron mostly just treats it as another toy in the Marvel U toybox, shorn of all context and meaning, and I think that really sucks.

Maybe the upcoming storyline where all the Marvel characters have a fighting tournament to see who gets to be the new Phoenix will address some of that, but I kind of doubt it.

[nyadnar17]

It honestly feels like whatever entity is calling itself The Phoenix in the Avengers is entirely separate being from The Phoenix in the X-men.

[cygnia]

Odds Knull just absorbs the Phoenix entity anyways, rendering this set-up all moot?

[lordultimus]

Pretty low, actually, this run is being very separate from everything else going on, barring exceptions like She-Hulk.

[silverhammerman]

Chiming back in to note that apparently in the rest of the issue the telepathic dude up there and the dead people are a prehistoric version of the X-Men, who also take in general outcasts, including gay people, despite modern scholarship suggesting that ancient peoples were usually pretty chill about queerness. So Jason Aaron decided that his (imo pretty unimaginative and thematically ill-conceived) vision of the Marvel Universe but for Cavemen also had to include historically inaccurate homophobia. It's... a lot to take in.

[arilou_skiff]

We dont really (for obvious reasons) have any data for how stone-age people conceptualized queerness, and once we do start to get data it gets... More complicated. Ancient greeks, romans, egyptians and mesopotamians had their own ideas of sexual propriety and gender-roles, and while they dont exactly line up with ours, they were often equally complicated and harsh, so saying "ancient peoples were usually chill with queerness" is a bit of a misnomer. Better to say that ancient peoples defined queerness and sexual otherness in different ways than we do.

[lordultimus]

I'm sure that there were homophobes, but modern scholarship also suggests that early man didn't really get that there was a connection to sex and pregnancy until animal husbandry started (well, the men, anyway, the women had nine months of clues), so who's to say what would be considered "natural" in those days?

[arilou_skiff]

It's less that there were homophobes and more that there were various aspects of taboos regarding sexual relations (often intertwined with notions of purity, ritual or otherwise, and gender) Those don't neccessarily line up with modern notions of "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" but they could be equally strong and rigid. (see: romans notions of active/passive sexuality, or various notions about third sexes, or... You get the point)

[silverhammerman]

Yeah I fired that off a little quickly and casually, and it wasn't really accurate. It's just that to me, knowing that ancient peoples did have different understandings of sexuality and gender, Aaron choosing to write recognizable homophobia into his story is a weird and bad choice. It's both lazy and out of place in the Archie-Comics-level premise of "What if all of the characters we know and love were cavemen?"

[gnarll]

Didn't that massacre get excavated in Austens "Angels and demons" X-men run?

[gnarll]

I dislike this. Pretty much every take on the Phoenix after Claremont makes it less and less interesting. And this feels like a giant leap in the direction of making it mundane.

It also continues the trend of poor research, which leads to poorly fitting changes in how the Celestials, Phoenix force, human history, Åsgård etc works.

I notice the bodies after the massacre are positioned to make them much like the bodies of "angels and demons" excavated in a scene of Chuck Austins X-Men run. A fitting association.

I do really like the art here, though. It is really A-class.