Avengers 127
“Bride and Doom!”
Published June 1974
Writer: Steve Englehart
Pencils: Sal Buscema
Inks: Joe Staton
Letters: Tom Orzechowski
Colors: Englehart
Editor: Roy Thomas
Cover: Gil Kane and Mike Esposito

Editors note: Yes, I know this isn’t an issue of the Fantastic Four. But Avengers 127 is the immediate precursor to FF 150 and the FF play a major role in it, so I felt it made sense to give it the full, TWGCM treatment. We will resume our march through the FF next week.

Synopsis

Gorgon and Lockjaw, the Inhumans, summon the Avengers to the wedding of Quicksilver and Crystal, although there is friction between Quicksilver and his sister, the Scarlet Witch. The Avengers and the Fantastic Four arrive in the Great Refuge (not yet called Attilan) for the festivities, but soon fall victim to mind control attacks, seemingly at the hands of the Maximus and Alpha Primatives, who are later revealed to be pawns of the evil robot Ultron.

What’s going on here

This issue is a bit of a jumble, with a lot of moving parts that don’t really cohere. The wedding of Crystal and Quicksilver, announced by Gorgon in the splash page, takes the Avengers by surprise, and presumably readers were equally taken aback. There was no hint that Crystal and Quicksilver’s relationship had advanced to the wedding stage in recent issues of the Fantastic Four, nor, as far as I can tell, in the Avengers. My guess is that editor Roy Thomas, wanting a big event for FF 150, thought up the wedding, and the writers made it work as best they could. The Alpha Primatives/Maximus/Omega/Ultron plot is particularly janky.

I’m not really familiar with this era of the Avengers, so it’s interesting to see Joe Staton inking Sal Buscema. I have never been a Steve Englehart fan, and I consider his run on the FF in the late 80s once of the worst ever, but I was surprised to see him get a coloring credit. The Gil Kane cover is amazing.

What I liked

I’ve mentioned before that the FF at times seems cut off from the rest of the Marvel Universe, and true cross-over events in this period are pretty rare. I believe the last was FF 73, but I may be missing something. So it’s fun to see the FF as part of a greater whole, even if I don’t love how they are handled here (more on that in a bit). Of course, cross-over events went from fun to a painful obligation for comic collectors pretty quickly, but as a young reader I loved them.

One small highlight from this period of comics is Iron Man’s nose. It always makes me smile.

What I didn’t like

I was disappointed with how the FF was dropped into the story, almost as an afterthought and without a scene of Johnny reacting to the news of Crystal’s engagement. Surely that would have merited a few panels in the FF’s own issue. Here is there first appearance:

When Johnny finally speaks to Crystal, it feels perfunctory and rushed:

It’s slotted into a sequence of exchanges between various characters — Johnny and Crystal, Crystal and Quicksilver, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, Mantis and the Swordsman — that has a distinctly soap opera-ish quality. All of it is very melodramatic, and written in anguished tones. (Plus, is Crystal really a “maiden?”)

Speaking of Englehart’s purple prose, this is as cringey a bit of writing I’ve yet encountered:

And Sue is suddenly back on the team, as if nothing over the last 20 issues in the FF ever happened:

I also thought this panel was odd. The Avengers and FF are performing tricks for the crowd at a wedding banquet? With Black Bolt elevated on a throne? There’s a weirdly medieval vibe to how Buscema envisioned Attilan.

Lastly, this panel was almost laughably weird. The giant Omega pulls off a mask to reveal he’s Ultron, like in the last scene of a Scoobey-Doo episode. Does Ultron really need to wear a disguise when he’s a 50-foot monster?

Anything else?

As mentioned, the Kane cover is incredible. It also is an echo of his cover for FF 146, and both foreshadow his cover of Giant-Size X-Men 1, and all of which seemed to inspire Mike Zeck’s Secret Wars 1, which in itself is much homaged. (Hat tip to sharp-eyed reader Jay Weintraub for pointing out the similarities between the covers of FF 146 and GS X-Men 1).

Overall

An Englehart / Thomas mess.