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scarletwitching · 5 years

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Can you talk about Wanda in the avataars verse? Maybe her family too if it’s relevant?

The first thing you need to understand about Avataars is that it opens with this map:

Avataars: Covenant of the Shield #1

The second thing you need to know is that this came out before Fellowship of the Ring was released, so it doesn’t have the aesthetics we now associate with prestige fantasy. There’s no grasping for “historical accuracy.” Which is why Hawkeye has purple hair and Wanda looks like this:

Her plot in Avataars goes like this: Witchfire is a paladin in the court of king St’vaan, also known as Captain Avalon. St’vaan’s son is kidnapped, and she sets out with the rest of the crew to rescue him. She runs into Simon Magnus, the leader of a separatist group of X’Changlings (people born with superpowers) who she used to work for. They have a tense exchange, but then everyone moves on. She has an abrupt romance with Idol, aka Symon, It turns out he’s working for Dreadlord (Zemo), who kidnapped St’vaan’s son, but it’s only because he has to and he heroically dies. But then she half-resurrects him as Phantazm (Vision).

Basically, a replay of the greatest hits, except everyone has terrible fantasy names (Doctor Strange is called Ctrang) and they change the Simon/Vision thing around for brevity’s sake.

Quicksilver is there (as Swift, maybe the least bad name in the book), but they get separated early on and he isn’t in it much. As previously mentioned, Magneto is also there, but it’s not clear if he’s her father or not.

Avataars: Covenant of the Shield #2

The use of “my wayward child” seems ambiguous here, and unless I missed something, there are no other references to them being related.

Overall, Avataars isn’t good and has too many clunky info dumps (it has so many pages of full text that it could be a Hickman comic), but I don’t consider it unreadable. It’s a silly medieval fantasy AU. There are some missteps (Sharon Carter gets fridged), but its version of Wanda is fine, costume aside. She gets to have a couple of cool moments, which is more than I can say for Wanda in 1602. If nothing else, I didn’t get mad reading it.

#anonymous #answered #avataars: covenant of the shield #alternate universes

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illuminatingcomics · 7 years

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I miss you!

It’s too late. It was only a matter of timebefore this happened. Out of cash, out of a job, out of my house, I only have thisplace where to vent out. I don’t want to supplicate for help, or bore you withmy sad story, I only want to open your eyes, be honest for once. This blog, andall the work published on it, was just a desperate attempt to fight back thegrowing insanity that overwhelmed my mind ever since I‘ve learned about thetruth…

And the truth, you shall learn, if you’rewilling to listen.

It’sa well known fact that Marvel experienced a terrifying financial crisis in themid nineties. Corporate greed and shady business practices saw Marvel’s stock value collapse; shares once worth$35.75 each in 1993 had sunk to $2.375 three years later. The market crashed.Retailers lost their shops, speculators jumped ship, and titles that soldmillions because they had twenty-three variant cover plated in gold and withattached trading card now sold only a few thousand copies. It was hell, and inthe back alleys of Wall Street, executives and editors were ready to cut eachother throat to salvage what little was left. Neil Gaiman compared it to thetulip mania, when back in the 17th century, the price of tulip bulbsexploded only to drastically collapse in 1637.

Now, what happened after?How did Marvel survive? The official version of the narrative tells us theyremained afloat selling the movies rights for some of their biggest and mostremunerative franchises (Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, the Sub-Mariner), before finallyentering the Disney family in 2009, other meat for the unstoppable everconsuming grinder that company became. But that’s not the real reason. I knowthe real reason. I saw the real reason.

I worked as an intern forMarvel from 2002 to 2003. It was a strange period in the company’s history.Modern classics like Grant Morrison’s New X-Men and Millar’s Ultimates were published side by side with stuff like Marville and that War Machine book madeentirely of 3D models. You could tell by entering their offices that editorsweren’t giving second thoughts to any idea, threw everything on the wall to seewhat stuck, a process that resulted in both masterpieces and ugly catastrophes.

I said I was an intern, Iwas more like a glorified janitor, paid in food stamps to empty out the trashcans, make photocopies, walk out Perlmutter’s pet South Pacific cannibal, andstuff like that… I’ve never met anyone important, so if you’re expecting astory about certain famous writers being secretly lizard people, I’m sorry, thisis not it. I’ve only ever crossed roads with Joe Quesada, and aside form hisconstant need to gift me autographed copies of the issues of Ninjak he did in1993, everything was normal… everything, not everyone. There was an editor.This man… he’s why I’m writing this.

Howard Gardner was his name,but you won’t find it printed in the credits of any book, I assure you. Yet hewas an editor, that was his role. Asking around the building, I’ve learned thathe had been working at Marvel since before the bubble burst, but only oversawfew, scattered books. Apparently he was the guy that came up with the basicideas for Avataars:Covenant of the Shield, Fantastic Four: Unlimited, and he hadghost written at least two issues of Uncanny X-Men… you know the ones.People didn’t like working with him, writers didn’t like talking to him,artists didn’t like the notes he put on their pages, yet, in an era of constantbudget cuts and people losing their job, he was still part of Marvel’s staff.

He was a tall, lanky man,of an auburn complexion, maybe… I say that because there’re few things abouthim I can accurately describe. Something about him slips away from my mind, Ican’t put a face to a voice, can’t connect it all to a name, and I’ve met himseveral times. The harder I try to remember the less I do… or perhaps, I simplydon’t want to remember, as if my memories are protecting me from something. There was a certain oddness about the way he behaved, and the requestshe made at every editor’s meeting, all promptly ignored by the rest of thosepresent. Now, you think he was asking for something gruesome and horrifying,but knowing the graphic shit Marvel published in their MAX line, would youreally believe they wouldn’t have the stomach for something in particular? No,his requests were just strange.

“I want Black Widow tofight iridescent orbs” he told a writer, “Make the furniture blue, it’s myfavourite colour” he asked a colorist, referring to an inconsequentialapartment shown during a fight scene. Just bizarre non sequiturs like those, atevery meeting when he wasn’t pitching some outlandish stupid book. He behavedlike he wasn’t entirely there, the best way I can describe it is that he actedlike a tourist from another country, that didn’t know anything about thecustoms of the area, but still tried his best to awkwardly fit in.

Eventually I got used tomost of Howard Gardner’s strangeness, but one thing I just couldn’t wrap myhead around were his visits to Marvel’s “boiler room”. Sometimes he went downthere two or three times a day, sometimes once every few weeks, and neverfailed to announce it. “I’m going to the boiler room everybody!” he woulddeclare, sometimes in the middle of a meeting, standing up and marching out theroom. Nobody seemed to care, or at least, they pretended not to care. I triedto ask Quesada once, and he just replied “He’s a funny guy like that” beforehanding me over issue #3 of Sword ofAzrael.

Such was my morbid curiosity, that oneday, after yet another announcement, I decided to follow him. He didn’t takethe elevator to reach the boiler room, but stairs. I waited five or six minutebefore chasing after him, as cautiously as possible. He was already about fourfloors lower than me, so I kept that distance, walking by the wall rather thanthe rails, only once in a while peering out to ensure he hadn’t notice me. So Iwalked, and I walked, and I walked… after several minutes I began to wonderjust how deep could Marvel’s basement be? We were already far below ground level,and yet we kept moving. I had no idea the building was that big, and thefurther down I went, the more the environment started showing signs of decay,and disuse, like nobody had been there for years, or decades… It gradually shifted, looking more and moredecrepit, walls covered in incomprehensible, ruined graffiti, garbage coatingthe floor, huge, old stacks of Jim Lee’s X-Men #1 stuffed inthe corners. The air was filled with a stale and odd smell, a mixture ofvinegar and paper, it made my eyes watery and my mouth dry, but still, I moveddown, as an unpleasant, sweaty warmth surrounded me.

Finally, the stairs ended, and only onelong, shadowed corridor appeared in front of my eyes, scarcely lit by orangetinged lamps. No trace of Gardner,he just vanished in the darkness. There was a noise, a rhythmic noise,reverberating in the air. The shuffling of pages, of a book, no, many books, anarmy of people skimming through hundreds of books, all at once. It wasstrangely hypnotic, and I began following it, carefully moving across thecorridor.

The floor was wet. Puddles of a wateryblack liquid covered it. The intense smell I perceived in my descent was allaround, and I finally identified it as the acute scent of ink. Shreddedcomicbook pages were all around, so utterly cut up and ruined I couldn’t tellwhich issues they were from.

I proceeded across thecorridor, and it seemed to stretch out without end. The further I went, thedeeper the ink lake turned. I was in it up to my ankles, when finally, afterthe seemingly endless walk, I reached a single iron door, left ajar. The boilerroom. The heat was unbearable, coating me like a blanket in the summer. I wasviscous and sticky with sweat, so thirsty my throat was sore, yet, I entered,following the noise, constantly skimmingin the my ears.

It was dark inside, Icouldn’t see anything, but still I understood, the place was bigger, muchbigger than it had any right to be. It was as if I was entering an entirelydifferent building, another place, better yet, another world. The floor was a dense, gooey swamp of ink and soaked paper, the airbasically unbreathable, polluted by the toxic smell of industrial paint. I tookjust a few steps forward into the alien world, and the marsh reached my knees. I stopped, gazed into the darkness… and I saw Gardner. He was far away,and the entire lower portion of his body, from the belt down wasn’t visible:he was immersed in the ink… I have to wonder now, was it really ink, orsomething else? And if it wasn’t, then what?

I shivered, glaring at the scene. Gardner had his arms up. He was looking atsomething. I narrowed my eyes, looked up, saw nothing at all.

Then, it moved. That nothing, was everything. Therewas a shape, filling the void, in its entirety. It was grandiose andstupendous, it was horrifying and atrocious. I couldn’t comprehend anythingabout its anatomy, it was as if a thousands sails moved at unison, shifting inspace, like billions of pages stacked one on top of the other. The rhythmicshuffling belonged to it, the supernatural, diseased sound of its existence.

If it had eyes, I can’t tell. If it had consciousness,or it was just an endless sea of living flesh, I can’t tell. It was ancient andunending, primeval masterpiece of a bygone era. It existed long before anyonecould recount, it filled our dreams and our nightmares. It was the reason ofthe company’s endurance. It was its protector. The god they had swore to serve.And it, in turn, served them. It was Marvel.

The moments that followed were a blur. I barely hadthe time to contemplate my insignificance in the greater cosmic theatre and wetmyself before I decided to run. Out of the boiler room, out of the building,out of the city, out of the goddamned country. Some would say I am coward, andit’s true, because in front of that archaic force, we’re all cowards.

It’s been fourteen years. Itried morphine, I tried cocaine, I tried coke. I still cannot forget. The imagesare burned in my mind. Mocking the thing with silly internet edits was my wayof fighting its power, and maintain my sanity, but it’s not enough anymore. Ah!It was never enough to begin with, and anonymity only got me so far. I believethey found me. I realize now the truth about Howard Gardner. More than a man,more than an editor, he was an instrument of its hateful design. He saw meescape, and he’s been looking for me, hunting me down every waking moment hewasn’t busy green lighting projects like Marvel DIVAS and Curse of the Mutants.

Theend is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery bodylumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, the hand! Thewindow! The window!

#ask #october #marvel

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