Welcome to the third of our posts commemorating May, 1976 as “Marvel Milestone Month“.  Following our looks at Captain America #200 and Thor #250, this time around we’re taking on the “Spectacular 150th Anniversary Special” issue of Avengers… although we’ll actually be spending more time on the following month’s issue, #151, since the “official” milestone issue turned out to be a disappointing misfire… unless, of course, you really were jonesing back then for an incomplete reprint of Avengers #16 (May, 1965) fronted by a mere six pages of new material from writer Steve Englehart and artist George Pérez. 

What had gone wrong?  Even before one dug into the issue, the cover offered an oblique clue — at least, if you knew how and where to look.  Sure, if you’d been following the series, the assortment of heroes depicted by Pérez and company thereon made perfect sense — these were the current candidates for a revised Avengers roster, after all, per the membership drive that had kicked off a little over a year before — and so did that big question mark in the background.  But if you happened to be coming to this title as a newbie, or had simply been away for a while, that same question mark might well have left you puzzled.  You might have thought something was missing — as indeed it was, according to the Grand Comics Database, which reports: “To the right of the UPC symbol there is a circular balloon that has been blacked out. This circle originally contained the words “.. Featuring a Far-Out New Avengers Line-Up!’… The original cover without the circle being blacked out was in the 1977 Avengers Style Guide from Marvel.”  No wonder that the cover’s final blurb — the one beginning “All This” — reads like a non sequitur in the published version.

So, the decision to run a reprint in what was to have been a special revealing-the-new-lineup issue worthy of its numerical milestone status was clearly made late in the game, while the book was already in production.  Again, we have the question: what had gone wrong?  Unfortunately, fifty years after the fact, there’s still no consensus; and at this late date, it seems unlikely there ever will be.  But while we’ll be getting into the thorns of the long-running controversy later in the post, for now let’s simply open to the comic’s opening splash page, assuming unto ourselves the same blissful ignorance that most of Avengers #150’s readers in May, 1976 (your humble blogger included) were, of necessity, then laboring under…

A few things to take note of here: first (and probably least), since Avengers was not, in fact, 150 years old, this story should not have been called a “sesquicentennial celebration” (nor, for much the same reason, was it in any sense an “anniversary special”, as the cover had claimed).  Second, the list of credits integrates the names of the personnel who worked on the reprinted material used in the issue — i.e., scripter Stan Lee, penciller Jack Kirby, inker Dick Ayers, and letterer Artie Simek — without actually acknowledging that their contributions come in the form of a partial reprint of Avengers #16, which seems kinda sneaky to me.  Third, the other two inkers credited, John Tartaglione and Duffy Vohland, hadn’t previously been involved with embellishing Pérez’s Avengers work, which suggests that they may well have been drafted in to work on this job at the last minute (for the record, Tartaglione would ink the next issue as well).

Fourth, and finally, the person credited as “editorial-ememdator” for this issue, Archie Goodwin, was at this time the editor of Marvel’s black-and-white magazines — or, at least he had been, up until this month.  Meanwhile, the editor-in-chief of Marvel’s much larger color comics line was — or had been — Marv Wolfman.  And if you look at the credits for the remainder of Marvel’s May, 1976 four-color output — with the exception of reprints, as well as those books produced by specially contracted writer/editors like Roy Thomas, Len Wein, and Jack Kirby — the name listed as those comics’ editor is Marv Wolfman.  That makes Avengers #150 a definite anomaly… but if you’re wondering why that might be so, I’ll have to ask you to put that question in your pocket for the time being; for now, let’s get on with our story…

Half a century on, the dialogue in this scene still makes me smile.  Having written the Avengers for almost four years now, Steve Englehart had a firm handle on the members’ individual personalities and voices, so that their shared affection and humor feel completely genuine.

The Scarlet Witch’s wry invocation of the “Lady Liberators” calls back to Avengers #83, and its less-than-successful attempt to deal with the subject of “Women’s Lib”; meanwhile, the other footnoted reference, to Iron Man #85, commemorates the welcome departure of Iron Man’s nose (the origins of which we previously discussed here).

With this last page, Englehart and Pérez establish the basic structure for this story (or, at least, what would have been the structure, had things gone as originally planned), as we see the Avengers’ here-and-now deliberations alternating with Dan Rather’s Sam Reuther’s recounting of the team’s history, with thematic parallels between the two narrative tracks subtly woven in — as demonstrated here by Thor’s role in the team’s founding being mirrored in the present by his stated intent to leave…

Englehart had set up Thor’s departure pretty well over recent issues, as we’d seen Moondragon needling the God of Thunder about his “slumming” amongst mere mortals, with things finally having come to a head in the previous issue’s conclusion of the “Serpent Crown” saga.  I wasn’t very happy about it — as all regular readers of this blog know, Thor was, and still is, my favorite Marvel Comics hero — but I figured that it wouldn’t be forever.  (And I was right, of course.  For the record, Thor’s next adventure with the team would occur just eight months after his forthcoming exit, in issue #159 — although I should note he didn’t formally rejoin the team at that time,)

There’s some wonderfully understated storytelling going on in that last tier of panels; Iron Man’s resigned but rueful comment about wishing “that nobody’d put this idea in his [i.e., Thor’s] head” is clearly aimed at Moondragon — but rather than directly indicating this by showing the Golden Avenger looking pointedly at the priestess of Titan,  Pérez subtly draws attention to Moondragon’s role by foregrounding her seated, obscured figure, while setting Iron Man in the far background, as distant and detached from her as the panel will allow.

Next, Iron Man’s question for Captain America leads directly into — what else? — Reuther’s rundown of the Avengers’ rescue of Cap from the ice in Avengers #4…

And here, of course, is where things run right off the rails, as what should have been a brief recap of the Avengers’ first major roster shake-up turns instead into an unannounced and unexpected (not to mention incomplete) reprint of that event’s original presentation in Avengers #16.  Yes, it’s a classic story — and if Avengers #150 had been a double-sized issue in which this content was presented as a sort of “bonus” to a regular-length new story, Marvel might have gotten away with it.  As it was, however, this was a big disappointment to me as a reader at the time, and it still rankles a little, even after all these years.  I’m inclined to think I’d have felt that way even if I hadn’t already read the original, 20-page “The Old Order Changeth!” the last time Marvel had reprinted it (in Marvel Triple Action #10 [Apr., 1973], if you’re wondering); but, if course, I’ll never know for sure.

Anyway, we’re going to skip over the bulk of the next twelve pages, returning just for the last panel, and the accompanying “Next Issue” blurb:

If there was one bright spot in having to wait until June for the revelation of “the long awaited new Avengers line-up” in #151, it was that the conclusion of the story was going to need another cover on more or less the same theme as that of #150’s — and that when that cover appeared on the racks, it had been drawn by none other than the title’s co-progenitor, Jack Kirby.  Your humble blogger actually prefers this one to Pérez’s job for the “real” milestone issue, though I can see where some might think it focuses too much on the team’s “Big Three” to the detriment of the other team members.  But, to each their own, as we’re fond of saying around here.

We turn now to the issue’s opening splash page:

And that’s also where we’re going to pause for a bit, so as to provide some further background information for what we’re going to find as we make our way through Avengers #151 — beginning with an explanation as to what in the world the name of Gerry Conway is doing in the credits of this “misplaced Marvel masterpiece”.  Hadn’t Conway left Marvel less than a year earlier to go work for rival DC, after being passed over — unfairly, in his opinion — for the job of Marvel editor-in-chief?  Indeed he had.  But in the time since then, Marvel had burned through not one, but two EICs, with the most recent incumbent, Marv Wolfman, following in the footsteps of his friend Len Wein in finding the job too mentally and physically exhausting to continue.  The man who’d held the job before either of them, Roy Thomas, had subsequently been approached about returning to the fold, and had more or less agreed to do so.  But then, at something close to the last minute, Thomas decided he’d really rather live in Los Angeles, CA, where he’d recently been vacationing — and recommended that Marvel hire Gerry Conway instead.  The Marvel brass decided to go with that, and so it came to pass that the then 23-year-old Conway returned to Marvel triumphant, ensconced at last in the job he’d wanted so badly… though, in the end, he kept the position for only a few weeks.

We turn now to the letters column of Avengers #151, the bulk of which was taken up by an “Apologia” that may have been written by Gerry Conway — though it’s just as likely to have been the work of assistant editor Jim Shooter, who (as readers of our Ghost Rider #19 post from earlier this month may recall), had come to that position during Marv Wolfman’s tenure as Marvel’s editor-in-chief:

Steve Englehart has been forthright in offering his account of how he came to part ways in the spring of 1976 not only with Avengers, but with Marvel Comics in general.  It’s a story he’s related in various venues, and in various degrees of detail, over the past five decades; the following version, one of the earliest I’ve found, first appeared in an interview that was published in The Comic Times #2 (Sep., 1980).  It begins with Englehart explaining how his disaffection with Marvel had been growing for some time prior to the flashpoint that came during the process of creating Avengers #150:

There began to be decisions made not by Stan Lee as the top of a bunch of creative people, but by Stan Lee as the bottom of a bunch of businessmen.  And he began to really put his energy up into the business end of it rather than down into the creative end below.  And the corporate influence became greater and greater…

 

They began to say. “Next year you have to make 10 percent more profit.”  And they didn’t care how you did it.  They didn’t have the slightest concern with what was in the books, they were just interested in the bottom line.

 

So we began to start hearing, “Well, you can’t do that anymore.  We know you did it, and we know it sold, but we prefer to make it a little simpler, a little smoother now,” and things like that.

 

It came to a head in April of ’76 when Gerry Conway became the editor for just three weeks.  He called me up and said. “I wrote The Justice League when I was at National, I’m the editor at Marvel now and I want The Avengers.”  And I said, “Hey, I’ve been writing it for 4 years. and it’s been selling.”  And he said. “Yeah, but I’m the editor.  I’ve got the power and I’m taking it.”  And I said, “Well, like hell.  I don’t have to put up with this.”

 

I had no plans ever to leave Marvel.  I mean, I wanted to be a Marvel comic writer.  We used to laugh at DC, and I found myself in a real sort of schizophrenic thing, sitting there sort of watching myself saying “Well, then fuck you, I quit.”  And part of me was shrieking “Do you realized what you’re doing?”  Because I was cutting myself off, right there.

In another interview published around the same time, in Comics Feature #5 (Sep., 1980), the writer offered further details concerning his actions following his fateful phone call with Gerry Conway:

I was halfway through [scripting] that issue [i.e., Avengers #150] when Conway called me up and I quit.  What I did, actually, was sit down and write the last eight pages in five minutes, with the most outrageous dialogue.  I just said, “I’m going to get this out of here,” and wrote just silly shit.  It wasn’t a real Avengers comic book, it was just dialogue for the sake of dialogue.  I remember Yellowjacket said to the Wasp, “Marry me and we’ll raise little Avengeritos.”  Then I realized that that was no good because they’d just rewrite it.  Better I should make them go reprint for the 150th issue.  I’m not shy about taking my revenge when I get screwed, but I don’t carry it around with me for months afterwards.  In the heat of the moment I said, “We’ll make them go reprint and to hell with them.”

Speaking on behalf of the eighteen-year-old me who bought that comic book new off the stands, unaware that it was 2/3 reprint material, all I can say is: Gee, thanks, Steve.

The late Gerry Conway’s version of events was, not too surprisingly, quite different.  This account originally appeared Back Issue #45 (Nov., 2010):

[Avengers] was perennially late to the printer, which was costing Marvel a lot of money…  I asked Steve for a commitment to have his next plot for The Avengers in by Friday, so that George Pérez could get started on it by Monday.  I gave Steve a Friday deadline for one reason — so that, if he didn’t make it, I’d have time over the weekend to plot a replacement issue.  I made it clear to Steve this is what I’d do.  He agreed to have the plot in by Friday.

According to Conway, he didn’t receive Englehart’s plot by the agreed upon day.

I called him, and he denied he’d ever made any commitment to delivery by Friday — as far as he was concerned, George didn’t need the plot until Monday, so he wasn’t going to deliver a plot until Monday.  When I told him this wasn’t what we’d agreed, so I was going to write a replacement plot myself, and he’d have to miss an issue, Steve responded [that] a fill-in story would ruin the overall storyline, and he accused me of trying to take over the book.  He said if I insisted on doing a fill-in, he’d quit.

 

Well, if I was going to have any authority as an editor, I had to do what I said I’d do.  Maybe someone else would have backed down and given Steve another chance to deliver his plot by Monday.  I didn’t feel I had that option. So Steve quit The Avengers.

Which of these accounts comes closest to what actually happened fifty years ago?  That’s not my place to say.  It’s worth noting, however, that neither contradicts the account given way back in June, 1976, in Avengers #151’s letters column.  After all, Steve Englehart acknowledged in 1980 that he’d turned in the second half of #150’s script late on purpose, thereby forcing the issue to go part-reprint.  The only real question is about what happened on the phone between him and Gerry Conway to prompt that action on his part.*

Speaking of #151’s lettercol, you may have noticed that, towards the end of the “Apologia”, Marvel challenged readers to identify which pages of that issue had been written by Englehart, which by Conway, and which by Jim Shooter.  According to a follow-up in the letters column of Avengers #154, no respondent got the breakdown completely right — still, Marvel published the full attribution therein, and we’ll be using that information to identify who wrote what as we proceed through the story (though, as we’ll see, even here some of the facts are in contention).

We jump back into things at the beginning of page 2 — which, like the opening splash before it, was scripted by Gerry Conway.

We haven’t looked at an issue of Fantastic Four lately — so, for anyone confused by the Thing’s physical appearance in the scene above, be advised that at this time, Ben Grimm had been temporarily “cured” of being the Thing in FF #167 after prolonged exposure to gamma radiation emitted by the Hulk.  Subsequently, Reed had presented the human, non-powered Ben with a “Thing suit” so that he could continue superheroing with the team.  None of it had anything to do with the Avengers — though I suppose you could argue that, given the FF’s status as the “first” super-team of the “Marvel Age of Comics”, having at least one member show up in a “Greek chorus” capacity made a certain sort of thematic sense.  (The fact that George Pérez was also drawing Fantastic Four at this time may have lent some creative synergy to the idea.)

One small note regarding Conway’s script for this last page; it seems highly unlikely that Sam Reuther could have received “reports” that Thor was planning to leave the Avengers, seeing as how the only person he’d spoken to about it before announcing it to the team just now was Moondragon.  But, whatever.

We come now to Steve Englehart’s first page for this issue — which, as you can see for yourself if you take a moment to scroll up and check, would have slotted in perfectly after the last “new” page of Avengers #150, right down to the interrupted sentence:

From here, it’s over to another Conway page…

Unlike the earlier pages by Avengers‘ new writer (and editor), this one actually does count as one of the “story spots” mentioned in the issue’s lettercol, pulled together by Conway and Pérez and intended to “lead into future issues”.  And since I’m not expecting to post about any of those future issues (at least not in any depth), I’ll go ahead and note that the distressed gent shown above is Bob Frank, aka the Golden Age super-speedster known as the Whizzer, who’d been established by Roy Thomas back in Giant-Size Avengers #1 as being the birth father of Wanda and Pietro Maximoff, aka the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver.  (This “fact” would of course be retconned just a few years later, but in 1976, it was canon.)  Like the other pages added to Englehart’s original script, it breaks the originally established pattern of cutting from the Avengers’ meeting room to Reuther’s broadcast and back again — but it’s hard to see how else what remained of Englehart’s script for #150 could have been padded out to fill an issue without extensive rewriting, and Conway at least tried to keep the new “story spots” connected to the main narrative, as demonstrated above by his cutting from a scene highlighting Wanda to one featuring her supposed dad (whose next appearance, by the way, will be in Avengers #153).

And now, back to Englehart:

This “story spot” page scripted by Conway foreshadows yet another upcoming development, the return of the Living Laser (who is of course the unidentified orange-gloved figure talking to the unnamed general in the scene above).  Never mind that Marvel’s readers of the time thought that the LL had been killed stone dead in Captain Marvel #35 (an issue which, incidentally, had been written by one Steve Englehart); as would be revealed in Avengers #153, that so-called “Living” Laser had in fact been an android duplicate.  Again, the scene is thematically linked to the main storyline by making reference to LL’s unrequited passion for the Wasp — one of the two Avengers currently under the spotlight…

Moving on from the Pyms, Sam Reuther next briefly discusses three heroes who had a chance to join the Avengers, but didn’t — Spider-Man, Sub-Mariner, and Daredevil — before proceeding to several others who did take the plunge…

This page by Englehart is followed by another of Conway’s; as with the earlier scene with the Thing, this next one offers the perspective of another hero-team — one that, in 1976, was just as new and untried as the Fantastic Four were old and experienced.  Of course, we’re talking about the Champions, who’d already been name-dropped (twice) by Englehart on the page above…

Hercules and the Black Widow continue to reminisce about the good old days for another few panels, and the page ends with Johnny Blaze musing, “I guess everyone needs a friend — even a Ghost Rider!”  Then it’s back once again to the main story…

Don’t feel too relieved, Shellhead; Moondragon will return a little more than a year from now, for Avengers Annual #7.  (And that won’t be the last you see of her, either, sorry.)

According to the Avengers #154 letters column, the page above is the last scripted by Steve Englehart; all of the text in the next four pages is the work of Jim Shooter, with the page following after that having been written by Conway, and the one after that (which is the story’s final page) by Shooter.  On his own personal web site, however, Steve Englehart claims to have written all six of the story’s concluding pages.  Clearly, at least one of these statements is less than completely accurate in one or more respects; again, it’s not my place to say which.  In any event, no one seems to dispute that Englehart’s original plot for Avengers #150 is what’s ultimately driving the narrative in these final scenes.

I don’t think that the mystery of just where Thor, Moondragon, were headed ever gets addressed in Avengers — but five months after this issue, readers of Defenders #44 (which was plotted by Gerry Conway) would learn that their destination was Moondragon’s former home, Titan.

Wonder Man?!  Now. that’s what I call a shock ending… or at least it would have been, if a Marvel Bullpen Bulletin published the previous month hadn’t already given the game away.  Oh, well; perhaps some readers had already forgotten about that spoiler by the time the event actually arrived, an issue later than it was originally supposed to.**

As to why Marvel was bringing Wonder Man back at this particular time, it seems to have been at the instigation of none other than Marvel publisher Stan Lee.  The first hint of this being the motivation appears to have emerged at a public appearance Lee made a couple of years later (later transcribed and published in The Comics Journal #42 [Oct., 1978]), during which the Man expressed his displeasure over DC Comics’ recent (relatively speaking) introduction of a character named “Power Girl”; given that Marvel already had a character named Power Man (two, actually), Lee thought this was bad form:

You know, years ago we brought out Wonder Man, and they sued us because they had Wonder Woman, and me, being a gentleman (Laughter), I said okay, I’ll discontinue Wonder Man.  And all of a sudden they’ve got Power Girl. Oh boy.  How unfair.

In his 1980 Comics Feature interview, Steve Englehart confirmed that the revival of Wonder Man was a direct result of the Power Man/Girl business:

Wonder Man was created in Avengers #9 and DC had objected loudly.  Stan said, “Okay, I won’t do this character any more.”  But then DC created Power Girl, and Stan said, “Let’s do it.”  It was just petty inter-company jealousies.  They just told me to bring the character back, but that was just when I was leaving the series so I didn’t have much to do with it.

Beyond the end-of-issue scene depicting WM’s literal return — and setting aside the character’s earlier turn as a member of the “Legion of the Unliving” during the “Celestial Madonna” saga — Englehart’s contribution to the Wonder Man revival project extended only as far as plotting the next issue, #152 (the Jack Kirby-Dan Adkins cover of which you can check out at left).  Gerry Conway handled the actual scripting tor that one — which, as it turned out, didn’t do much in the way of providing answers to the mystery of Simon Williams’ resurrection.  Nor, it must be said, did the remaining issues of Conway’s run as Avengers writer, which would terminate in December, 1976 with issue #157.  Wonder Man literally shambled his way through those issues, slowly regaining something like his original human consciousness and will, but the explanation for how and why he’d returned to the land of the living in the first place would have to wait for Conway’s successor, Jim Shooter (and for a future installment of this blog).

Avengers #152 was also the first to bear Gerry Conway’s name as the editor of record — though by that time, he’d already left the editor-in-chief position at Marvel Comics.  According to what he told Back Issue in 2010, he’d held the latter, bigger job for “about a month and a half”; according to Steve Englehart, it was closer to three weeks.  However long it actually was, Conway was in and out so quickly that his ascension never got announced in the monthly Marvel Bullpen Bulletins; nor, as best as I can tell, was he ever credited as “editor” on any Marvel comic released during this period that he didn’t also write.  Even Avengers #150, with which he must have been editorially involved at some point, carried an editing credit only for… Archie Goodwin, the man who’d ultimately succeed Conway as Marvel’s EIC (see?  I told you we’d get back to that anomaly eventually).

Evidently, the conflict Conway had with Englehart over Avengers was not atypical of his interactions with other creative personnel during his brief reign.  As he said in 2010:

Being pretty young I probably wasn’t as smooth in my dealings with the writers and artists as I might have been…  I met a great deal of entrenched opposition and resentment from some people whose egos were offended by the idea I’d been put in charge.  Maybe that was because I’d left Marvel for a year and then returned to the top job.  Maybe it was because of my personality.  Whatever the reason, the hostility I encountered made the job intolerable…

Upon exiting the editor-in-chief position, Conway appears to have negotiated a version of the same “writer/editor” contract enjoyed by his predecessors Roy Thomas, Len Wein, and Marv Wolfman — though one which had him working on a greater quantity of titles in comparison.  (In October, 1976 alone, Marvel released an eyebrow-raising seven comics both written and edited by Conway.)  That inevitably brought with it other conflicts, since in order to provide Conway with his contracted quota of titles some reshuffling was necessary.  One particularly unfortunate example was the unwilling departure of writer Steve Gerber from Defenders — though that’s another topic we’ll save for discussion in a future post.

For now, let’s return to Conway’s tenure on Avengers.  At the time his issues originally came out, I found the drop-off in the quality of writing following Englehart’s run to be practically painful; recently, I re-read all of them to see if my older self would view them more favorably, and I’m afraid my assessment hasn’t changed much.  Conway doesn’t appear to have had very many new ideas regarding what sort of adversaries the team should battle, or the kind of situations they should get mixed up in.  Along with the aforementioned handling of the mystery of Wonder Man’s return — which pretty much amounted to kicking the can down the road — and the return of the Whizzer, we also saw Earth’s Mightiest Heroes get involved with Doctor Doom and the Sub-Mariner in a crossover with Super-Villain Team-Up, as well as what appeared to be the return of yet another long-absent hero, the Black Knight, but really wasn’t.  Otherwise, the most substantial development that happened over the course of the run was the return of the Living Laser, something my younger self was hardly inclined to get excited over; what was more, that particular storyline ended up involving the Serpent Crown from Counter-Earth, which Englehart had in fact seemed to have forgotten all about at the end of Avengers #149, and therefore needed to be dealt with — but about which Conway didn’t really seem to have any interesting notions of his own.  Beyond what I saw as their plotting deficiencies, I had another major problem with the scripts, in that the characters’ voices no longer sounded quite right to me; dialogue that had come across as genuine and natural during Englehart’s run had now taken an unwelcome turn towards the stilted and cliched.

I don’t mean to suggest by all of this that none of the Avengers stories published on Gerry Conway’s watch had any entertainment value; the artwork, mostly by the ever-improving George Pérez or the always-reliable John Buscema, was generally excellent, and in a visual medium like comics that obviously counted for a lot.  And, to be honest, I kind of hate to come down too hard on Conway; not simply because he’s no longer with us and so can no longer come to his own defense, but because of how hard he could be on himself in regards to this era in his latter years, such as in his 2015 introduction to Marvel Masterworks — The Avengers, Vol. 16.  That collection begins with issue #150 and ends with #163, thus bracketing Conway’s stories between the last of Englehart’s and the earliest of Shooter’s; in his intro (which bears the title “When Chaos Was King”), Conway describes some of the problems he found upon taking the editor-in-chief position in 1976, then goes on to say:

I tried to bring some order to the chaos. I failed. My inexperience and poor social skills resulted in several writers and artists quitting when I tried to enforce editorial oversight.  One of the writers who quit (and who hasn’t spoken to me more than once in the nearly forty years since) was my friend, Steve Englehart.

 

That’s why the volume of Marvel Masterworks you hold in your hands was a sad one for me to review in preparation for writing this introduction.  To me, it marks the nadir of my career at Marvel, and, I think, the nadir of Marvel’s experiment with its non-editorial editorial system.  Everything that went wrong with Marvel’s books in the mid-Seventies is in evidence here: inconsistent art (in the thirteen Avengers issues there are five different pencilers, not counting the reprinted Kirby art in issue #150, and God alone knows how many different inkers), story arcs that fail to develop, awkward collisions with other titles, and a general sense that things are out of control.  Which they are.

 

As the editor and writer for most of the stories here I take the blame for that, but I share the blame in part with the system that gave me my chance to rise and subsequently crash. It’s a system that was inherently unstable, but when it worked, it worked brilliantly…

It’s hard for me to disagree with either point of that last statement of Conway’s — either the brilliance or the instability.  As I’ve said before, my younger self would likely have been fine with Marvel just delaying going to press for a month (or even more) when a book was late, giving the creators time to finish their work, rather than going with a reprint or other fill-in — but in the American comics industry of the mid-1970s, that option wasn’t on offer.  Given the actual economic realities of the time, I’m still inclined to think that the brilliant comics we got were worth all the downsides caused by the instability… though I’m pretty sure that not everyone who reads this will agree with me about that.

There’s one more factor to bear in mind, and it’s this: if Steve Englehart hadn’t left Marvel when he did in 1976 and gone to DC Comics, chances are we’d have never been graced by his subsequent runs on Justice League of America, Mister Miracle, and (last but definitely not least) Batman in Detective Comics.  And that would have been a real loss to the field.  Does that mean that everything worked out for the best, after all?  I don’t know, but it’s something to ponder, at least.

Before wrapping this long post up, I’d like to note that, despite the valedictory tone that’s pervaded much of what I’ve written here, we’re not quite done with Steve Englehart’s 1970s Marvel work on this blog.  Still to come are his latter issues of Doctor Strange and Captain Marvel, and even a Thor Annual — though I’m afraid you’ll have to look elsewhere for an analysis of his Super-Villain Team-Up issues, sorry.

But before we can get to any of those, we still have Marvel Milestone Month to wrap up — and if Avengers #150/151 may be taken as signaling the end of an era, our fourth and final commemorative comic can, in its way, be considered a harbinger of the Marvel age that was to come.  I hope you’ll return this Saturday for our look at X-Men #100 — or, as one might dub it, “The Eve of the Phoenix”.

 

*Adding yet another wrinkle to the difficulty of figuring out the timeline of these events, Englehart’s decision to quit seems to have come while not only Avengers #150, but also the preceding issue, #149, was still making its way through production,  I base this assertion on a 2010 blog post from former Marvel staffer and writer Scott Edelman, who therein shared a portion of the original art for #149’s final page:

(Needless to say, Steve Englehart’s “Dear Bullpen” message didn’t make it into the published version.)

**Prior to letting the secret of Wonder Man’s return slip in May, 1976’s’s Bullpen Bulletins, Marvel had already leaked the info to the audience of its in-house fanzine, FOOM — the 12th issue of which included a brief roundup of Avengers news that closed with the following tidbit:

Cover dated December, 1975, FOOM #12 appears to have been produced prior to Marvel’s decision to run a fill-in story in Avengers #145-146 — something which obviously had to affect both the planning and scheduling of future stories, and which may explain this news item’s announcement of the team’s upcoming lineup change as coming not in #150, but in #149, with the milestone issue focusing instead on the return of Wonder Man.  Having said that, it’s hard for this reader to imagine that the baldly celebratory atmosphere of the story that eventually did appear in #150-151 was ever meant to be a mere lead-in to the “true” commemoration of the numerical milestone — which, assuming it was anything like the story that ultimately ran in #152, would seem way too grim and downbeat for such an occasion.  On the other hand, Steve Englehart might have originally had wildly different ideas for how the basic ideas of “choosing a new team” and “Wonder Man returns” would play out over these two issues; in any case, I doubt we’ll ever know for sure, one way or the other.