A Sense of Doubt blog post #3379 - Avengers "Sex Scandal" - COMIC BOOK SUNDAY for 2405.19

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3379 - Avengers "Sex Scandal" - COMIC BOOK SUNDAY for 2405.19

I am entering low power mode... Not that I am in a kind of low power mode all the time. I try to curate shares of other people's original content as much as I can. but often it's very little curating.

Since 2022, when I set a new record of days behind, I try to keep up with the blog and not be more then 1-3 days behind at any time. I have more of a production line happening lately with the blog, so often posts are done in advance during nights and weekends when I am not working and thus "relaxing." I find blog work to be relaxing.

And, so, here's a share that has been drafted for some time, with only a little curating.

I disapprove of Marvel's cowardice in excising this scene documented below from collected editions of Avengers.

WEAK SAUCE.

Just own it.

I mean, really, who among us has not considered the sexual adaptations of Mister Fantastic's powers?

I loved this "sex scandal" sequence when I originally read it (and I have never missed an issue of Avengers since I started buying consecutively in 1985, and my runs before that are pretty consistent).

Thanks for tuning in.


via Tom Brevoort - newsletter #81: Ore Wa Senshi - Oct 15th 2023

This issue of AVENGERS, #71, was released on October 15, 2003 and hasn’t been reprinted in its entirety in years. 

And that, my friends, is a story. So, first off, it’s worth knowing that, as I believe I detailed in a previous Newsletter, Marvel President Bill Jemas had been growing steadily more and more dissatisfied with the writers then working for Marvel, to the point where he started up the Epic Comics program in the hopes of bringing in some fresh talent that he could mold in his image. Bill certainly didn’t like my books—we had history that went back to his earlier days working on trading cards at Fleer, so ours was a complicated relationship. 

To try to improve relations, at a certain point when he was trying to get stories paced out more in the manner that he preferred, I wound up having new AVENGERS writer Geoff Johns speak directly to him, and to get his notes on the long arc we were planning, “Red Zone.” Bill’s opening line to Geoff was typical of him, 

“You don’t know how to write.” 

But Geoff had been trained in Hollywood and he’d taken aggressive notes from executives before, and so rather than being cower by Bill, he met each challenge head on, and in doing so, while Bill never entirely came around on his writing, he did gain a little bit of Bill’s respect. 

Now, at this time, Bill was pushing for our material to be edgier. 

THE ULTIMATES had been launched which featured more extreme versions of the Avengers characters—more violent, more sexualized, more dangerous—and it was a huge hit. Bill wanted to push the envelope in these directions a lot more. He felt that any attention was good attention, even if it was seemingly negative. And he made these preference known to Geoff through their discussions.

Consequently, Geoff plotted a sequence in AVENGERS #71, the first issue after “Red Zone”, designed to steer into what Bill said he wanted. The issue focuses on Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne, who had been estranged for years but who had been coming back together across the length of this run.

The scene opened with a shot of a Las Vegas hotel with shouting coming from inside one of the rooms, shouting that made it apparent over the next few panels that the persons involved were Hank and Jan, and the misdirect was that Hank was striking her as he notoriously had in the past. 

But at the page turn, we find that Hank and Jan are rather in bed together, and that Hank has shrunk down to his ant-size in order to pleasure her more directly. It’s a dumb, adolescent shock-scene, the sort that really doesn’t have a place in a book like AVENGERS. 

But when Bill heard about it, he loved it, and pushed for it to be even more graphic and shocking. So these were the marching orders. End of the day, though, none of that abdicates me from my part in allowing all of this, I could have stopped this page at any point. 

There’s also a digression I need to talk about to give you some context for a bit of what came next. Bill was in his final days at this point, though nobody knew it yet, and he was growing more regularly erratic. 

Upset at the artwork in some recent issue of some title—I don’t recall which one—he decided that, going forward, EIC Joe Quesada would have to sign off on every page of every issue that was being produced. It was a tremendous bottleneck, a waste of time and resources and this only lasted for as long as Bill remained in charge, which wasn’t long. 

But this nonsense provided me with some good fortune. 

Because by the time AVENGERS #71 hit the stands, Bill was out, and so the shitstorm over this page fell directly on me alone. 

Fortunately, I had both the e-mails from Bill expressing his love for this scene and the sign-offs from Joe proving that everybody involved had both seen and blessed this sequence before it went to print, and so I wasn’t solely responsible, Marvel had approved the sequence. 

In the end, the decision was made to drop the offending page from the collected edition, and it hasn’t been reprinted since that initial printing so far as I know.

On a more prosaic note, cover artist J.G. Jones included the likeness of editor Lysa Hawkins on the cover of this issue, behind that big die in the foreground.

LOW POWER MODE: I sometimes put the blog in what I call LOW POWER MODE. If you see this note, the blog is operating like a sleeping computer, maintaining static memory, but making no new computations. If I am in low power mode, it's because I do not have time to do much that's inventive, original, or even substantive on the blog. This means I am posting straight shares, limited content posts, reprints, often something qualifying for the THAT ONE THING category and other easy to make posts to keep me daily. That's the deal. Thanks for reading.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2405.19 - 10:10

- Days ago = 3243 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.