As consumers and critics of entertainment, many of us enjoy hunting for information about the creators of that entertainment. What was their intent? What symbolism, what clues, what messages did they mean to bury in their work for us to uncover? Many of us also frequently go beyond the information offered up to us. We frequently speculate about how the beliefs, life events, or relationships of creators might influence their art. Which songs are about which boyfriends? Which characters are mocking portrayals of real-life rivals? We long to know what drove our favorite artists to create and what ideas haunt them.
But sometimes, art is just a day job. Sometimes the drive to create only comes from a paycheck and the only thing haunting the creator is a deadline. This is the roughly the case for Gerry Conway’s work on the “Avengers,” a short run (#151-157 and Annual #6) wedged between two more famous runs (Steve Englehart immediately before and Jim Shooter immediately after). Conway described his approach to the title recently in an Epic Marvel Podcast interview, “I think I was just vamping to some extent, just trying to pay off the stuff that Steve [Englehart] has left unresolved and do stories that would keep some interest going until we could decide who would be the best team on the book.”
But even this era of “vamping” has interesting context to unpack. The Conway era of “Avengers” occurred during an interstitial time at Marvel. His issues came out in 1976 and 1977 when the wild experimentation of the early 70s was starting to burn out but before the consistency of the Shooter era had begun. For example, Jim Starlin was no longer on Captain Marvel and his Warlock story was drawing to a close. This is also right around the time that the Steve Gerber era of “Defenders” came to an end. Steve Englehart, one of the foremost craftsmen of the countercultural comics of Marvel’s early 70s, left “Avengers” (and Marvel entirely) because of an editorial dispute with Conway.
In order to take a closer look at Conway’s “Avengers” run, I re-read the Attuma and Dr. Doom story that ran through “Avengers” #154-156 and “Super-Villain Team-Up” #9. Conway plots and writes #154-155. On #156 he is credited as plotter with Jim Shooter taking over as “writer.” The “Super-Villain Team-Up” issue is written by Bill Mantlo.
The biggest giveaway that Conway is writing in a kind of holding pattern is that these issues don’t spend much time on character development. There are some interesting moments where the Vision reflects on his humanity in light of the unexpected return of Wonder Man (the Vision’s android mind being a kind of copy of the mind of Wonder Man). But aside from that, these issues are primarily plot driven. In fact, the majority of the story features the Avengers as nothing more than mind-controlled pawns of Attuma. There are a lot of nuances as to how and why that happens but to put it as briefly as possible: Attuma mind-controls the Avengers so they will attack Namor, in order to serve as a distraction so Attuma can go to Maryland unbothered. Attuma has never resonated with me as a villain because I’ve never been told what motivates him. Of course, I know that he wants power, but why does he want that power? What is he trying to prove? It’s very possible that I’ve missed some essential Attuma backstory comics, but if so, these “Avengers” issues certainly don’t bring me up to speed.
Despite a convoluted plot and a lack of character development, the issues in this arc still provide numerous instances of comic book joy. For starters, the covers of the “Avengers” issues feature the wonderfully stylized action of return-to-Marvel-era Jack Kirby. In “Avengers” #156, our heroes are forced to team-up with Dr. Doom in order to defeat Attuma and I’ll always happily read about a self-serving and scheming Dr. Doom. Possibly the greatest appeal of this story is the art in “Avengers” #154-155 which is done by the masterful team of George Perez (pencils) and Pablo Marcos (inks). Perez is the master of hyper-dense panels, and since the Marvel comics of this era contained only 17 pages of story, his rich density was working on overdrive. Perez and Marcos were massively ahead of their time in the mid-70s. Their clean lines and detailed backgrounds are striking, especially when contrasted with the rougher line work by Jim Shooter and Sal Trapani in “Super-Villain Team-Up” #9.
So do comics need Morrison-esque mystical motivations behind them to be interesting? Do they need Remender-esque injections of trauma and angst? Not necessarily. In the same way that the cubicles of the Brill Building spawned some of the purest pop songs in American history, there is still a lot of entertainment to be harvested from comics that are primarily driven by a deadline.
