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Aug 15, 2017

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 902: Avengers v.1 #236, October 1983

https://www.comics.org/issue/37854/

You know those lazy Summer days when Spider-Man shows up at your house, and then you're called away to an emergency at Project Pegasus, which you avert, but there's another crisis brewing there that you don't know about yet?

Well, the Avengers have one of those days in today's comic, which opens with the line "Avengers Mansion on a lazy Summer day..."

Having heard about the pay cheque from She-Hulk, Spidey decides to take the Avengers up on their offer of membership, but things have changed in the interim (15 issues), and the Avengers aren't so sure anymore. It doesn't help that the Web Slinger broke into their house and disabled some of their security contraptions. But Spidey just rolls like that.

This is a pretty good little standalone issue, again, though it seems to be rolling into a major confrontation of some more characters who will reappear in the assault on the Mansion story years down the line. We see the return of Blackout (from where, and because of what, I have no idea), though he's certainly less-mentally damaged than he appears in the later issues. What happens to him might well be the subject of the next couple of issues. And his connection to Moonstone is an interesting one too. She's one of the villains who, by the issue's end, has rallied to face off against the Avengers. I find Karla Sofen fascinating - she comes across as a highly educated, highly powered sociopath, though once we hit Thunderbolts territory, her sociopathy seems to recede a bit. Maybe. I think the notion of a villain who's not only really powerful but also really intelligent is a cool one. And she's not over the top intelligent like a lot of the tinkerer/inventor types who populate the Marvel U (I'm thinking of yesterday's Wizard, or Doctor Doom, or the Fixer). No, Dr. Sofen is a very, very smart psychiatrist, so not only is she capable with her powers, but also with understanding human (and mutant, and alien, etc, etc.) motivation. This makes her tricky in both fisticuffs and battles of the will. I'm going to keep an eye on her, and perhaps, after the Stern Avengers run, look into reading through at least some of Thunderbolts.

We'll see.

To be continued.

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