Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Avengers Assemble (Vol. 2) Issue #1 – “Zodiac (Part 1)”!

First regular Avengers, then New Avengers, and now a story where the Avengers assemble? How is that different? Have what I’ve seen already been examples of the Avengers only half-heartedly assembling? And how many different Avengers titles does one really need?

GREAT QUESTIONS! I’ll barely answer exactly one of them! Marvel NOW! has, by my count, 18 different general Avengers series, including ones (like this one) that started a bit earlier than the official Marvel NOW! relaunch. I’m not even taking into consideration the countless Avengers team member spinoffs. And that’s just Marvel NOW! There’s also an entire 60 previous years of this bullshit! As for how many different Avengers titles does one really need: zero.

That being said, I have no real introduction for Marvel NOW!’s Avengers Assemble other than it’s yet another road on my futile journey into oblivion. And I’m happy to take it!

Oh yeah, and my buddy Brian Michael Bendis wrote the first story arc before the series was taken over by Kelly Sue DeConnick, and this was a complete coincidence on my part. I didn’t seek him out on purpose, I guess he just happens to be prolific.

So, onward.

Avengers Assemble (Vol. 2), Issue #1 [May, 2012]
Written by: Brian Michael Bendis
“Zodiac (Part 1)”

Let’s take a gander at exactly who we’ll expect to be attending this assembly of Avengers. Iron Man, Thor, Hawkeye, Black Widow, Hulk, and that buttfucker Captain America. Quite an unimaginative, trite combination there, Brain Michael Bendis. If that IS your real name.

“And there came a day, a day unlike any other, when Earth’s mightiest heroes found themselves united against a common threat! On that day, the Avengers were born, to fight the foes no single superhero could withstand!”

BOOOORRING! Boring! Show me Hawkeye eating potato chips in his underwear while cracking up at Tim Allen’s anti-woke Last Man Standing reruns. Now that’s entertainment.

“I am cancer,” says a bald man in the dark. Maybe bald from cancer. I don’t know who this is, but he looks like and is dressed like a white Tibetan Buddhist. “The reason the great Cosa Nostra was successful for many decades was because they lived by a code of honor.”

BOOOOOOOOORRRRRIINNNG! Why is this guy talking to me in the dark just like Reed Richards did at the beginning of New Avengers? Do I look like I want to be talked at by men?

This code of honor was a strong code of honor. Real robust. He blah blah blah blah blahs about dreams and ambitions, That everyone has the same dreams and ambitions and no one in the history of mankind has achieved these dreams and ambitions alone.

“I’m offering you simplicity: if one of us succeeds, we all succeed. If one of us is in trouble, we all come to the rescue. We all pay in and we all cash out. And I’ll start the pay in with… POWER. A secret source of power that we will all benefit from.”

Now who wants to be Sagittarius? Virgo? …no, you don’t get to be Cancer. I’M Cancer! No one is crabbier than I am!

“We will be the ZODIAC,” he declares to a room full of eleven other ugly, grim-looking bad guys! Well, two of them are bad gals. Women represent only 16.67%. Let’s work on that next time.

Mr. Scarface, a real looker, asks Cancer where the fuck this big, great, secret source of power will be coming from.

Something to do with the Avengers, I suspect! Fireworks are going off around a tall building with STARK on the side. Like TRUMP, only with more Robert Downey Jr. and less Donald Downsey Jr. It’s a worldwide celebration in the heat of New York! Like anyone in Brunei gives a shit. “The new Avengers tower is open for business,” announces an unknown, biased narrator.

This guy really blah blah blahs too. He sucks off Tony Stark a little bit, apes the man’s declaration that this tower fortress project was “the thing he was most proud of in his entire career”. Yeah, until a plane flies into it. Nice fortress you got there, it’s 100 stories tall. No match for King Kong or Godzilla.

People from all over the world attended the ceremony, and the Avengers were there to greet everyone and say hello and offer snacks and stuff.

Captain America stands at a dais looking all important in his ruffly blue outfit. “We are a planet of the free, a people of freedom…! And if you choose to stand in the way of that freedom, you will hear this words: AVENGERS ASSEMBLE!”

Yeah, tell that to Syria. I don’t see you helping them out. “Planet of the free” my rump!

Later, the Avengers assemble, so to speak, in a meeting room watching the ceremonial footage. “Why don’t any of you stop me when I get like that in front of the press?” Steve Rogers moans, watching his dumb smiling face on the screen with embarrassment. Everyone is like “because we luuuurrrvvv you, sir!”

Tony Stark offers all of them the liberty to crash at his new pad…”but, please, really, I’m begging you, don’t knock over the building anymore.” Ha! So a plane flew into the old Avengers building! I understand now.

Stark suggests fighting bad guys somewhere other than New York City sometime. Even just once. They might like it!

Hulk conscientious objector! Hulk has two toes on each foot! Hulk has swastika tattoos on thighs!

Speaking of somewhere other than New York City, the “Incredible” Hulk sits solemnly on the precipice of a bluff overlooking a desert of the western United States, probably. Military dudes in jeeps roll up to where he’s sitting, very conspicuously green within a backdrop of red, orange, and brown. Hulk not happy! Hulk mad!

You think the army cares? No, son, the army only cares about the army.

The giant FABOOOOMMM of an explosion rocks the convoy of army vehicles. The vehicles fly everywhere. The military men who don’t fly everywhere are surprised to see the Hulk and blame him immediately for the explosion. The Hulk is confused, like always.

A very large, swirling, watery blue entity arises from the epicenter of the explosion. “Wow, the Incredible Hulk,” it says, calmly surprised, “I somehow always thought you were a myth.”

Hulk’s like “BAHRBAL BRRBABRRLLRLRLRL” and lunges at the creature. Hulk passes right through its watery waterness. How humiliating for both of them! Hulk lands with a FUMP in front of another military vehicle. “THEY’RE COMING RIGHT FOR US!” an army dipshit basically says. Interpreting this FUMP as a direct offensive attack, army dudes start shooting a million bullets into the general vicinity of, I don’t know, something!

The only way to stop bad guys with guns is a good guy who can absorb the bullets.

Mr. Water Man is like “wow! cool! wow!” as Hulk gets riddled with bullets. Next, Waterman becomes a tsunami of torrential, raging H₂O, engulfs Your Hulkiness, washes away military men and their miltary jeeps, and– …oh wait, someone launches a tank shell right at Hulk’s chest and sends him (and Watery Walter) flying.

There is just a veritable abundance of panels covering the military attacking these two and, conversely, these two attacking the military. I can barely tell what’s going on. I don’t know who’s winning. It doesn’t even look like it matters much.

“Well, this was an eye-opener. I’ll tell you that,” says Watergate. About what, I don’t know. I DON’T KNOW! I don’t know.

I. Don’t. Know.

*gets slimed*

This is the part where Mr. Hulk gets mad as a hatter, I tell you what.

“It’s gone! The package is gone!” yells Army Douchebag #3, “I told you people to guard it with your life!”

They think Hulk stole the “package”. Hulk, again, is hella confused. As always.

“You don’t even know what it is! You couldn’t know!” screams the Army Man. Hulk doesn’t know what the fuck this idiot is yelling about. Now they think Hulk’s watery friend took the package! “Not Hulk’s friend,” Hulk insists while Army “General Whedon” Douchebag #3 radios in for backup, which sounds like he wants someone to drop a nuclear bomb on their heads.

Hulk notices an object on the ground. It looks like this:

It looks like this.

It looks like that. He picks it up while the army guys try shooting their guns again. Maybe it’ll work this time! Just keep trying, why not?

There’s a lot of BUDDABUDDABUDDABUDDA TOOM TOOM TOOM going on with respect to Brian Michael Bendis’ attempt to figure out what bullets sound like. At this moment, Hulk hops really high in the air with the thing he picked up, effectively escaping. This is what he should’ve done first, but the guy is dumb as a box of really heavy, dumb bricks when he’s green and shirtless, so I suppose this is the best we can all hope for.

There’s a smoldering piece of strange wreckage on the ground. It looks like a large capsule. Some of the army dudes wonder who the Waterboy was and how he did the things with water. General “Joss” Whedon doesn’t care about that bidness. He wants to get the Avengers on the horn.

Alas, though, some of the Avengers are currently busy not assembling, you might day. Black Widow and Hawkeye are staking out a cabin surrounded by guards. Seven guards! Seven armed guards! Seven guards armed with semi-automatic rifles! *burp* That’s a lot of semi-automatic rifles.

Hawkeye takes a moment to be rude.

Slick as a wet shit, dude.

Heh heh. Anyway, let’s take these dudes out! Hawkeye draws back his bowstring and looses some blunted arrows at three of the SEVEN guards ARMED with SEMI-AUTOMATIC HAMBURGERS. Blunted arrows to the head knocks all three out. I have to keep stressing the point that these arrows are BLUNTED. Nobody dies here, unfortunately.

Hawkeye still hits on Black Widow a little bit while he’s rendering these guards unconscious. It’s revealed that they’re both at this cabin/house to “stop some lunatic from selling God know what to God knows who”, which I find quite enlightening. Black Widow tells him to zip his lip or she’ll tell everyone what his favorite movie was when they attend his funeral. Hawkeye zips the lip.

I’m used to Natasha being Daredevil’s girlfriend, but that whole storyline was just Kevin Smith’s self-insert and we’ll hear no more of it! You can use your imagination there.

The two of them peer through a ground floor window. We don’t see what they see, but they see something “weird” and, apparently, Black Widow finds it unlikely that they can handle it by themselves. Hawkeye wants to, though. He doesn’t want an additional four wheels in his date! Black Widow assembles the Avengers like they’re an IKEA dresser.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the cabin, Army is moving the strange capsule out from the back of a truck. Or into the truck. It’s really hard to tell. This issue is really bad at making anything clear. Our two Avengers punch some more lights out and steal the truck. I have no idea if the capsule is in the truck or not.

See? Who knows.

It gets weirder still. A behemoth, maniacal bull-like creature with thick, sinewy, sexy thighs starts chasing after them. Hawkeye launches some more arrows (super pointy this time!), but they don’t make a difference. The truck is already going 70 miles per hour, but Hawkeye tells Black Widow to drive faster. However, she sees two glowing red star-like objects in the night sky, smiles, and says “We’re good.”

I suppose the two lights in the sky means THOR’S A-COMIN’, but Thor a-comes. Iron Man follows suit, but Thor’s a god damn god (damn!) and hits the beast with his hammer before Iron Man is able to, I don’t know, knock back a bottle of bourbon in front of them?

It gets weirder. Some other weirdos with their own semi-automatic rifles start shooting more fucking bullets into things. Of course, they just shoot them at Iron Man, whose iron manliness stymies the bullets forthwith. These weirdos are Latverians, which is like a combination of Latvians and Bavarians, and Thor doesn’t know who they are? I think I’ve come across a mention of Latveria before. I don’t remember where, though. Who cares.

“What manner of foul creature do we have here?” Thor asks about behemoth-bull-man-perfect-thighs. Thor is not very omniscient for a god.
“Not asgardian?” Iron Man asks.
“I believe it is a creature of magics,” responds Thor. And asgardians aren’t? Man, I don’t know shit.
“I AM TAURUS!” bellows the stinky bull. He then whips these two Avenging fools around like ragdolls. “You stole from me,” Taurus says, clocking Thor in the jaw. Stole what? His virginity?

HE’S COMING RIGHT FOR US!

Black Widow and Hawkeye stare speechless. Mouths agape. Taurus blasts the everliving fuck out them, tearing the jeep into a million twisted pieces. The capsule was in the truck after all! But now it’s most definitely out of the truck.

“YOU DO NOT STEAL FROM THE ZODIAC!” yells the irate bull.

Final Thoughts

Well, it’s certainly been quite some time since I’ve been absolutely bewildered at the beginning of a story, and this time I can’t even blame ignorance of the characters!

Don’t let me down, Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Michael Bendis.