Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Avengers Assemble (Vol. 2) Issue #7 – “Zodiac (Part 7)”! In the previous installment, this particular Avengers team has already been assembled and the other 28 Avengers don’t get to come and they’re all salty about it. They should’ve at least brought along Spider-Man, who would’ve done backflips while saying snarky somethings in their little ears. Their loss.

The Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy intend to fly to the Badoon planet to start beating up Badoons when a Badoon warship starts Badooning the shit out of their own ships. The Avengers are like “HEY, GUARDIANS, SIT THIS ONE OUT OK, WE GOT THIS” but then Hawkeye accidentally jettisons all of them out into space and now Thanos’ Cosmic Cube is glowing like crazy!

It’s really funny.

Avengers Assemble (Vol. 2), Issue #7 [November, 2012]
Written by: Brian Michael Bendis
“Zodiac (Part 7)”

COVER ART ANALYSIS: Thanos has a Star Trek borg eyeball while staring maniacally at his enormous fist with the pretty gem-knuckled gloves containing the heavenly souls of five angry Avengers! This means that the bad guy is happy and winning and the good guys have been launched into the vacuum of space. LOL!

Thanos has summoned the elders! He’s not allowed to summon the elders! It’s dinner time, and this is rude! “How many times must the universe punish you for your ways?” asks one elder. “You are truly mad,” says another elder. “What do you have there, Thanos?” asks yet another elder. “When am I going to find a better dang job?” asks me, preoccupied.

Thanos cannot WAIT to show them was he has. Check it out in all its cubey glory: a cube! But not just any cube! It’s a special cube! Eight corners? Sure. Six faces? Of course. Twelve edges? That doesn’t sound right, let me check really quick. *cube blinds Thanos permanently* Yes! Twelve edges!

“A Cosmic Cube?” asks an elder (the Collector) with little emotion.
“Yes,” responds Thanos, holding it up.
“I’ve never seen that one before. What do you want for it?”

Pfft. This Collector elder just wants to collect things? Anything and everything? He can collect my nuts.

Another elder is skeptical. That’s not a real Cosmic Cube! The Collector isn’t listening, he wants that cube! He has many trinkets to trade, “But I don’t have the Infinity Gems, if that’s what you’re after.”

Thanos cares not for Infinity Gems at this moment! He wants one thing and one thing only! He slowly unzips his pants… then he zips it back up. “That it was I who ended your existence!”

That does say “…That it was I who ended your existence!”, just in case you can’t read 0.25pt on my shitty blog.

Then he ends the elders’ existence! Certainly, ending their existence means they’ll never know that Thanos was the one who ended their existence because they no longer exist to know that. Technicalities.

The souls of the elders’ bodies are getting sucked into the cube, which I would have thought would be a good thing for Thanos… but his eyes are bulging and he’s belting out a strong “NOOOO!” So it’s bad instead? Did he want it the other way around: The cube splintering into many cubes which would suck themselves into the elders’ bodies? Or did he want the elders to suck themselves, and–

Elsewhere in space, there’s a group of Avengers and Badoon looking like dead meat floating around.

“S.H.I.E.L.D. Command. This is Natasha Romanoff – the Black Widow – broadcasting to you from Mapped Sector 97.”

“The mission has failed. I repeat: the mission has failed.”

S.H.I.E.L.D. now needs to come into space and collect their asses. By the way, Thanos still has the Cosmic Cube and he’s going to keep doing mean things with it.

Black Widow is the only one conscious. Outfitted in a state-of-the-art space suit with a vacuum hose and a miniscule tank of oxygen, she attempts to float around to try to revive some of her buddies. She starts with Hulk, the guy who will need the most oxygen and will likely start thrashing out of fear, surprise, and pent up sexual frustration. She fills him with just enough oxygen to keep him awake and then she throws his ass back over toward the ship. He grabs Thor on his way.

Next is Captain America! He is revived, and now the space-suited Guardians have arrived to help collect these lousy Avengers.

Hulk smacks Thor to wake him up, still in deep space, and points to an oncoming army of laser gun Badoons! Egads!

Pew pew pew! Bang bang bang bang bling blong bling blong! Moo! Bleat! Moo moo moo!

Fighting ensues in the middle of space, so that’s neat. It looks like they were able to neutralize the threat bewilderingly quickly. One moment the Badoon army is shooting off lasers, the next moment there are bolts of electricity coming out of what appears to be a Babylon 5 type space portal? Or maybe out of Thor’s hammer without Thor even striking the hammer? Then all the Badoons are floating around like “oh shit we’re dead now I think”.

The Avengers are all still alive and well. They haul their deep space butts back into their large jet with the “A” on the tail (“A” is for “Avengers”, or perhaps “Applesauce”). Black Widow saved the day! Hurray and huzzah! Excelsior! Wubba lubba dub dub!

Oh no, but where are Iron Man and Hawkeye! This is a problem! We need to go back and– oh, they’re with the Guardians? Well that was a real suspenseful four seconds. They look dead though. Maybe they’re both dead. I hope Hawkeye is at least dead. I don’t like Hawkeye, he seems like an annoying fifteenth wheel.

The Guardians twist and turn and weave around the lasers of whomever is left actually shooting them. Get the medpacks ready! Iron Man is going to need a whole slew of tongue depressors!

I’d make an Air Supply joke, but Family Guy already made an Air Supply joke and, therefore, it’s beneath me.

Raccoon Dude starts bickering like a cranky old woman, but Chris Pratt Quill reminds the little fucker that these Avengers are running out of non-liquified organs and they need to get them to safety stat! But, alas, the Guardians ship starts getting bombarded with Badoons! Badoons upon Badoons!

Thor makes a Thor pose and smashes his hammer, sending more electricity buzzing through space. The Badoons get blown. Out. They get blown out. Then the Guardians close their hatch. WHEW THAT WAS A CLOSE ONE. A CLOSE ONE, YOU GUYS.

Rocky Raccoon makes an observation that their Badoon ship was more packed to the gills with Badoonsies than usual. Everyone ignores him. Hawkeye and Iron Man look quite dead, so they need to get the medpacks stat. Hawkeye needs gauze!

Also, if these two are dead, that’s going to be a bad look. The Avengers will take advantage of some of that tried and true eye-for-an-eye justice.

There’s more fighting. Just more and more fighting. People waited a whole month for this issue back in 2012 and only a small handful jerked it through all the fighting. The rest jerked it afterward and wanted their money back, but you know what they say: You jerk it, you bought it!

Hulk asks for permission to smash, and Golden Boy Captain America allows it. On his way to smashing he gets shot by lasers, but the thing about Hulk is this: uhhhh, lasers can’t hurt him! So shut up.

Star-Lord! That’s Quill’s nom de plume! I remember this now from falling asleep through the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie! Star-Lord asks if the other Avengers are ok, conveniently hiding the fact that Hawkeye and Iron Man are totally decomposing as we speak.

Panels like these make up most of the issue. Disorienting. Terrible.

They need a better plan than the current one, which is trying to outrun Badoonville. They need to find a way to destroy this clown car of a Badoon ship. I predict that there’s a portal in the ship that’s allowing soldier after soldier after soldier into the fray. The better plan has already been determined right after it has been stated that they need a better plan! The plan will involve Hulk and Thor, because they are the two most dispensable now that Hawkeye and Iron Man are biting the Heaven curb.

Haha, ok, nevermind, the two of them have just bolted up screaming. “WHANNANNNAAA!” and “OH, WHAT THE FLARNNNAAA!” are what Brian Michael Bendis had chosen to put in their little speech bubbles. This means the medpacks are working. I’ll just move on.

So here’s the plan: Thor and Hulk are going to do their smashing to destroy the internal power source of the Badoon ship and implode the bitch. AND, take them both out in the process hopefully! Let’s get to work!

The Guardians have a “better” plan that won’t result in two deserved deaths: everyone is going to have to jump into their ship because the Avengers ship (“A” is for “Abysmal”) is most definitely not going to make it out of the implosion sucking situation. Them’s the breaks. The Guardians’ ship is better though, they have a pool table with blue felt on it!

I’m very sorry, I don’t speak Vin Diesel.

Groot “I am Groot”s his way through the conversation about the plan, and Raccoon Sir translates. This is not his fight. A conscientious objector, huh? There’s a good lad.

Thor makes his way toward the core for some power source smashin’, but then he goes “AGH!” because he gets shot with a Stargate staff weapon. Three Badoonies aim their weapons at him.

“You know not who you attack, vile one,” Thor says, obviously pissed off but he doesn’t really want to show it.
“We know who you are, Odinson,” responds Badoon #1.
“And this day, you have declared war on the Empire of the Badoon,” chimes in Badoon #2, “Know – the Earth will burn for this.”

Badoon #3 doesn’t have any lines.

Hulk makes short work of these three. He lunges with all his 9,500 lbs of bulk, likely crushing them into goopy paste. This gives Thor the chance to reach the big, swirling, incandescent gas ball that is the central power source. He twirls his hammer daintily and shoots electricity at it.

“Here we go.”

An explosion.

Next thing I see is that Thor is safely aboard the Guardians’ ship. We see nothing about this happen. Mark Bagley obviously had no idea how to draw the thing that Brian Michael Bendis had no idea how to describe, so here we are.

“Can we go home now?” Hawkeye asks after Black Widow comments upon the most insane thing she has ever seen.

Star-Lord makes a salient point. This was just one Badoon ship. They have about 779 more. And they’re not going to take too kindly to having one explode. That’s gonna be a pickle. Especially since it took for-fucking-ever to make it happen.

Well, that’s not the biggest concern at the moment. Thanos appears. He’s huge. He’s got a powerfully glowing chest. He looks mad. He’s also see-through. So you can’t punch him.

Final Thoughts

Where are the Zodiacs? I miss the Zodiacs. They were fun. These Badoons can make like a tree and “leaf”! Sorry for the language. I mean no offense to Groot either, by the way. Maybe.