Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Avengers (Vol. 5), Issue #5 – “Superguardian”! In the previous installment, we read about Hyperion’s stupid origin story (with respect to his presence on Earth, that is), and the Avengers travel to one of Ex Nihilo’s impact sites in order to kick around some scientists who are running experiments on the contaminated land. After successfully removing the threat and quarantining the land, the Avengers think they have all the sites contained.

But there’s a seventh site in Norway…

Oh no!

Avengers (Vol. 5), Issue #5 [April, 2013]
Written by: Jonathan Hickman
“Superguardian”

“PREVIOUSLY ON AVENGERS”: “We have to get bigger,” says Tony Stark, talking about his and Steve Rogers’ penises again.

“OUTER SPACE. THEN.” announces a flashback sequence. Some nerds dressed up as Stargate Jaffa warriors are trying to fix a Stargate portal. I’m being absolutely serious here. It seems ridiculous, but here we are. Someone should alert Richard Dean Anderson’s fat ass on the double.

One guy announces that the Stargate is broken and the world is now lost. A lady says that Earth needs to be warned, so she sends Smasher to let Earth know that “Immundra has fallen”. That sounds like something that nobody on Earth is going to care about. Imagine trying to tell Lindsey Graham or Vladimir Putin or, like, Kanye West, that Immundra has fallen. They’ll tell you to eat your own shit.

Something explodes two seconds after Smasher vows that he will not fail, so LOL. A bunch of people die. LOL.

Not Pictured: The Smasher failing miserably literally one panel later.

“Here’s something they don’t teach you in school in Iowa, or Colorado…or anywhere else on Earth for that matter.” begins the very USA-centric narration, “Synthetic tri-plate spectra-forms are actually organic constructs.” Gee, I could’ve really used that information during my Iowa/Colorado schooling.

Anyway, the dead Smasher guy with his smashed-up red eyeball lenses are shown on the ground. We see a cracked piece of the lens morph into a pair of red goggles. We see a young woman, clad in plaid, the uniform of the farmgirl, spot them and pick them up in the middle of a large cornfield. “Huh.” she says.

GRIPPING STORYTELLING SO FAR! Are we done yet? Ha! Just funnin’. I love comic books! (?)

So this lady’s on an Iowa farm, and her name is Izzy. She returns to her farmhouse to try to tell her dad about these cool-ass specs, but he has to go out and fuck the pigs or whatever it is farmers do on their farms, so he’ll have to hear about it all from her later. Her grandfather is hacking and wheezing in the kitchen, hooked up to oxygen and lookin’ like Hector Salamanca from Breaking Bad. She spoons up a couple of bowls of soup and sits down to talk with Gramps.

He grumpily asks her why the hell she still lives on the farm. Izzy’s mom died a few years ago, and she dropped out of school to help out, but Gramps says it’s time to blow this popsicle stand! Farms are the worst, I agree. Go literally anywhere else! I’m on Gramps’ side with this one, she shouldn’t be stuck there anymore.

Listen, when a mysterious pair of goggles starts flashing dangerously, I’d advise against following its orders.

Izzy, the aspiring astronomer, goes out to her fancy-ass $9,000,000 telescope later that night. The red goggles that she kept in her sweatshirt pocket start to glow and talk to her. “Put me on.” they say. Well, fuck that! If my glasses started talking to me I’d kick those suckers to the curb. But, yeah, in a trance Izzy puts them on and then immediately turns into a Smasher! Whatever that is. She gets the suit and everything, and her goggles immediately begin surveying the night sky in order to assess her location and calibrate and download info and all that science-y stuff. The goggles ask Izzy if she would like an upgrade. “Absolutely.” she replies, and she gets launched into orbit!

Killing her instantly!

But no. Gramps watches her launch like a rocket through his window and grunts a triumphant “Hrmpt! That’s more like it.”

She’s sent through a portal hovering around Earth. The goggles inform her that it’s a “noncommercial, stealth-grade Stargate”. Literally a Stargate. Did someone get Richard Dean Anderson’s big fat butt on the phone yet?

Izzy is now in Chandilar, the Shi’ar homeworld. Nice name. What are its moons, Joey and Ross?

Chandilar looks like a complete shithole.

Izzy’s trying to make sense of this whole situation, since she was just on her farm probably 50 seconds ago: “This is…another planet…that’s…a freaking alien planet.” After Izzy announces out loud that she’s the first human to step foot on an alien planet, the goggles correct her and then start gogglesplaining that she is, actually, merely the first human Subguardian visitor in the history of the Empire. So that’s a gold star for you!

And as a Subguardian, she gets to meet the Superguardians! I’m sure they’re quite nice. They’ll take you out to lunch on your first day. We’ll get back to Izzy later, I’m sure she’ll be juuuust fine!

Ha ha ha! Get a load of this dude’s wang! It’s shaped like a pretzel!

At Avengers Tower, in the present, Tony Stark is trying to speak to the large nude Builder guy that the Avengers took home from Mars. You know, stole from Ex Nihilo? Cradle robbed? Stark is attempting to decipher the language, and he’s making good progress! He’s figured out the word “Blackveil”, which might be the Builder’s name. The Builder waves as he says it in his weird Futurama alien speech.

A couple of the other Avengers B-Team blowjobs congratulate Stark on his progress, but Stark has more to report: he’s been trying to look for Izzy and Eden on the “Avengers Machine” (it’s like a special Speak & Spell that connects to the World Wide Web!), but all he’s getting are reports of “imperial alerts” and “threats to the empire” and “general hysteria” and “muffin recipes”. But, hey, Izzy and Eden aren’t even in our galaxy right now! So there’s that little hiccup. Anyway, does anyone want muffins?

AT THE SHI’AR GALACTIC RIM, something is happening! I don’t know what it is! Help! OK, some dudes are fighting some other dudes. A few of these Smasher-types are slumped on the ground. Someone says “Warstar is down, Oracle.” Oracle tells the other, Manta, that Galin (a Smasher) is gone. These giant dick-shaped space vessels start descending upon the land, and there are easily dozens of them. Sentient drones. “Sharra and K’ythri save us.” whispers Manta.

And then some unknown entity starts blasting these drones, painting the sky red with fire.

Invader ZZIIIMMM!

IT’S THE MUTHAFUCKIN’ AVENGERS! HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT!

Smasher’s exospecs picked up on the Shi’ar Galactic Rim’s intergalactic alert, and they came as quickly as they could! Captain America! Wolverine! Falcon! A white lab coat nerd (?). Everyone!

“What’s an Imperial Guard unit doing getting rolled by a bunch of sleazo normal-type attack drones?” Wolverine asks with tactful curiosity. And Wolverine gets schooled! “You humans and your tiny sphere of influence…look UP.” says one of the guardians.

And UP is an entire fleet of…someone arriving. Again, I don’t know. The white lab coat nerd calls them “around twenty heavy cruisers and countless support ships”, but they look like a bunch of Steel Soldier-type suits to me! Izzy Smasher is nervous. “Most of the technology is hundreds of thousands of years beyond what we have on Earth…I would never run, but how do we even fight something like this? I mean, when facing an endless alien armada, what’s a Smasher to do?”

And Hulk, he says fuckin’ SMAASSHHH, lady.

Captain America and Wolverine are gonna take the low road. Falcon is gonna take the high road. Manifold asks Cap’n what he can do, and Cap’n suggests that he uses his move-things-to-other-locations powers to move the ships within the other ships. Manifold says that bad things will happen if he does that. “Then get busy, son…bad things are exactly what I want to see.”

How’s it going, pops? Oh, not much is going on with me, thanks for asking. It’s all been pretty boring, actually.

It’s time for another Izzy Smasher Flasher Backer! After a month of Smashing and not much else, she returns to her farm in Iowa. And by “returns” I mean, “crash lands like a dang meteor and scares the poop out of her old man”.

Her dad is like “where the hell have you been for literally 30 days you weirdo” and Izzy’s like “SPACE, DAD! I’VE BEEN IN GLORIOUS SPACE! THERE ARE ALIENS, DAD, AND I LOVE HANGING OUT WITH THEM!” and her dad is like “fuck, I thought that crazy syphilus-riddled grandfather of yours was pulling my leg, but he was telling the truth! Too bad I had to shoot him dead before he infected the animals with his lunacy! Yeah, grandpa’s dead! Want some muffins?”

Back in the present, the Avengers are fighting! That’s what they do. And I get to read and write about it.

Hulk smashes. Cap’n smashes. They all smash. Except Smasher! She throws blasts of eye-fire like Cyclops! Her exospecs warn her that continuous use will damage her retinas, but she doesn’t listen. “Subguardian, if you continue at this rate the deple–” starts the exospecs, but Smasher tells her to shut up! So the exospecs run crying to Smasher’s supervisors, the Superguardians, but they end up congratulating her on “holding the line”. They’re coming to help now.

And I guess they won, because we jump immediately to the aftermath. Now that’s some exciting comic book storytelling! But NOW, before the Superguardians leave, they must chastise the Subguardian. Just kidding! They’re happy! They promote her to Superguardian! How touching!

I’m happy too!! Look at all those exclamation points!!! Or maybe my lithium salts are wearing off!!!

“Would you look at that…you’re the first human member of the Imperial Guard, Izzy.” Captain America says, congratulating her on this wonderful honor I myself didn’t know about fifteen minutes ago.

Flashback again, and Izzy’s smelly old grandpa actually isn’t dead yet. But he’s coughing in his bed like Joffrey Baratheon after some Wedding Wine.

Grandpa! Grandpa, are you– …fucking kidding me here, sir?

“Look at you…back from Pluto.” he says. What a firecracker! Hasn’t lost a bit of his edge! He has a note for her. “Here, a good friend gave this to me and I want you to have it. I want you to use it.”

Here’s what the note says: “DAN, IF YOU EVER NEED ANYTHING, CALL ME. -STEVE”

And here I am amazed. Steve Rogers isn’t illiterate. Could’ve fooled me!

Izzy is confused, but Grandpa Dan tells her that she has a destiny now to do great things. And real heroes make others believe they can do great things. So do great things or he’ll keep coughing on her.

Back at Chandilar, the Bing-iest Planet in the Galaxy, one of the creatures that attacked the empire with his drones is in front of the Majestor for questioning. And he doesn’t speak English like everyone else on Chandilar! But that’s ok, Oracle ripped the info out of his mind anyway.

The Majestor asks pointedly what weakness they saw in the empire that emboldened them to plan and carry out an invasion attempt. Oracle tells the Majestor that it’s not what it seems. They weren’t invading at all. They were running away from something. From someONE.

Final Thoughts

I HAVE A HEADACHE NOW. Thanks, Avengers. I’m going to go get some muffins.