Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Avengers (Vol. 5), Issue #8 – “Starbranded”! In the previous installment, the LAST WHITE EVENT happens because “the machine is broken” which means “the universe is broken” and a college campus got “starbranded” which means it got “blown up” killing every student and professor there… except one. The Avengers find some nerd among the rubble and he might just be the key to unbreaking the world.

He looks like a bowlcut sack of coathangers, though. I can’t imagine him being helpful unless they throw him in some furnace in order to power the broken machine’s engines. I’d laugh, but this is MARVEL COMICS and nobody even says a swear word worse than “ass” here, let alone murders a college student to power a machine. This shit really is for children.

Avengers (Vol. 5), Issue #8 [May, 2013]
Written by: Jonathan Hickman
“Starbranded”

“Oh man,” says the kid. The little nerd. He looks at his hand, and there’s a giant smoldering brand on his palm shaped like a star. Perhaps he has been “starbranded” so now he’s the fixer of the universe or some other asinine shit. The kid is literally naked and he looks like Bradford Cox on the cover of his Logos album. Look it up.

Captain America extends a hand and grins wryly like an overly buff Pixar character. “It’s okay. Help’s here now. Are you hurt?”

The kid – with Donald Trump hair – wonders what the ungodly stupid fuck is going on and why he’s naked within smoking rubble and talking to Captain America. Captain Marvel tells him they’ve all assembled to bring him pants, which I laughed at. Good lol, ma’am.

The kid is named Kevin Connor, and Iron Man does a quick background check to make sure he hasn’t manufactured nuclear weapons in his home or cheated on his calculus test or anything else of the sort. “Kid’s clean, Steve,” Iron Man says while making kissy faces. “Good grades. No disciplinary actions. No legal trouble of any kind.” Well thank God, because he was caught shoplifting when he was 11 years old then they would have to pull out their giant Avengers guns and shoot him point blank in the neck.

Captain America bends down to the nude kid and tells him they’re going to take him in and run some tests. Kevin quivers with anxiety about getting probed in the butt until he discovers that he’s sitting on top of a whole bunch of skeletons.

I mean, death is subjective, son. What is “dead” anyway other than an idea, man? …but yeah, they’re dead.

Kevin Connor is freaking out! Skeletons! Creepy icky skeletons! Who did this?! Who made this little oops?!

“You did,” responds the Universe Lady. “My children made systems. You are a flawed product of those systems. You were designed to be a weapon, Kevin Connor. That weapon became active and 3,203 people died.” Hey! That’s like a 9/11 and some change. Good going, Kevin. Terrorist.

Kevin has a conniption fit. Captain America continues to be calm against all odds, tells him that they’re going to help him even if he doesn’t DESERVE any help, and they’re going to figure out exactly what had happened. All that happy horseshit, la la la. Kevin says “NO!” and starts lighting up like a mass of plutonium under a criticality event. Iron Man, magically knowing the blast radius, advises his team to get back. Hulk shoves that fucker out of the way and runs toward the kid against Cap’s wishes. “RARRRRRRR!” he yells, leaping at the nude dude. Instinctively, the kid lifts up his hands and points his palm in Hulk’s direction. He blasts Hulk into orbit, which was my second lol of the day.

“Captain Marvel?” says Captain America.

“Yeah?”

“Please go retrieve our Hulk. Good chance we’re gonna need him.”

Aye aye, sir. Meanwhile, they’re going to call the military and tell them to not meet them up here after all. Time for six superheroes to take care of it themselves for some reason. Kevin continues to blither and blather and cover his genitals. Hyperion tells Kevin to shut the fuck up and lie down on the ground. “What if I don’t want to?” he argues petulantly. Then Thor throws his hammer at him, sending him flying two miles into rocks, effectively NOT killing this 80-pound kid immediately. Thor tells Kevin to shut the fuck up and lie down on the ground. Kevin responds, “I barely felt that.”

Yeah, the little virgin is sexually frustrated and his hump pillow was lost in the blast.

Well, now this kid has become a nuisance and the Avengers all flex their powers and abilities to take him down by any and all means necessary. Hulk is almost to the moon when Captain Marvel rescues him.

“I don’t know what this is. I don’t know what’s happened to me…” Kevin says, sparkling. “But I do know one thing. I’m not going to le–”

Hulk returns to Earth all meched out, somehow, and plows into the kid at escape velocity. You know… escape velocity but in the other direction. There’s an enormous “BA-BOOM” and a new crater is left in the dirt. Then Hulk holds onto the dork’s skinny arms while Thor readies to crack this kid in the skull at 1,000,000 mph.

“STOP!” yells Universe Lady. Captain America agrees with the “STOP!” sentiment. “Nightmask, can you help?” He looks at Nightmask, who might be able to help. “Do you know how to stop this?” he asks, wondering of Nightmask knows how to stop this.

“Yes,” he responds a little too fucking late. Like, you could’ve stopped it already, right? Bitch.

He explains to the now docile college student that a White Event happened and he’ll show him exactly what that means. Then a bunch of concentric circles show up in the air and Kevin is wisked away to the middle of what looks like a vast ocean.

Being the Starbrand comes with no dignity, I see. Nice butt.

Nightmask goes on to explain the brand on Kevin’s palm. “A weapon designed to protect a people as they progress through a change period, becoming a more advanced society. It’s a defense system of planetary scale. It is what you have become. You are a Starbrand.”

A small swirl and suddenly Kevin gets some nice red superhero threads. With a starbrand on the chest. There’s more yada yada about the universe being broken, then Kevin turns around and sees the Superflow of the Universe from Issue #7 all crashed and torn up in the water. “It is a dying network created by the Builders. It is broken.”

It used to be a communication station, a delivery system for “producing avatars such as ourselves.”

Kevin asks he’s just Kevin with the ability to blow up planets now. Nightmask says no, probably to dissuade him from actually trying to blow up planets. Just a hunch. Kevin asks Nightmask if they can stay here in the empty, shitty ocean instead of going back to the pit of college skulls, but Nightmask says no! Moving forward is the only answer! How dare you even consider against moving forward. There’s no reverse on time’s arrow!

Nightmask continues to yammer about the Builders’ older systems and how they’re in conflict with the new, broken system. They’re not supposed to be used at the same time, so there’s a problem that needs to be fixed. Now that Kevin and Nightmask are a couple of cool superhuman buddies that can transcend time and space, they can use the fancy concentric circles to travel from one place to another. And they do just that.

Later, at Avengers Tower, Captain Universe Lady turns back into Tamara Devoux and has no recollection of any of the issue’s events thus far. Captain America says that she’s pretty fucked for now and they need to move onto other more pressing issues.

They went to Denny’s for a very affordable Grand Slam breakfast.

Tony Stark is tasked with finding Nightmask and his loser sidekick, but he’s always 45 steps ahead of Cap! He conveniently tagged Nightmask with a Reed Richards-brand universal tracker that can track him across universes, so to speak! He’s on Mars, of all places! Let’s go gettim.

Nightmask aka Adam aka the Builder Jerk took Kevin to Mars because that’s where Nightmask was born. Where he was supposed to be better than humans until the White Event happened. Now he’s a shell of a husk of a slug of a man. “I was repurposed from an older system to a new one, and now those systems are in conflict.”

So that means Nightmask has to go to daddy. Ex Nihilo. Who is sitting in some weird dirt throne next to Abyss, in a dirt throne of her own making.

Nice teeth, sir. Who’s your dentist?

Final Thoughts

I can’t believe how quickly this douche was going to resist the friendly Avengers. On the other hand, if Captain America were to bend down and offer me help I would waste his ass too. Fuckin’ patriotic piece of shit.