Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: New Avengers (Vol. 3), Issue #1 – “Memento Mori”!

So here’s what I’m thinking already. Where does this Jonathan Hickman guy get off, doing a run on a New Avengers reboot while simultaneously working on the rebooted Avengers (Original Flavor) AND, mind you, the Image Comics dystopian sci-fi epic East of West?? How can you maintain consistency juggling these three MONSTERS? Something’s got to give! Some neglect is bound to happen. I can TASTE the neglect on New Avengers!

Another thing. NEW Avengers? Why are there more Avengers? There are already FOURTEEN Avengers on the team in the concurrent companion series, who’s even left at this point? Is Hellcat still kickin’ around? Maybe the janitor at Stark Industries can give it a go?

New Avengers (Vol. 3), Issue #1 [March, 2013]
Written by: Jonathan Hickman
“Memento Mori”

I’m presented with a “Previously on New Avengers” catch-up, which defeats the purpose of starting at #1 all over again. Just start at #940 or whatever! Make number go higher!

Previously on New Avengers, “years ago, the most powerful men in the world voted on whether or not to run the world in secret.” OH, GEE, I WONDER WHAT THEY VOTED FOR? Powerful men, in my experience, like power.

“Only one of them disagreed.” Wow, what a fucking loser. It’s T’Challa, Black Panther, and he’s not on board with this cockamamie power-hungriness.

“You just decided all by yourselves that you are Earth’s protectors,” he sardonically jabs at his fellow super-type hero-types. “What happens when you disagree? When one of these Earth-changing moments finds you all at odds with each other, here in a secret meeting? What happens then? Walk away now.”

No one walked away. No one except Black Panther.

INTRO SCREEN! DOO DOO-DOO-DOO DOO! “Memento Mori”, by the way, means “Remember you must die” in Latin. Not Pig Latin, the smarter Latin.

Cut to the present. Mr. Fantastic gives us a tense art school film dark-room monologue. It’s very upbeat.

Don’t make me summon my team of fact-checkers, dandy-boy.

Keep your kids away from this series, everyone. The subject matter gets bleak!

“You. Me. Everyone on this planet. Our sun. Our galaxy. And, eventually, the universe itself. This is simply how things are. It’s inevitable…”

“And I accept it.”

Boom! Dead! Uh-bleh! *corpse sound effects*

We’ll see later what happens with Mr. Fantastic with his alarming suicide ideation. Now we jump to Wakanda, 26 hours ago, the land of Black Panther, I think! Three tribal kids come across a small open area in the forest. A glade, perhaps. There’s a sizable glowing obelisk, kinda like the Washington Monument! Only, like, 10 feet tall.

“The games are designed to find this generation’s potential Makers, Kimo. And last time I checked, seeing the finish line isn’t the same as crossing it,” chastises N’Kono, the shorter and balder of the three kids. The third kid, not-Kimo, tells N’Kono that they’re pretty close. They solved the Golden Paradox, they found the Lost Tribe, AND they decoded the structure of the Artificial Man! If my Final Fantasy X is correct, they just need three more planet sigils before they can beat the big sky whale! Or something to that effect.

Not-Kimo is named T’Dori, and she spends some time circling the obelisk. “What do you think it could be, T’Dori?” Kimo asks, referring to the grand prize, “Money? Glory?”

“I’d settle for a jetpack. Who knows?” T’Dori answers. Certainly better than glory. Fuck glory.

The three of them figure out in roughly 17 seconds that the obelisk has on it an etched list of names. Very specific Griot bards, the ones that formulated the Sundiata Code! Should I be better dressed for this? It sounds very respectable. “It’s a theory about tradition. Of exactly how Wakandan excellence has been passed down through the generations,” explains N’Kono. Sounds lame to me, dude. I’m going home.

Congrats, Tidus, you examined all the right Glyphs and inserted all the correct Spheres! The Aeon is yours!

N’Kono draws out a knife, cuts some meat out of his hand, and drips blood on the obelisk as an offering. “So we remember where we came from on the way to where we’re going,” he declares as the obelisk starts lighting up and making “FSSHHTT!” sound effects, getting ready to blast off into outer goddamned space and/or open an underground path.

It’s neither! Hooray! It merely displays a map of the current solar system. It’s not the same one as Earth, this is a whole different solar system, mind you. BUT, fuckin’ Kimo, it’s not their solar system either! The one on the map has 12 planets, count them carefully. Not 1,610 planets like ours! I know you’re bad at math, little one, but that’s not even in the ball park!

“But it is where you are headed,” speaks a voice from behind. Black Panther, lookin’ like Batman wearing a shell necklace, has been stalking them creepily in the bushes. “My King!” cries Kimo. “This is not Necropolis, child. To the living, I am simply the Black Panther.”

Black Panther congratulates the three of them for making it this far. They are Makers now. No ifs, ands, or buts! The finest of your generation! Live up to it, or else.

He congratulates N’Kono on his top-shelf guidance. Real A+ stuff. His father’s grandfather, T’Konda, the Black Panther of his own generation, would be proud of him.

However, enough of that sappy horsefuck! The world out there *Black Panther motions to the planetary map like Vanna White* crumbles like so much delicious coffee cake, and all the men who run the show are getting old and stupid. So, let’s get packing, kids! Some young blood is needed post haste! For your info, it’s M23-671A, an M-Class planet circling an orange dwarf 241 light years away. In short, your grand prize is the “stars themselves”. Bring sunscreen.

Kimo, N’Kono, and T’Dori stare blandly at this mope. Wow, cool prize, bro. Kimo feels tremors. T’Dori doesn’t see anything, but Black Panther feels them too. Something’s coming.

And yeah, something comes all right. You. In your pants. When a big sexy rhinoceros pops out of crazy interdimensional portal right in front of the four of them. “Look out!” N’Kono yells with all the urgency and speed of a bowl of fruit pudding. They jump out of the way, the rhino passes them. Whew! Good thing that unpleasantness is behind everyone forever.

The portal is still open. Black Panther instructs the children to stay there as he kinda, you know, pops his head through for a bit. Awaiting on the other side is an alternate version of where they’re standing, only the landscape is hued with an eerily dusky red glow and, oh yeah, there’s a giant round swirling planet dangerously close to their own.

What fuckin’ planet, dummy? Oh, you mean THAT planet, ohhhhhhh.

Down from the planet drops a couple of fancy-pants human super-types backed by a team of army military personnel. When I say “down from the planet drops”, I literally mean that they just leap down from the planet like it’s a bottom hatch of an aircraft. The group speaks to each other in an alien language.

Already disobeying direct orders, not befitting of brand new Makers whatsoever, the three children decide to take a little journey through the portal themselves to see what they’re missing. Black Panther tells them to hush the hell up while they spy on these visitors. Kimo has half a mind to approach them and ask what they’re up to. Where’s the harm? Besides, “what kind of future astronaut explorer is afraid of a little first contact?” he asks his group with the bravery of a Little Toaster.

“Hello! Welcome to Wakanda!” Kimo shouts, emerging from the thickets. Black Panther, horrified, tells him to to cork it. The female human superhero-type responds with “Suharruhu!”, which I think my aunt and uncle have a 2008 model of that particular car. The Wakanda group wonders aloud what language it is she’s speaking, and Black Panther has an inkling that it’s Old Sumerian– a real Mesopotamian ancient-ass language. “And you speak English…so it’s one of those Earths,” says the woman with a air of annoyance.

Black Panther asks if this planet-in-the-sky business is her doing, and she responds offended that he even asked the question. “Yes, I am a Black Swan–but no man or woman can summon an incursion,” she responds haughtily, “We simply live with the loss and give the Great Destroyer his due. Rabum Alal, he is impatient and his appetite endless.”

To this is like, Black Panther is all “What, lady???”, and the woman asks him if he were to try to stop her if she happened to be here to “kill a world”. You bet your skimpy armor-free outfit, ma’am!

This lady thought as much. “Kill them.” she instructs her military team, and they start blasting their hot laser guns! Black Panther tries to put a flimsy contact-lens-shaped force field, but the concussive blasts shatter it into nothing. Both Kimo and T’Dori get hit and are subsequently charred into creepy skeleton bones!

See, this is why I always say never talk to new people.

With Kimo and T’Dori out of the picture, N’Kono unleashes his own white-hot fury as his foes in the form of…a gust of wind, or something? It goes “THOOM!”.

Black Panther grabs N’Kono out of the way of a soldier’s lightsaber and the both of them retreat back into the jungle. The military personnel have to act fast before they reach the incursion walls! Switch the thermal lenses and go go go go go go go GO GO GO GO GO GO GO!!

“Something is wrong,” Black Panther pants after they get some distance, “I should’ve been able to jump us all the way back to the Royal City.” He notes that whatever the shit is going on, it’s interfering with time-space continuums. N’Kono doesn’t mind, he’s not really feeling it anymore anyway. The space travel thing is suddenly not fun anymore. After all, his brother and sister are now dead. N’Kono wants to thoroughly and sadistically fuck these bitches up.

Black Panther thinks that’s a really dumb idea. “You will return and inform the city…understand? Our people have already lost too much today…I would not forfeit our entire future.”

Ughhh, fine, dad. N’Kono wises up and– ha, no, too late, he gets zinged in the neck with a laser error. He’s gonna die too, his eyes are all milky already! “I see them…my King. I see… I see… the stars.”

Dead.

So much for the new Makers! They weren’t such hot shit after all.

Alien Villain Lady and Alien Villain Guy converse. Alien Villain Guy is Manifold! I completely forgot about him! Whoops! He has what they came for, a large time-capsule-shaped piece of business. “Good. Then give it to me…” she goads, “Unless you want to pay the offering. Can you do that, sweet, sweet Manifold?”

“No.”

“Then what good are you?” she asks, giving him a lazy back of the hand across the mug! WHAAAAM! He gets dropped to the ground. Black Panther is currently occupied, handing a military guy his own ass in the background.

“So I escape only to be murdered here–in this Eden? I made all this possible! You don’t have to do this.” Manifold whines pitifully. She has no time for this, what’s done is done. This is business! Nothing personal! She zaps him with ultra-hot laser eyeballs! He’s probably dead now too, I suppose.

She clicks a button on the time-capsule pipe bomb just as Black Punch lays a fist across her jaw. But it’s too late, it does an explosion.

Hakuna Matata….what a wonderful day…

“Once, the goodness spoke, and it was given a prophecy,” speaks some narration over panels of skies and explosions and clouds and Black Panther staring up at the skies and explosions and clouds. “A word spoken in fire and flood, a word of dead kings and hopeless causes. Of the future lost and of worlds dying. Of fallen angels and lost souls.”

“When facing the end…When everything around you crumbles– When everything withers and dies…Who answers the call of desperate men?”

Fade to black.

I dunno. Call girls?

FLASH FORWARD. THE NECROPOLIS AT WAKANDA. THE NEXT DAY. (!) (!!) (!!!) Black Panther is worshiping a big obsidian cat statue. “Save me from what this world demands. Save me from righteous men. Save me from thinkers. Save me from summoners. Save me from midnight kings. And the devil himself.”

We see, one by one, Avengers members assemble.

“Save me from what we are about to do.”

Among the group are Captain Fucking America (of course), Mr. Fantastic, and a bunch of others that I don’t recognize at all yet!

Cliffhanger!

Final Thoughts

Well that certainly was an issue of a comic book, wasn’t it everyone? I’m glad Captain America has 41 hours in a day to be part of every assembled superhero group in the universe.

Peace out, homies.