All-New, Overworked Avengers #60 – ‘Tell Me Why’

Posted on by phil.wrede
Inside of Avengers Tower, Tony Stark stands with his back to a door, and his hand protectively over his heart. “I’ve walked into an ambush,” he says. The title of this comic strip, “All-New, Overworked Avengers Presents… ‘Tell Me Why’,” is visible at the top of the image.
Tony tries to make a good introduction to King T’Chaka of Wakanda, but he does not succeed.
Tony makes fun of of Prince T’Challa before they officially begin their negotiations, and T’Challa takes the bait instantly.
King T’Chaka explains that he’s hired She-Hulk to mediate their negotiations. Tony can’t keep himself from trying to flirt with her. She-Hulk does not take the bait.
She-Hulk invites Tony to make his case for retaking possession of the Avengers.
Tony explains that he made a mistake, in giving up the Avengers, and admits that, because of his exceptional capabilities, when he does make a mistake, those mistakes are at a large scale.
Tony asks King T’Chaka to return the Avengers to his control. When She-Hulk asks T’Chaka how Stark’s plea struck him, the King of Wakanda observes that the Avengers have been a substantial drain on his time.
T’Chaka laments the American systems’ apparent alliance to stymie progress, and his desire to extract himself from them. She-Hulk mentions that they need to officially select a new chairperson for the Avengers. As if on cue, and uninvited, Captain America walks into the room, offering his services.
The parties to the negotiation all tell Cap to leave, and the Falcon pops his head in, to lead Cap away.
On the top half of the image, the Falcon tries to offer Cap some counsel. On the bottom half of the image are the credits for the comic strip, citing the Unsplash users whose photographs were the background art, the ownership of Marvel by Disney, the creation of Marvel characters by actual human beings, and the figure photography/script/lettering by me, Phil Wrede.

Picking up right where we left off in the last installment of the “main story,” Tony Stark gets to make his case to King T’Challa of Wakanda – and the prince and princess – about why he should be able to reacquire the Avengers, after giving them away so speedily before.

I have to observe that I don’t think I made the most of this period of different “ownership” of the Avengers. I got a few good quips from J. Jonah Jameson about it, for sure, and incited a vaguely timely conspiratorial protest of the Avengers, but a bold new era in storytelling, it was not. I thought I could tell a more intricately-plotted story about an American reaction to a sort of reverse colonization, with a foreign power now directing some of the most dangerous people in the country, but instead, I wound up doing an unevenly-plotted character study about how Spider-Man, and the people around him, deal with trauma (an original story idea for Marvel Comics characters, and one that certainly hasn’t been done by titans of the medium, no, not at all…).

It definitely didn’t help that I was juggling graduate school homework and my day job on top of making this comic, so it was often all I could do just to generate a four-panel comic strip that entertained me, some weeks. But, still, I should have set myself a more achievable target, if I actually wanted to hit it.

Hopefully, I can do better with this return to the status quo, and maybe I can also give the Wakandan royal family a bit of a breather, so the next time they make an appearance, they can be reinvigorated, themselves!

Captain America’s superpower seems to be inserting himself where he’s not wanted, doesn’t it?

1 thought on “All-New, Overworked Avengers #60 – ‘Tell Me Why’”

  1. Pingback: All-New, Reacquired Avengers #61 – ‘Ain’t Nothin’ But A Heartache’ – PizzaRat dot Net

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