All-New, All-Interlude Avengers #134 – ‘Come Into Your Own’

Inside Avengers Tower, the Beast angrily pleads with Tony Stark to listen to him. The title of this comic strip, “All-New, All-Interlude Avengers Presents… ‘Come Into Your Own’,” is visible at the top of the image.

Beast tries to make Tony understand why he’s so scared of/angered by the Reverend William Stryker’s presidential campaign ad (as seen in the previous comic strip). Tony tries to reassure Beast by telling him that there was no way he could ever support Stryker’s candidacy, or stance on nearly any issue, but that’s not good enough for Beast, and he storms out.

Back in his quarters, Beast calls Domino on the special X-Force radio frequency, and they commiserate over their friends and allies’ shared dispassion for the threat Stryker poses to mutants. Domino offhandedly refers to a Plan B outreach strategy…

…and we cut to the front lawn of the White House, where War Machine lands, to have a meeting with President Kirby (who’s named after legendary comics creator Jack Kirby, and “played” here by an action figure of Bruce Campbell from the Evil Dead series).

War Machine tries to make the President understand the opportunity that Stryker’s rhetoric has given him, but Kirby declares that most Americans don’t want to hear anything about mutants, at the present (and, implicitly, that the President doesn’t, either).

S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Wurmser (“played” here by an action figure of Arnold Schwarzenegger from the movie Terminator: Dark Fate) emerges from inside the White House, and suggests that people don’t want to hear about the Avengers right now, either. Now outnumbered, War Machine departs, just as reclusive billionaire Jay Hansen walks onto the lawn, reminding the President that the two of them share common interests.

Back at the Avengers Tower helipad, the android Jocasta and Captain America pace around, discussing Cap’s feelings about the still-mysterious Starjammers-affiliated Captain America lookalike. Beast stomps outside behind them, still furious, and both Cap and Jocasta try to understand why.

Beast despairs that, even after a lifetime spent in service of a world that originally hated and feared his kind, no material progress has been made in human/mutant relations. Jocasta and Cap start to recognize the peril in Stryker’s rhetoric, and Cap suggests that, instead of despairing, they take action!

The credits for the comic strip, citing the Unsplash users whose photographs were the background art, the use of fonts by Blambot, 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.

I know I said that last week’s comic was the “interlude” in the main story, before it spiraled almost completely out of control, but I wanted to have more discussion and place-setting this week, so the interlude continues! Some of this desire is almost certainly due to X-Men ’97 getting all up in my brain; I was not expecting to enjoy the new show as much as I have, and it’s inspired me to start including ideas I’ve had for the “main story” of this comic for months. Not that I didn’t have enough to do already, but it’s better to have too many ideas than to have too few, right?

With that said, I promise I’m not going to let the Starjammer Captain America doppelganger plot thread dangle for months, with no resolution (or even allusion) this time. I have a rough outline of a plan, and I want to stick to it! I don’t want to go another five months without seeing Agent Wurmser, either!

Now, it’s probably apparent, but I’m trying a new formatting style for the comic images this week, one with dimensions a little more in line with traditional superhero comic book pages. I figured, I’m not constrained by the Instagram box sizes anymore, so maybe I should stretch my page layout skills a little further! Not that much further, this week, but perhaps this will be the first step toward some more visually imaginative layouts in the Phil Wrede Marvel Action Figure Comic Universe! If you have any opinion about it, at all, I’d love to know what you think!

All-New, All-Interlude Avengers #134 – ‘Come Into Your Own’

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