All-New, All-Intelligent Avengers #143 – ‘Someday I’d Like to Land’

Posted on by phil.wrede
In Avengers Tower, Captain America and the Falcon overlook a row of windows that let in the bright daylight. Captain America laments Jocasta’s recent kidnapping, and the Falcon tries to talk him down. The title of this comic, “All-New, All-Intelligent Avengers Presents… ‘Someday I’d Like to Land’,” is visible at the top of the image.
Cap and the Falcon walk into a conference room, as the Falcon reminds Cap (and informs us reading for the first time) that numerous Avengers are combing the city, trying to find their friend. They meet Tony Stark in this conference room, where…
…Tony is in the middle of meeting (via hologram) with Prince T’Challa of Wakanda, Hawkeye, and She-Hulk. Unfortunately, none of them have any good news to share. Simultaneously, in New Mexico, at X-Force’s secret base, Dr. Hank McCoy (the Beast) has come for a visit. He seems to enjoy how quiet the desert is, compared to New York City.
Over Beast’s shoulder, Domino approaches. She and Beast talk in vague terms about what he expects himself to do, in the face of Reverend Stryker’s run for president, and the seeming disinterest of his fellow Avengers to the threat they know Stryker poses. Domino seems pretty sure she knows what Beast wants to do, since he’s come all this way.
In the Baxter Building, headquarters of the Fantastic Four, Ben Grimm (AKA The Thing) approaches the portal to the Negative Zone, which has turned on by itself. He converses with H.E.R.B.I.E. via the building’s internal communication network.
Two figures walk through the portal: one is a tall, muscular Skrull, wearing a long red cape. The other is a squat, demonic creature. Though we don’t see their names yet, they are the Kl’rt, Super-Skrull, and his servant, Nihilus. The Super-Skrull pontificates vaguely about how unimpressed he is by the Earth.
In the Phil Wrede Marvel Action Figure Comic Universe, the Super-Skrull hasn’t yet revealed himself, when he’s previously visited Earth, so the Thing can’t identify him to H.E.R.B.I.E. Nihilus is terribly offended when the Thing doesn’t recognize the King of the Negative Zone, and Ben doesn’t feel optimistic about how this interaction is going to play out.
Jocasta’s primary systems reboot, and display for her a series of visions of Captain America, Iron Man, and Dr. Doom. She awakens in a dark room.
She cannot detect any nearby networks, and therefore realizes she can’t send a distress call to her fellow Avengers. Footsteps approach, and she looks up to see Justin Hammer (“played” here by an action figure of Jeff Goldblum from the Jurassic Park movies) flanked by a Doomboat and the criminal thug Hammerhead.
Hammerhead flashes his smartphone at her, and via video chat, Dr. Doom makes a vaguely ominous remark. The last panel of this page reveals that Jocasta is being held somewhere on Justin Hammer’s Long Island mansion.
The credits for the comic strip, citing the Unsplash users whose photographs were the background art, the use of fonts by Blambot, the stock visual effects by Action VFX, the ownership of Marvel by Disney, the creation of Marvel characters by actual human beings, and the figure and certain background photography/script/lettering by me, Phil Wrede.

One promise I can make, as the architect of all things Phil Wrede Marvel Action Figure Comic Universe, is that you’ll always get a payoff to a dramatic cliffhanger (and most dramatic teases, too)! It may take literal years to get that payoff, but it’ll happen! This week, for instance, we pick up where we left off with Jocasta’s kidnapping from last week, and we get the re-re-emergence of Justin Hammer (after his ominous ad on Jonah’s show a month and a half ago), and the next development in Beast’s conflict between his job with the Avengers and his mutant identity, and we get the first part of an answer to Miles Morales’ question about the residents of the Negative Zone from that presentation Reed and Tony did, back in February! We haven’t seen a Doombot since October of 2022 (back when I was just removing the cape from my Dr. Doom figure, to differentiate the evil Doctor from his robot servants), so welcome back, Doombots!

There’s a lot going on this week, isn’t there? It’s kind of nuts that we took last week off from the main story, entirely, when I posted my nearly-full-length Deadpool & Psylocke comic (which, if you haven’t read, I’d love it if you did. I’m pretty proud of it)!

The big question that this strip doesn’t explicitly ask, but that I’m going to ask in the post text: do you think Hammerhead’s related to Justin Hammer??

6 thoughts on “All-New, All-Intelligent Avengers #143 – ‘Someday I’d Like to Land’”

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