A.X.E.: Avengers #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
A.X.E.: AVENGERS #1
Writer: Kieron Gillen
Artist: Federico Vicentini
Colourist: Dean White
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Tom Brevoort
Although it’s billed as a separate one-shot, this is essentially A.X.E.: Judgment Day #5 1/4. Note though that it doesn’t have the Progenitor’s narration from the regular series.
COVER / PAGE 1. Iron Man in the shadow of the Progenitor.
PAGES 2-3. Recap and credits.
PAGES 4-6. Inside the Progenitor, the team make plans.
“For an Avengers, Eternals and X-Men get-together, this Avenger is feeling distinctly outnumbered.” This feels like a nod to the Avengers’ somewhat peripheral role in the crossover, which only has a peripheral tie-in issue in Avengers itself. It might be said that so far, this is more of a story about the Eternals, the X-Men, and the Avengers’ house.
Sersi was indeed an Avenger in the 1990s, as was Wolverine in the 2000s.
“It killed Thor. It killed Carol… Steve is out there trying to hold things together.” In A.X.E.: Judgment Day #5.
“We built this… and it’s based on your nervous system.” A.X.E.: Judgment Day #2.
“I’ve made myself incapable of feeling bad about anything.” Given Gillen’s take on Mr Sinister as an endlessly self-revising man, it seems highly likely that this is literally true, at least if “feeling bad” means guilt. Sinister is clearly capable to some extent of panic and anxiety.
PAGES 7-10. The team fight the Celestial antibodies.
“[W]hen I first plundered the Dreaming Celestial…” In Uncanny X-Men #1-3 (2011). The mechanics of precisely how are new, I think.
“I have a bad habit of being attracted to redheads who are mean to me…” Iron Man is presumably referring mainly to his long-time supporting character Pepper Potts, and his current partner Hellcat.
PAGE 11. Iron Man and Yinsen.
Ah, Iron Man continuity. Not exactly my strong suit, but I’ll see what I can do.
Ho Yinsen was the imprisoned scientist who helped Tony Stark to build the first Iron Man armour in his origin story from Tales of Suspense #39 (1962). The details of the story have changed over time due to the wartime setting and Marvel’s sliding timeline, but the basics are consistent: Yinsen heroically sacrifices himself to buy Tony time to finish the suit. The original Iron Man suit was the big lumbering thing seen here, and it “kept [Tony] alive” by keeping his heart beating despite his shrapnel injury (an angle long since dropped).
PAGE 12. Iron Man and his suits of armour.
These are all recognisable Iron Man suits from various points in history, but I’m not going to try and identify them more specifically than that.
PAGE 13. Iron Man and Captain America.
PAGE 14. Iron Man and Jim Rhodes.
“Rhodes” is referring to the most recent Iron Man #17 (2022), from the Christopher Cantwell run. In that storyline, Iron Man gains cosmic powers while defeating Korvac, and returns to Earth declaring that he’s going to use his godlike powers to redeem the world. That goes about as well as you’d expect. At the end of the issue, Iron Man does batter a bunch of characters, including Jim Rhodes, who are trying to rein him in.
PAGE 15. Iron Man and Thor.
“You tried it with me and you saw what happened.” Iron Man cloned Thor in the 2006 Civil War crossover, accidentally creating a violent lunatic. As far as I know, the clone is still out there somewhere, going by the name Ragnarok.
“If only you had held it together for a few more weeks…” Whether Iron Man would have been powerful enough to take on a Celestial even with his cosmic powers is debatable, but you never know. The Cantwell arc actually ends with Tony being packed off to rehab for several months, so he’d have had to hold on to his cosmic power for a bit more than a few weeks. (Longer than that, in fact. Cantwell’s Iron Man arc ends around the time that Ben Reilly becomes Spider-Man – it says so, and Ben appears prominently as the Scarlet Spider earlier in the run – meaning that vast swathes of Spider-Man continuity must have happened since Iron Man lost his god powers.)
PAGE 16. Iron Man and Hulk.
PAGE 17. Iron Man and women in his life.
Specifically, the Wasp, the Black Widow, Pepper and Hellcat.
“With Whitney Frost shaped exceptions…” Madame Masque, another recurring Iron Man villain.
PAGES 18-20. Iron Man’s parents die in a car crash.
As best I can tell, Tony first mentions his parents’ deaths in Iron Man #104 (1977), and this car crash was first shown in a flashback in a back-up strip in Iron Man #288 (1993) – though it might have been mentioned earlier. The lighting makes his mother look a bit like Madame Masque, but that’s probably just a coincidence.
“I always hoped it was an assassination…” This being the Marvel Universe, several stories have tried to introduce the idea that it wasn’t just a car crash. Iron Man: The Iron Age #1 (1998) claims directly that Roxxon had them killed, but that’s a statement by one Roxxon employee to another, and he might be lying. In S.H.I.E.L.D. #5 (2010), Howard tells Nathaniel Richards that “They’re going to fake my death. I believe an automobile crash is the plan that was eventually settled on.” Since this scene is presumably based on Iron Man’s own knowledge, it doesn’t actually contradict either of these. Nonetheless, Kieron Gillen’s approach in this scene is closer to Len Kaminski’s original approach in Iron Man #288, which was simply that Tony is driven to master engineering because his parents died in a machine failure.
PAGE 21. Howard Stark appears.
Howard is evidently the Progenitor, given the “you pass” and Howard’s glowing eye (although it’s a different eye effect from the one that we’ve seen up to now when the Progenitor appears to characters). But up to now, the Progenitor has failed characters who don’t believe that they’ve achieved what they ought to have achieved, especially where it’s a result of their own shortcomings. This seems like a change of approach.
PAGES 22-23. Iron Man reports back.
As he points out, if the Progenitor is still judging him, that’s inconsistent with the Progenitor having already made a final decision to destroy the world. Is it trying to scare people into improvement?
PAGE 24. Trailers. The only tie-in issue this week is Amazing Spider-Man #10, which has no importance to the crossover, but is a very good issue in its own right.
Iron Man’s whole schtick is he’s a futurist. By definition he can never achieve his goals, because he’s always looking at what’s coming next. This should be on par with Captain America always setting his ideals higher than his current saintly actions.
Man I hope it turns out the Progenitor is barely functional mentally, and is just out there playing Numberwang with people’s lives.
How long is it until they connect the Frost family that Madame Masque was adopted into to Emma Frost’s family?
Speaking of Whitney Frost, has any comment has ever been made in-history of the coincidence of surnames with the White Queen?
I see that @Sam has wondered the same thing.
I’m pretty sure they have never met. Madame Masque didn’t tend to make a lot of appearances outside of Iron Man comics (until very recently). Byron Frost was a wealthy financier which makes the eventuality of a connection even more likely.
Let’s also not forget Deacon Frost, the vampire who was responsible for Blade’s origin.
I think Marvel needs to publish a series The Frosts to straighten out all this continuity. I mean, it’s the Marvel Universe, there are no coincidences…we can’t possibly have three major characters running around with the surname of Frost who have no relation.
Then, Marvel can get onto the secret history between Jessica Jones and Rick Jones.
Well, Roy Thomas has just written for X-Men Legends… there is time.
Also, never mind Jessica Jones. I want to see a link between Rick Jones and Richard Jones aka the Phantom Reporter. Per the Twelve limited series that finished ten years ago, he has been in suspended animation for sixty years and was last seen active in the present day.
While at it, connect the Fiery Mask powers that he acquired in that series to the Ghost Riders.
Kurt Busiek once wanted to establish that Man Mountain Marko was related to Cain Marko, the Juggernaut. When he wrote a story featuring Man Mountain Marko, he threw in some lines of dialogue where Man Mountain Marko talked about how Cain had all the advantages growing up but got stuck under a mountain but the lines got cut and Busiek got told they weren’t related.
Re:Rick Jones and Jessica Jones- it’s been specifically stated that they’re not related. In one story, Jessica encounters a Rick Jones impostor and one of the clues that he was an impostor was that his wife thought they were related.
Chris V. said: I think Marvel needs to publish a series The Frosts to straighten out all this continuity. I mean, it’s the Marvel Universe, there are no coincidences…we can’t possibly have three major characters running around with the surname of Frost who have no relation.
They can also reveal their secret shared relationship to the Golden Age hero Jack Frost, who is in turn a mutant Frost Giant and indirect ancestor of Bobby Drake through Sir Francis Drake, who is also related to Dracula’s descendant Frank Drake and thus to Dracula.
“They can also reveal their secret shared relationship to the Golden Age hero Jack Frost, who is in turn a mutant Frost Giant and indirect ancestor of Bobby Drake through Sir Francis Drake, who is also related to Dracula’s descendant Frank Drake and thus to Dracula.”
I hate everything about this. Thanks!
So did that fairly missable wrap up to the Arno Stark subplot re-retcon it that Tony actually is Howard and Maria’s son after all or is KG perhaps choosing to avoid that can of worms he opened years ago on his brief Iron Man run?
Tony Stark’s parents named him after Tony the Tiger who shills for Kellogg’s by pushing their Frosted Flakes product onto unsuspecting children who aren’t aware that those yummy flakes were actually frosted by Frost Interational as part of a scheme by Frost International CEO Emma Frost to control the minds of children who reside outside of her telepathic range and also I’m drunk.
@Loz
Gillen has Sinister referencing Stark being adopted earlier in Judgment Day, so I think it’s more that he didn’t want to over-complicate this particular comic issue.
Whatever did happen to Arno? Was he the villain of that Iron Man 2020 story they did two years ago?
Also, current Tony Stark is… He was actually dead during the Doom/Ironheart era, right? He was a digital copy of his mind and that copy now has a body? Do I have that right?
@Krzysiek Ceran, The Iron Man 2020 story is the answer to both questions. It had Arno as the villain, but he thought he was the hero, while robo-Tony thought he was a useless copy. Robo-Tony’s robo-parents grew him a new meat body to convince him that he was the original and best, and his newfound confidence led him to trapping the unwitting Arno in a virtual reality simulation where Arno was the original and best, and everyone loved him.
Now that I type it out, it makes me wonder what Sigmund Freud would make of the story.
Ri Ri Williams, aka Ironheart, will be revealed to be the daughter of Simon Williams, aka Wonder Man. Which makes her the niece of Williams’s brother by brainwaves, the Vision, who used to be married to the Scarlet Witch, who is now Ri Ri’s aunt. The Witch’s brother is Quicksilver, who was married to Crystal. And what do we know is made of crystals? Ice! So Ri Ri is obviously related to Bobby Drake who was (is?) dating… Christian Frost!
Add another branch to the Frost family tree! We’ll out-complicate the Summers yet!
Piotr, Illyana, and Mikhail Rasputin will turn out to be descended from Grigori Rasputin, the famous mystic.
Oh wait, they already did that.
“vast swathes of Spider-Man continuity must have happened since Iron Man lost his god powers”
The Wells run on ASM jumps ahead six months (landing somehow on the present day based on Johnny Storm’s condition), so that was a long stretch in rehab.
“They can also reveal their secret shared relationship to the Golden Age hero Jack Frost, who is in turn a mutant Frost Giant and indirect ancestor of Bobby Drake through Sir Francis Drake, who is also related to Dracula’s descendant Frank Drake and thus to Dracula.”
If they’re going there, they could also include Deacon Frost, the vamp who attacked Blade’s mother while she was giving birth, and also turned Hannibal King into a vampire.