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Topic: 25 Years Ago: West Coast Avengers (Topic Closed Topic Closed) Post ReplyPost New Topic
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John Byrne
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Grumpy Old Guy

Joined: 11 May 2005
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Posted: 07 October 2013 at 9:30am | IP Logged | 1  

For as long as it was fun.
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Andrew W. Farago
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Posted: 07 October 2013 at 12:33pm | IP Logged | 2  

JB's West Coast Avengers is near the top of my all-time favorite Avengers runs.  The team had a really dynamic lineup with loads of classic Avengers, it's one of my favorite eras of JB's art (I'm sure that's at least in part from the book coming out during my own "Golden Age" as a reader), and it all led up to Acts of Vengeance, which is still my gold standard for giant superhero crossover stories.

My only regrets about JB's West Coast Avengers is that his tenure on the book wasn't a year or two longer, and that Paul Ryan didn't get to ink more issues.  That was a great pairing, and puts him on a short-list with Klaus Janson and Walt Simonson of inkers who didn't get to do enough pages with JB.
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Daniel Gillotte
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Posted: 07 October 2013 at 4:02pm | IP Logged | 3  

Would love to see a shot of Hawkeye's Whirligig- anybody got it and willing to scan?
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Simon Anderson
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Posted: 07 October 2013 at 4:17pm | IP Logged | 4  

Darren said:

I recall seeing the photocopies of the pencils for the first issue of WCA when JB was in the UK, I think that was '88. He also had an issue of the She-Hulk in pencil with him too.I can't recall specifically but my memory tells me that there was two issues of one and one of the other in photocopied form.

I can recall the first two WCA issues and the second issue of She-Hulk. I was fascinated by them (as well as watching JB draw)!
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Noah Smith
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Posted: 07 October 2013 at 7:48pm | IP Logged | 5  

Interesting.  The ISAAC solution hadn't occurred to me, but I had thought "Why couldn't they just re-use the recordings of Simon Williams' brainwaves that Hank Pym made in the first place?"
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Chris Durnell
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Posted: 07 October 2013 at 8:06pm | IP Logged | 6  

There were so many ways for the "old" Vision to return, it never occurred to me that this was meant to be permanent.  I viewed it the same way JB return the Thing to his "old" dinosaur hide version instead of the rocky one.

The destination was known from the beginning.  It was only a matter of how much fun the ride would be before it ended.

Years later when I met the fan community online, I was shocked to find how many hated, hated the change JB made to the Vision and how terrible it was.  It never seemed to occur to them that it was meant to be temporary. 

It also seemed many selectively remembered the past.  They brought up the original Vision appearance where he cried as a way to show how JB got it wrong without bothering to think 1) the Vision was already supposed to have Wonder Man's brain patterns then, 2) there were many times after that where the Vision was shown to be especially cold and unemotional, and 3) there was a significant change in the Vision's behavior after he removed the Control Crystal from his mind in Avengers # 254 by Stern.
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Jeffrey Rice
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Posted: 07 October 2013 at 8:30pm | IP Logged | 7  

The Vision was capable of emotion. They just did not come easily. Takes a good writer to get that fine line. It makes the Vision's emotional outbursts that much more powerful.
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Mark Haslett
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Posted: 07 October 2013 at 8:53pm | IP Logged | 8  

DANIEL: Here's a link to a JBF Reading Club thread with the whirlygig page (and others). If you search for Reading Club Avengers, you'll find every issue has a thread.

Whirlygig Issue Thread Link
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John Byrne
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Posted: 08 October 2013 at 6:11am | IP Logged | 9  

The ISAAC solution hadn't occurred to me, but I had thought "Why couldn't they just re-use the recordings of Simon Williams' brainwaves that Hank Pym made in the first place?"

••

That would restore the Vision to how he had been when the Avengers first encountered him, but none of his experiences, or memories, since then would have been represented. He'd still have been a substantially different character, just different in a, ah, different way.

+++++++

It also seemed many selectively remembered the past. They brought up the original Vision appearance where he cried as a way to show how JB got it wrong without bothering to think 1) the Vision was already supposed to have Wonder Man's brain patterns then, 2) there were many times after that where the Vision was shown to be especially cold and unemotional, and 3) there was a significant change in the Vision's behavior after he removed the Control Crystal from his mind in Avengers # 254 by Stern.

••

There is a whole sub-strata of fandom that loves to complain, lives to complain, and actually keeping their complaints grounded in some kind of reality is not something they worry about. When I did CHAPTER ONE, there were howls of protest that I had "replaced" the microscope gift from Ben and May to Peter with a computer. In fact, I'd included the computer to establish my story was not taking place in the 1960s (as some would have insisted), and had the gift giving take place long before Parker became Spider-Man. In the original Lee/Ditko version, the microscope came after Peter became Spider-Man.

Perhaps the most frustrating was my time on HIDDEN YEARS, when I was being constantly bombarded with complaints about how I was "damaging continuity" with my tales, tho absolutely none of them did any such thing. Here the lack of knowledge on the part of those who complained was exacerbated by their refusal to even check to see how the original stories had been presented. When I had Ororo meet the original team, in a story set before GIANT-SIZED X-MEN 1, many self-declared experts flipped out, claiming this could not have happened because it had not been mentioned before, and, further, Jean and Ororo did not "recognize" each other in GSXM 1. Yet, as I pointed out, where was the moment when they WOULD have recognized each other? In the middle of the battle with Krakoa, should there have been a pause while the girls said "Hi"? Or could that have maybe happened on the long flight back to Westchester, after the issue ended?

(Fans who complain that something cannot be "real" because it "wasn't mentioned before" are among the most difficult to deal with. Apply that rule retroactively, and probably half the Marvel Universe would disappear!)

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Darren Taylor
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Posted: 08 October 2013 at 6:17am | IP Logged | 10  

"(as well as watching JB draw)!"
@ Simon: Agreed! I stood transfixed pretty much the entire time. I had nothing clever to say and was more than a little star-struck:)

I still have the Convention book somewhere!

-D 
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Jack Bohn
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Posted: 08 October 2013 at 6:29am | IP Logged | 11  

One thing I remember is the MARVEL AGE interview hyping the mag, Byrne mentioned two characters he'd be adding, saying one was probably obvious, the other he'd like to keep as a surprise. I thought Iron Man and the Human Torch, or - if he was aware of the advertising - the Human Torch and Iron Man. Then the end of one issue the USAgent comes busting through the doors saying he's there to put the jamboree in order. Dun-dun-DAAA!
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Joel Tesch
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Posted: 08 October 2013 at 8:50am | IP Logged | 12  

US Agent's inclusion was a bit strange to me. Captain America was on the east coast team at the time. Wouldn't he have raised a concern to the West Coast crew about having a mass-murdering, homicidal maniac on the team? Maybe that would have been addressed in due time...
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