Avengers vs. X-Men #8, "Round 8"

When it comes to Namor's appearances in team books, whether as a guest-star or as an actual member of said team, I sometimes struggle to choose where to direct my attention between the Avengers, Defenders, X-Men, Invaders and Fantastic Four. As a result, the next three posts (perhaps more) will be about times that those teams have met either as allies or foes.

We begin with Avengers vs. X-Men #8. From what I can gather, Namor appears in the earlier issues of the mini series but being that he gets cover treatment here, we're going to start at the end. It seems that he does not appear in issues 9 through 12.

Marvel's attempts at bringing us up to date sometimes only add to the confusion but they do a nice job here.

So Stark messed everything up again. Got it.

I'd heard that there were some...uhm...strained feeling about Namor/Atlantis and Wakanda so I'm actually eager to read this now even though nearly everything of Marvel I've read that was published in this century has been complete ass. So let's go!

Sure enough, Namor and his "fish army" (Iron Man's words) are devastating Wakanda. The Avengers retaliate, getting their shots in on Namor one by one.

But once a Phoenix-powered Namor decides to stop dicking around, he quickly regains the upper hand.

There isn't much more to it than that. Namor wrecks stuff, takes some ineffective hits and delivers some blows. Much of this book is a giant fight, as one should expect.

How does he ultimately get taken down? Well...We're not really told but the Scarlet Witch is the one who pulls it off.

That seems plausible enough. Her ability to, in effect, cause unlikely events to take place could cause the Phoenix Force (or whatever the hell it is called) to exit Namor's body as it did as a result of the confrontation above. Fair enough.

A couple of things are unclear but perhaps that is simply from lack of having read the earlier issues.

For one, I believe it is known that the Phoenix corrupts its host. So why is everyone so eager to shit on Namor over this attack? Captain America (granted, an arrogant asshole, IMO) mutters "Damn you, Namor" at some point and later tells him he should be ashamed of himself.

Perhaps the Phoenix force is like having too much booze? It "releases" you to do things you normally wouldn't?

And nice behaviour by The Thing over on the right. Granted the two of them have a history and Namor essentially devastated a city (perhaps a country) but again, he was not of sound mind at the time. As Captain America and Spider-Man look on, who are the heroes in this story again?

And what IS Namor's motivation here, exactly? He tells the Black Panther at some point "You must know I would not stand for this". For...what? He also says that they (The Avengers) have brought this on themselves. It certainly sounds like Namor's actions were an act of retaliation.

Following its exit from Namor's body, The Phoenix Force was spread (presumably equally) among the remaining four people who shared it with him.

The Avengers, realizing that it took all of them to beat just 20% of the force, decide to bail to K'un-Lun (home of Iron Fist) rather than to attempt to battle all of them.

I would argue that it technically only took one of them, the Scarlet Witch, but that would diminish the gruesome, massive compound fracture that Red Hulk suffered and that was completely ignored throughout the rest of the book. He's just standing there in a group shot at the end like having an arm nearly severed was just another day at the office.

Acknowledging that I'm jumping in well into the story so that a lack of clarity might be caused by that alone, this was a pretty entertaining book. I've read enough Marvel books published in the 2000s that are little more than characters having extended meaningful glances (can you even call that reading?) that the large scale action of this one was a refreshing surprise.

Uncanny X-Men (2011) #12

When choosing which issues to pick up and review during the recent sale on X-Men digital books, the one below was pretty much a no-brainer.

This is only my second foray into the Avengers vs X-Men story. The first was issue #1 of the VAC: VS mini series, reviewed here.

Looking back, while I recognized at the time that the AVS:VS book acknowledged its own pointlessness, X-Men 12 underscored it in spectacular fashion. AVS: Vs #1 was published one month before the above issue in which the same two characters were going to throw down anyway. Again, it may be that greater exposure to the story as a whole makes VS more worthwhile but that isn't the sense I get right at this point.

But enough about that. What about this book?

Well, Namor gets plenty of face time, which is good. It's not particularly good quality time though.

The X-Men are looking for a character named Hope that I know next to nothing about. They are split into teams which leads to this exchange.

Okay...Not only is artist Greg Land notorious for tracing his art from pornography, it appears that writer Kieron Gillen is determined to play along because this sort of thing keeps coming up (double entendre not intended) throughout the issue.

Around the same time this little group arrives at Tabula Rasa, whatever the hell that is, so does an Avengers teams of Luke Cage, She-Hulk and The Thing.

Evidently, the Avengers didn't feel the need to diversify this group's power base. It's all physical strength and, well, that's about it.

Namor uses one of his lesser-known "abilities" to try to track down this Hope character.

Yeah, that's just gross, I don't care how many boobs she has.

Anyway, they do encounter the Avengers and waste no time attacking them. Namor pounds Cage into the ground and tosses him into the nearest body of water which, unlike the one above, is sort of brick-coloured.

Land must have traced that from some porn actor who has no fingers.

Namor uses Cage's unconscious form to knock She-Hulk unconscious and just like that, we're on to our main event.

The scrap, however, is unimpressive, short-lived and interrupted by some kind of alien thing that resides in this joint.

Seriously, Gillen, what the hell is wrong with you? As lazy as Land can be though, The Thing's expression there is kind of funny.

Hope having been located, everyone just heads home. So we followed the team that did NOT find Hope.

Really then, this book is just as pointless as AVX:VS. It just gives the illusion of having a story attached to it.

AVX: VS (2012) #1

I haven't had a lot of time to devote to this little ode to Sub-Mariner awesomeness lately. This book is perfect, then, because it devotes only 10 of its supposed 22 pages to a fight between The Avenging Son and The Thing from The Fantastic Four. Or actually, based on what he's wearing, it may be accurate to say that he's The Thing from The Future Foundation.

There isn't much point to this book but it makes no bones about it. It was a six-issue extension of the Avengers vs. X-Men limited series that ran throughout most of 2012. It features nothing but fights that would normally have taken place somewhere during the second issue of the main series.

A scrap between Magneto and Iron Man kick things off, then we get into the meat of the matter.

Of course they're fighting in the ocean. We don't know why they're there or why these two in particular are scrapping for the umpteenth time. Either that's explained in the main series or it isn't at all. We're just here for the fights, remember?

The ending, which I won't give away even if the book is six years old as I write this, is a little unclear. It involves outside interference, to borrow a wrestling terms, by a sea creature that I would have thought Namor could have simply controlled. In any event, if you simply consider where these two characters have been in the pecking order over the years, you can't probably figure out who was awarded the "victory". A fun distraction that doesn't pretend to be anything but.