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.