“Well wait one gosh darn second, Octo” I hear you say, “That masthead says Avengers: Earths Mightiest Heroes, and not Thunderbolts: Marvels Most Wanted, did you read the wrong comic? I WANT MY MONEY BACK!”
And you’re right to make that demand, I’ve already mailed the cheques.
But more to the point, this issue of Avengers (
Old Entanglements) is the direct continuation of the last issue of Thunderbolts (where the Bolts’ secret hideout/teen make-out cabin) was completely leveled by Hercules and also Hawkeyes involvement with the team was leaked to the public.
It’s also a direct continuation of the previous issue of Avengers, but I’ve only read, like, two issues of the Busiek run there so I’m less invested with that storyline, but this ain’t Kurt’s first rodeo and he’s good at getting you up to speed, and besides this is
much more of a Thunderbolts story featuring the Avengers, than an Avengers story featuring the Bolts.
Also, while George Perez is one of my all time Favorite illustrators, he isn’t really able to match the Saturday Morning Cartoon aesthetic I love about Bagleys art, so it looks… kind of
off.
Anyhoo; we get a brief recap on the recent
important bits of Thunderbolts courtesy of some news coverage, which mainly exists to let people who’d been reading this book and not that one, know what their deal is; and most concerningly, that longtime Avenger Hawkeye has apparently joined the team.
News which comes to a pretty big surprise to comparably long time Avengers, Captain America and Hank Pym. Actually let’s go over the full team because it’s not a… super conventional Avengers line-up;
Captain America (Super Soldier, Living Legend, Americas Ass)
Scarlet Witch (Mistress of Chaos, Sometimes Mutant, Robot-smoocher)
Wonder Man (Invulnerable D-List Actor, Loves being Alive)
Vision (technically Wondermans brother, Nice Robot Son of Killer Robot Dad, Is Very Sad)
Firestar (Amazing Friend, Living Microwave, Too Radioactive)
Justice (I 'unno, some kinda cape guy? Friends with Firestar?)
Hank Pym (terrible)
Thor and Iron Man are also technically on the team at the moment but they’re Hecking off in Asgard and Recuperating From Many Broken Bones at the moment so they don’t show up much or at all on this story.
Anyway, we’ve got a montage of the Avengers showing off where they each are on their personal character arcs, while Cap and Hank both try to call up Hawkeye on the phone to ask him “Hey! What the hell, man?”
Firestar needs to wear a specially modified undersuit to maintain her powers which are otherwise killing her
Justice feels like he really doesn’t warrant being on the same team as Captain America (I feel the same way)
And Wonderman, Vision and Wanda are presently entangled in the weirdest love-triangle in the history of comic books because she used to be married to Vision, before he had his personality sucked out, and now he has it back, but she’s dating Wonderman who is delighted to be alive again, and shares the same brainwaves as Vision so it’s *basically* like her dating her old boyfriend, by merit of encephalogram.
God I love Comic Books.
Wonderman, incidentally does not realize he’s involved in a love triangle at all because he’s just so giddy to be revived after the last time he was killed (it happens to him a
lot, and he does not like being dead)
Anyway, the absolutely baffling array of interpersonal romance is cut short, when Hawkeye… does the superhero communicator equivalent of butt-dialling the Avengers Mansion, and reveals his location to the team;
As you might have guessed, he’s at the
Dominus Base in Arizona.
What’s a Dominus Base you may well be asking?
Well, you probably are asking because the Thunderbolts have no friggin' idea themselves, including Jolt who is basically a living Marvel Universe Guidebook. Luckily, being one of the people involved with the Dominus storyline, Hawkeye is able to tell her.
And I swear you can just hear Kurt Busieks giddiness at being able to bring Dominus Base back for the sake of a one-off crossover story; if there’s any doubt that Kurt is absolutely the kind of comic nerd who just LOVES being able to bring up weird ephemera this would lay it to rest.
The short version is that the Dominus was a sentient alien computer created by a race called The Arcane, who sought to, well, dominate the Earth. Or annihilate it if it proved undominatable. It mainly tried to do this with its avatar, the
long forgotten silver age villain Lucifer (no relation to any other Lucifer), whom Hawkeye identified as "a turniphead". Eventually, long after the last time it tried, the West Coast Avengers found Dominus and destroyed its central computer system just as it was gearing up to trying conquering/destroying the planet again. And then they just left a giant techno-base buried underground in Arizona because all the cool alien tech inside it was destroyed; so it was just a fancy underground warehouse.
The "big fancy hidden technobase" being the aspect that's particularly important here; since the Thunderbolts actual hideout was completely destroyed in the last issue; to the lament of all the horny teens in Wyoming. The Dominus Base needed all kinds of surveillance equipment to aid in its conquest of Earth, and it had to be livable for Dominus' avatars and host-bodies, so Hawkeye figures it's the perfect place to set up as a new headquarters for the Bolts.
So the Bolts set about trying to find an entrance way into the base, mainly by exploding large chunks of the walls, while having a quick montage of their thoughts and feelings for readers of the Avengers who haven't been following the T-Bolts. And no sooner do we get through them all, than a Quinjet appears out of nowhere and blows up one of Songbirds constructs as she tries busting into the base.
Yep, we have a superhero meeting, and that means Everyone Has To Fight. Technically, this is the
second time the Bolts and Avengers have met, but the last time the Avengers were being mind-controlled, so that doesn't count.
Anyway, it's a big ol' smack-down, and it's a really good one. Not quite as hyper-kinetic as a Bagley fight scene, but there's some real neat stuff with panel layouts that I really should have taken the time to screen-cap, and it gives lots of chances for everyone on each team to show off exactly what they can do.
Except for Hawkeye, who isn't contributing to the fight, and Scarlet Witch, who SHOULD have been able to shut down the Thunderbolts immediately with her Chaos Magic, if she felt so inclined. She doesn't feel inclined, however, because what little magic she was spending on the fight was spent trying to figure out who the actual villain is using... I guess a Detect Good and Evil spell, and realizing that NOBODY on either team is actually being mind-controlled into violent or criminal acts; Hawkeye is on the Thunderbolts of his own free-will and the Bolts were just investigating a disused Evil Techno Base for benign purposes.
So she and Hawkeye call a time-out on the superhero fight and explain things a bit; and Hawkeye explains why, exactly, he's signed up with the Bolts (because the Avengers gave him a chance when HE had a criminal background); and calls out Cap for doubting him by saying his objections are "BUSHWAH".
Which is a hilarious thing to yell during a screaming match.
Anyway, after yelling BUSHWAH, tempers cool a bit, and both teams begrudgingly agree to stop fighting. And we're only midway through an extra long comic, so this would be about the ideal time for both groups to come together to fight a common foe.
Oh, yes, that will do nicely.
As it turns out, the Dominus Base wasn't just an abandoned techno base buried in the ground; it was a Transformer; and the force of the battle between the Thunderbolts and Avengers knocked a few pieces of it back into place; reactivating its main computer and causing it to assume its true form; the enormous robot
Dominex
Everyone spends a moment wondering if they were mispronouncing its name as "Domin
us" all along, or if this is a new guy, before Dominex makes his intentions a bit clear by blasting everyone with eyeball lasers; and announcing that since the Dominus was created to Conquer or Destroy the Earth, and since the Dominus was blown up and no aliens currently rule the Earth, it had it was time to get crackin' on Plan B; to march over to the thinnest point on the Earths Crust, and overload its power-core, resulting in an explosion so massive it will split the Earth asunder and kill every living thing on it.
Naturally, neither team is a fan of this plan, so they fly off to try to stop the Dominex before it can reach the fracture point and explode. As does the US air force, as a mile-tall robot screaming its intention to crack the planet open like an egg tends to attract attention. The Avengers are late getting there, as they took longer to recover from Dominex' eye-beams (Jolt was immune and revived her own team quickly, not realizing that Vision and Scarlet Witch are probably better choices for this kind of mission than Hawkeye is).
So now we got everyone fighting Dominex, and it's a George Perez comic where a whole lot of people is fighting One Big Guy, so of course, it's amazing to behold; but ultimately, the good guys are losing; Dominex has a forcefield that keeps anyone from so much as scratching it, and when the Bolts get inside it by hopping into one of the gaps in its armor they made trying to get into the Base BEFORE it was a big robot, they find that it can self-repair and undo any damage they deal to its interior.
The Bolts manage to delay Dominex by having Moonstone use her ability to change the structure of her costume (which IS one of her powers, as situational as it is) and slaps on one of the old helmets used by Dominus' avatars in order to try to convince Dominex that the Conquer Earth plan is still on-going so breaking the planet apart is premature; and relying on the fact that a mile-tall alien robot made out of a building would probably have a hard time telling one human apart from another so it would probably not notice that Dominus has a has a different face, voice and gender than it did previously.
Luckily, that is exactly the case; the Dominex doesn't *stop* but it does slow down enough for Mach to use his armor computer system to upload Dominexs schematics to Vision and Hank Pym outside (and Tony Stark, in his hospital bed, with many, many broken bones) and help the team track down Dominexs central core and destroy it before it can start repairing itself, or figure out that a lithe blond lady is not a stocky, brown haired man and resume trying to blow up the Earth.
Dominex shuts down, permanently this time (as per Marvel Fandom Wiki, this was its first and last appearance), and the Avengers are forced to admit that, yes, despite their lifetime of evil up until recently, the Bolts really DO seem to have genuinely turned a leaf and are acting like good guys. But they're not
completely convinced, and remind Hawkeye that if Clint is a member of that team and they DO revert to their criminal ways, it implicates the Avengers as well.
And Hawkeye solves that problem by officially quitting the Avengers so he can be a Thunderbolt full time.
Cap says "Well... I guess... that addresses my concerns?" and both teams head off into the sunset. Except the Thunderbolts are still homeless because their prospective housing was once again completely annihilated because of superhero shenanigans.
NEXT TIME: Wizard Magazine Would, Once Again, Like to Remind You They Love This Comic