Random Happenstance

What do Lone Wolf and Cub and Marvel Adventures Avengers have in common? Well, I've probably got all of both of them, spread out across like four different formats. Today we've got one of the collections that I believe were sold at Target, per the indica: Target Avengers: Mischief, reprinting Marvel Adventures: Avengers #5-8, written by Tony Bedard, pencils by Shannon Gallant, inks by John Stanisci, Cory Hamscher, and Norman Lee.

As always, these are fun, light adventures; with a line-up I kind of like: mainstays Cap, Iron Man, and Janet Van Dyne as Giant-Girl; Wolverine and Storm, Spider-Man and the Hulk. Most of these issues feature Loki, creating foils for the team just to see what would happen: this was pretty close to the Wrecker's usual origin, and he fits into Juggernaut's as Cain Marko's guide "Loquito" and points him at the temple of Cyttorrak. Loki later disguises himself as Cap and the Juggernaut as the Hulk, as they breakout the recently created U-Foes to join their little team. (It's easy when you can pick up four members at once!) Loki leads an attack on Avengers Tower, in a flying middle school (Irving Forbush!) reasoning they wouldn't know what to make of it, until it was too late! Still, Cap works out what Loki wanted--to regain reverance over "twerps" like Spider-Man--and embarrasses him on national TV as a bully.

This collection is a hair bigger than a usual comic, but I also have several of the digest-size books. I didn't have this one, though; in fact I had less of them than I had thought! A lot of that shelf were the later collections which usually spotlighted Spidey, Cap, Iron Man or Thor; or some team-up pairing thereof. But, I have some as they were originally published, as regular comics. I might have to take a bit to re-read the last collection of the series--there was a relaunch afterwards--and the team had added Tigra by that point, which is even better!