The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 915: Avengers v.1 #246, August 1984

Starfox is a bad influence. Or, actually, maybe he's a good influence. Taking along the Wasp, Eros crashes a party thrown by one "Sylvia Serisi," actually Sersi from Jack Kirby's Eternals series. Looking ahead, this is just the beginning of an association between Sersi and the Avengers. She becomes a regular team member in the 90s, and still occasionally shows up every few years.

It's nice to see that She-Hulk is at the same party, though not in connection to her fellow Avengers. It kind of makes sense that super-people would move in the same circles, so it's not surprising to see someone they know at the party. This is one example of how Stern and Milgrom use the soap opera of The Avengers to build a huge, intricate world for the Marvel heroes to inhabit. In the 80s, this was the comic that was establishing what the Marvel U looked like, even if X-Men the more popular.

A couple of other interesting things happen. Stern's style of writing is to have a big action even in each issue, for the most part. In the background of that, he plants the seeds of the big story he's interested in telling. For the last few issues, it's been the increasingly strange behaviour of the Vision. Today's meeting, behind closed doors, with President Reagan is enough to get even his doting wife the Scarlet Witch raising a concerned eyebrow. If memory serves, this'll all come to a head soon. The other interesting thing is that Captain Marvel, Monica Rambeau, reveals to her parents her identity as a superhero. I'm trying to read the race and gender politics of this run of comics with an open mind, but I have to say thus far I'm far more impressed than I thought I'd be. In he the Spider-Woman story from a few days ago, it was an all-female team of Avengers leading the charge. Can you imagine seeing something like that in the MCU? Roger Stern is a writer with definite ideas about things. His firing from this title a few years down the line is proof positive of that. I look forward to being further pleasantly surprised.

To be continued.