The Hope… and the Slaughter!

Book: The Avengers

Issue No.: 177

Published: August 15, 1978

Title: “The Hope… and the Slaughter!”

Cover Price: 35¢

Format: Original paper copy

I’ve been assuming that Marvel’s 1978 comic books, as a rule, featured seventeen pages of story, an optional fan-mail page, and a bunch of ads. On first read, this issue of Avengers seemed to feature a lot of story. I was thinking, wow, Jim Shooter (the writer) really did a lot with seventeen pages. But I counted the story pages just in case and found out that this book features eighteen story pages. And also a fan-mail page!

This issue of Avengers wraps up the “Michael” storyline (where the bad guy is this nearly all-powerful being who calls himself Michael and looks like a normal blond dude and his lair is just a house in the suburbs), so I guess maybe that warranted an extra page of story. Aside from writing The Avengers, Jim Shooter was Marvel’s editor-in-chief in 1978. So if Shooter wanted an extra page for a book he was writing, I guess him being the boss at Marvel made that an easy get for him.

Another assumption I’ve made about these books is that advertisers were buying ads for all of Marvel’s books for a given month. For example, the inside cover of all the August 1978 Marvel books I’ve seen so far features an ad for the Energized Spider-Man toy (made by Remco — I had this toy in the late 1970s and should probably write a post about it!). So how does a book make room for more story pages without cutting into ads? At least in this case, Avengers no. 177 is missing two pages of house ads (ads that advertise other Marvel books). I compared this Avengers book with the last book I read for Marvel Time Warp, Marvel Tales no. 97, and that issue of Tales includes an ad encouraging readers to subscribe to various Marvel comics ($4.50 for twelve comics delivered to your home — truly a bargain!) and an ad for Marvel’s (awesome) Godzilla and (also awesome) Devil Dinosaur books. Both of those ads are missing from Avengers no. 177, but otherwise the ad content of the two books is the same.

Now that I’ve dazzled you with three paragraphs about page counts and advertisements, I guess I should get into the plot of Avengers no. 177. Like I said earlier, there’s a lot going on here. Not only do a bunch of Avengers (including Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor) fight Michael, the Guardians of the Galaxy show up, too. (These aren’t the same Guardians from the Marvel movies — they’re a different group of heroes from the future who have time traveled to 1978.) And Michael kills a bunch of these superheroes. When the first hero fell, I was like “oh, wow.” But after he killed Black Panther and the Scarlet Witch, I was like, “oh, at least most of this is gonna get undone.”

And that’s what happened. It turns out that Michael wasn’t really a bad guy and that the Avengers were just used as pawns by cosmic beings who didn’t agree with Michael’s goals. Michael didn’t get defeated by the Avengers so much as he just gave up. Since he knew the Avengers had been tricked into fighting him, Michael forgave them. Before he died, Michael un-killed everybody that had perished in battle with him.

Next time — The Invaders fight Destroyer!