AVENGERS #102-104 (1972)

A very busy set of issues as Rick Buckler signs on as artist, and Chris Claremont gets a plotting credit.  Claremont was a budding editorial assistant at the time.  The story has so much in it, it’s hard to compress into a summary.  Basically, The Sentinels survived their journey into the sun and are heading towards Earth with the goal of sterilizing all humans, thereby preventing the birth of more mutants.

They start by going after Scarlet Witch, and I’m not sure what was going on here but it looks like the writer was going for a “she dressed for it” kind of vibe?

She gets all hot-looking to go sit on a bench, and gets attacked.

Side note: The irony of her being in love with a robot and being kidnapped by one.

They need Scarlet Witch’s power to kill all mutants. In fact, she will be the one whose words “No More Mutants” will end new mutants from being born. But that happens next century.

The Avengers track the robots to their lair, which is basically an anthill.  Weird.

There’s a little typo, and those are always fun. “Nickel of time!”

We get a cutaway diagram of the base, too, and I’ve taken a solemn oath to reprint these whenver I find them.

Quicksilver is first.

Then most of the team gets captured.

Vision appears to be knocked out too, but he’s faking it because he’s a robot. (Why didn’t Iron Man put down his own eye/mouth shields?)

In the big finale, one of the huge robots falls on Dr. Larry Trask and kills him.

I wish they’d used the sound effect, “Squish!”

Meanwhile, Hawkeye finally is forced to accept that Wanda Maximoff doesn’t love him–she’s in love with Vision.

The X-Men still can’t be found.  

Lots of X-Men appearances this year–but their own comic is still in reprints.  Also very cool to see how Claremont was involved in these rebranding issues for the mutants.  We’re still two years away from Giant-Size X-Men #1, though.

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