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On the upside: This book revisits the greatest Marvel comic of all time, Fantastic Four #5–the one where the FF go back in time and Thing gets to be Blackbeard the pirate. That’s really cool.
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The team finds the old machine. And yeah, it’s incredible that it’s just abandoned. Also, strangely, Dr. Doom seems to have installed a “view only” button on his time machine…
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But putting all those issues to one side, the story in Avengers #56 is cool.
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Captain America misses Bucky like mad and has come to believe Bucky really isn’t dead.
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So, he recruits the team to go back in time to the moment Baron Zola strapped the duo on a rocket and shot them up in the sky.
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Cap gets convinced that Bucky is in fact dead by the end. Of course, he’s not.
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Hank Pym trusts Jan to mind the buttons and make sure they get back in time. But she falls asleep.
And there’s a casual panel here–no fanfare at all–that I’m going to say represents the first Fastball Special. Even if it’s not called that.
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That’s all in issue #56. They say that it’s to be continued in King Size Special Avengers #2 (aka Avengers Annual #2), but I can’t see how it gets continued there.
![](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/marveldatabase/images/6/6e/Avengers_Annual_Vol_1_2.jpg)
The Annual is a weird time travel story that kind of sucks. You can tell is sucks because Nathaniel Richards is in it and he takes on YET ANOTHER name. Scarlet Centurion.
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So, stick with #56 and you’ll have a good reading experience.
As noted above, the most astonishing- and I do mean ASTONISHING-aspect of this story is the fact that the most incredible invention-and possibly the greatest WEAPON-of all time-Dr. Doom’s incredible time machine- has been just totally ABANDONED FOR THE TAKING by ANYONE WHO WANTS TO COME and GET IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The idiocy involved here is just mind-staggering. Now, I am aware that the time-machine is eventually relocated to the Baxter Building where it will be ( relatively ) in safer keeping. I don’t know exactly when this transpired, but it did, because I believe the next chronological appearance of the time machine was in Marvel Two-In-One#4. ( 1974, six years later ) Any government on Earth would have the ultimate superweapon with this time machine, but in these issues, it’s being treated as garage sale junk!! W-T-F-?!?!?!?!? Also, don’t be too hard on Jan-Baby for falling asleep at the switch- I seem to recall reading somewhere that this was NOT an arbitrary occurrence, because some malevolent force somewhere wanted the Assemblers to materialize onto this scene, so it-they made Jan go winky-bye, and, somehow, astonishingly, also caused her right hand to fall onto just the right button to make it happen. I don’t remember where I read this-I just did. Also, as with Marvel Girl/Phoenix and Gwen Stacey’s miraculous resurrections, the poignancy of this powerful issue was totally nullified by Bucky’s return from the dead in 2008. What yet another Mighty Marvel shitter.