With #20, Solo Avengers is retitled Avengers Spotlight. This was to ensure that Avengers fans would see the comic at direct market comic book stores, who shelved the ever-burgeoning monthly shipments alphabetically. By ’89, there were at least a dozen regular indie publishers in addition to DC and Marvel, so it makes sense that a title like this could get lost in the “S” lane.
And so the Solo Avengers experiment ends, and is replaced by…The exact same thing but with a different title. Hawkeye beats Orb with a trick arrow. I’ve never liked trick arrows. And also, Ghost Rider has stood his own against multiple Avengers (and at the same time, at that!), and yet has struggled against Orb so…This seems out of balance.
Anyhow, the story is about Orb being Hawkeye’s prisoner as they trapse across a desert so Hawkeye can take Orb to jail. Only Plantman has taken over the desert.
It’s not a terrible story. It’s actually better than most of the Hawkeye installments in this title. It’s used to bridge Solo Avengers to Avengers Spotlight. The rest of the stories in these issues are single-issue short tales. The Moondragon story (in issue #20) has its own post here.
There’s a Black Panther story that is horrible and inconsequential.
And then in Spotlight #21 there’s a Starfox back up that is kind of a two-parter crossing over with Marvel Comics Presents, so I cover it separately here. But you can see how Marvel is not really making use of the anthology concept, with crossing over and all.
Hawkeye: Howard Mackie, Ron Wilson. Grade: C
Black Panther: Sandy Plunkett and Scott Hampton. Grade: F