Dark Avengers #176-177

Let’s jump ahead a couple of years to see how Doctor Doom’s return in Fantastic Four #569 was retconned.

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Dark Avengers #176 (2012)
by Jeff Parker & Kev Walker
cover my Mike Deodato Jr.

This the series is called Dark Avengers, naturally we are going to be focusing on a new Thunderbolts team. No, that’s not confusing at all.

This iteration of the Thunderbolts is not as famous as others, so it needs some introduction.
It’s a pity this didn’t really take off because it’s one of my favorite uses of the concepts: Luke Cage has assembled a team of supervillains who join the team to reduce their sentence!
Basically, it’s the Suicide Squad but you don’t get automatically killed if you disobey orders.
That’s a neat concept and it works VERY well with Luke Cage.

The membership was quite fluid, but at the time this story takes place it includes:

• Moonstone, because otherwise it’s not the Thunderbolts
• Boomerang
• Mister Hyde, in a different look because someone has read League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen
• Ghost, an Iron Man villain who was in Osborn’s team
• Satana, the freaking DAUGHTER OF SATAN (!!!) and walking fanservice
• Centurius, evil scientist from Steranko’s Nick Fury
• Man-Thing, who is not a villain but works as the team’s pet and teleportation gimmick
• Troll, a half-human half-troll feral girl who might be the best thing about this book and deserved to be the breakout star

For reasons that are not really that important at the moment, the team is lost in time.

Did I mention this run was a lot of fun?

Also there’s lots of infighting whenever Luke Cage is not around, because Thunderbolts.

Centurius figures out the reason why the Thunderbolts are in this particular time period is that they’ve crossed paths with another time traveler…

…who as you might have guessed is Doctor Doom himself, fighting prehistoric shark after being dropped into the past by the Marquis of Death in Fantastic Four #567.

Moonstone has been hanging around superheroes for so long that she’s started to quip like one.

She brings Doom to the time-traveling tower that the Thunderbolts are using as their base (don’t ask), just in time for it to vanish.

Boomerang is having the time of his life on this team.

Thunderbolts Tower then takes the team even further back into the past, at the origins of life on Earth.

This is where Doom starts to wake up, and you may notice he’s not wearing his mask: that’s because the Marquis took it from him.

It’s interesting to see that nobody reacts to seeing Doom’s scarred face. It’s probably a combination of the other crazy stuff happening at the moment, plus this team includes people who are used to seeing much worse (like the LITERAL DAUGHTER OF SATAN), but you’d think that at least Boomerang would say something.

At this point nobody has figured out this is Doctor Doom, because of the lack of a mask and the heavy damage to his armor.

Then Man-Thing finds the team, and he’s acting a bit different than usual… HE TALKS.

He’s the reason for the time travel shenanigans: he wanted to get back to the beginning of life.

Everyone is hearing Man-Thing’s words differently, which is a neat gimmick.

The team is ready to get back to the present, planning to disband immediately because Thunderbolts…

…but they forgot about Doctor Doom, so OF COURSE he takes control of the tower.

Seriously, this incarnation of the Thunderbolts needs more love.

Doctor Doom does not appreciate retcons.

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Dark Avengers #177 (2012)
written by Jeff Parker
pencils by Kev Walker & Declan Shalvey
cover by John Tyler Christopher

The reason why this series is called “Dark Avengers” is that it features both the Thunderbolts AND a team called Dark Avengers. That’s not confusing at all!

The Thunderbolts don’t really appreciate Doom’s idea to strand them through time, so they leave the Tower with him once they reach the 21st century.

This means, you guessed it, a big dumb fight.

SHOCKINGLY, Boomerang doesn’t do well against an army of Doombots!

After plots about the Dark Avengers that have nothing to do with the Doom story, Ghost asks Man-Thing to help.

Ironically, a Man-Thing with a brain turns out to be less effective than the usual brainless one.

I’ve raved about the Thunderbolts, but Doom is also all kinds of badass in this.

Even when Satana sends him to Hell… AGAIN…

…including a connection to Triumph and Torment…

…IT’S STILL NOT ENOUGH.

I’ve never really cared for Satana, but this series made me appreciate her.

The Thunderbolts retreat to the Tower, which is still set to jump into the far future.

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Doctor Doom doesn’t appear in the next issue, so this is where we’re going to stop.
But I should mention that this results in the destruction of Thunderbolts Tower.

Yeah I’m not holding my breath for the rematch between Doctor Doom and Boomerang either.

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Doom significance: 6/10
Retconning the fact that Doom is millions of years old: he didn’t save himself from the Marquis of Death by jumping from body to body, he hijacked Thunderbolts Tower.

Silver Age-ness: 6/10
On the Marvel scale for sure, but… they rescue a time traveler completely unrelated from their own time machine and then forget about him for several pages!

 Does it stand the test of time?
#176: 9/10
#177: 6/10
Most of my praise goes to the Thunderbolt series… but this is technically the Dark Avengers series crossing over with them. In fact issue 177 mostly covers the Dark Avengers adventure, which is completely disconnected from the Thunderbolts one.
The Thunderbolts story is a delight: it’s FAR more complex that I could cover here, but it explores small niches of the Marvel Universe and gives a new twist to several locations and characters.
And the Thunderbolts themselves are great: there’s absolutely no pretense to be heroes, these are horrible people who end up doing good things for purely selfish reasons. But I think it works better with this team than with the Osborn team, because in this incarnation they’re fun classic supervillains instead of outright monsters and serial killers.
That’s right: the less morally deplorable team is THE ONE WITH THE DAUGHTER OF SATAN.
So if this was just the Thunderbolts, it would EASILY be a 9/10 for both. But #177 mostly focuses on the actual Dark Avengers, and the fact that I didn’t cover them AT ALL should really tell you how uninterested I am in that particular incarnation.
As for the Doctor Doom retcon, while I would’ve preferred avoiding it… it was kind of necessary, because as mentioned in the Fantastic Four story having him millions of years old creates all kids of problems from both continuity and characterization standpoints.
If you HAVE to retcon a way for him to survive the Marquis of Death, this wasn’t a bad solution: yes the Thunderbolts rescued him from the sharks, but everything else was Doom’s doing.

It was a Doombot all along
Most definitely not, between the retcon and the mental trip to Hell.

Number of superheroes who have fought Dr. Doom: 98
No additions to the list.
If Songbird was here I would certainly add her, but she’s not with the team now. I considered adding Man-Thing, but he doesn’t fight Doom.
As for the others, they’re in the Thunderbolts exclusively for their own selfish reasons and they consider themselves supervillains anyway.
Except Troll. I don’t she can even grasp the difference between hero and villain. She just likes to bite and break stuff.

Crazy tech
As Doom himself basically points out: he’s on the verge of death without any of his weapons, and he STILL manages to reprogram Thunderbolts Tower without breaking a sweat.