#Hydro Man | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

thebibliomancer · 6 months ago

Text

Essential Avengers: Avengers West Coast #59: GET SMART

June, 1990

Vs. the Horror of HYDRO-MAN! DELUGE!

This is a weird one.

It's a fill-in issue but it also ties into one of the plot threads from Byrne's run but it also ties into Acts of Vengeance and also Hawkeye is back on the team.

It'll make sense at the end but from the beginning its a weird swerve if you were following month to month.

Last times on West Coast Avengers: not relevant. This is a fill-in.

This time on West Coast Avengers: mother nature pulls a heist.

A tidal wave in San Remo, California not only does pedestrians a startle, it also lifts three sacks with dollar signs out of an armored truck and carries them to the ocean.

Global warming has gotten out of hand!

Okay, actually it's Morris Bench, Hydro-Man.

He makes a clean getaway and is soon living it up, enjoying a beer on the beach.

But despite having successfully pulled several heists, he doesn't get any respect.

Some randos sitting near him, not knowing he's nearby, start shit-talking Hydro-Man as a big dumbo who wastes his potential on petty heists instead of being a cool dude like Dr. Doom and ruling a country.

Hydro-Man is mad but doesn't blow his cover over it. He just sulks that the two random assholes have a point. He is a big dumbo who only pulls small, manageable jobs.

But dangit, he wants to better himself! Not morally but in terms of getting respect and power!

Then a mysterious blonde man sits at his table and tells Hydro-Man he's small time because he's a dumbo. He puts his hand on Hydro-Man's face, does a little sparkle sparkle, and suddenly Hydro-Man is thinking big-time thoughts!

He runs off, leaving his armored truck score behind. Because he's got big-time dreams now.

The blonde man is left behind thinking to himself how amusing this should all prove.

What a mysterious blonde guy who can magically make a man smarter. So mysterious.

Anyway, ten miles down the coast, the Avengers West Coast Compound. Where Wonder Man and Hawkeye are having a little sparring match.

Hawkeye manages to make Wonder Man look a fool by first freezing him and then clogging up his belt jets with a glue arrow, sending Wonder Man SPLOOOSHing into the pool.

They only just call the sparring match when a priority call comes in for the Avengers.

A police guy has called the Avengers to inform them that Hydro-Man has taken hostages and is demanding that the Avengers (West Coast) come fight him or he'll kill his prisoners.

The Avengers (West Coast) have no idea what this is about because they've never fought Hydro-Man before but they're also not that worried.

It's just Hydro-Man! He's a doofus!

Wonder Man and Hawkeye - and just the two of them? - fly off to confront the villain, joking about bringing sponges and a hot water bottle to trap him in.

Hydro-Man has staged this showdown at the Arnel Building in downtown Los Angeles. Twelve employees have been shoved into a large metal crate and dangled high in the air above the lobby.

Hydro-Man tells them that once he kills the Avengers, he'll let them loose.

But even if he lose, he's got a secret contingency plan.

Dun dun dun foreshadowing.

Hawkeye and Wonder Man show up and instantly start getting styled on.

Hydro-Man has had his intelligence boosted but its also the two Avengers being a lot stupider than usual.

Wonder Man flies headfirst at Hydro-Man who SPLOOSHes to the floor to dodge, so Wonder Man instead careens into the opposite wall, forcing Hawkeye to duck out of the way and accidentally shooting an arrow that almost hits the hostages.

As is often the case, writing someone smart is hard, writing their opponents stupid is easier.

Hydro-Man splashes over Hawkeye to submerge him in water. Hawkeye has an air-mask ready but Hydro-Man increases the pressure until Hawkeye passes out.

Fairly clever but. With the amount of water shown, could the pressure actually be that high?

Ah well.

Wonder Man flies through the water to save Hawkeye. Then, he brags to Hydro-Man that the same trick won't work on him because he's nigh indestructible.

So Hydro-Man sends his water body into Wonder Man's mouth, down into his belly, and exerts pressure there until Wonder Man passes out.

Sure?

There's a non-zero percent chance that this inspired a thing Akira Toriyama wrote in the Buu Saga four years later.

I'm not saying it did. But there's enough time between this Avengers West Coast and the relevant Dragon Ball chapter that it is possible.

Anyway, beating two Avengers in about two minutes isn't enough for Hydro-Man.

He steals Hawkeye's communicator and yells into it that he wants more Avengers to beat up.

Dr Pym is the only one available (where are the others?) but he runs into action when Hydro-Man threatens to kill the knocked out Avengers AND the hostages if more Avengers don't arrive in ten minutes.

Smart Hydro-Man has come up with a cunning way to keep Wonder Man restrained.

He tied Wonder Man and Hawkeye to the cable suspending the hostages. If Wonder Man snaps his bonds, down goes the hostages.

Hydro-Man: "Man, this is what it must be like to be Reed Richards or Dr. Doom. A solution to every problem. A counter-measure to every attack. And, after this, I will be in the big leagues! The world'll see that Hydro-Man's a mover and shaker now -- 'cause I'll be the man who killed the Avengers!"

But just when he's about to select a hostage at random, Rover shows up.

Hi, Rover!

Hydro-Man scoffs that only Dr Pym came, the weakest Avenger of all (point of order, that's probably Hawkeye. Or Dr Druid, if he ever shows up again).

But Dr Pym also has the power of being a smart cookie.

He enlarges a force blaster and blasts the cable, holding up the hostages.

But but but! He grabs the crate (elevator car, maybe?) with Rover's electromagnets before it can fall and then lowers the hostages to safety so they can run.

Confronted by someone who isn't an idiot, Hydro-Man is pleased.

Hydro-Man: "Ooh, this is gonna be GOOD!"

Hydro-Man points out that he still has Wonder Man and Hawkeye as hostages and then lunges at Dr Pym.

Dr Pym enlarges another weapon from his pocket of mystery and heat blasts Hydro-Man into instant evaporation.

Dr Pym: "Guess he wasn't so smart, after all."

That is some tempted fate, Hank.

Hank flies Rover up to where Wonder Man and Hawkeye are still unconscious and bound and frees them.

Then the area gets super humid. Like, I dunno, an entire man was flash evaporated but can still control water even as vapor?

Hydro-Man reforms and mocks them for not knowing that steam is just hot water. Wonder Man knocks him off his feet with a big stomp but before he can punch Hydro-Man while he's in his human form, he BLOOOSHes on Hank Pym, knocking him out before he could finish setting up a containment tank.

Hawkeye tries using a freeze arrow but Hydro-Man just opens up a hole so it passes harmlessly through him.

And then he once again water pressures Hawkeye unconscious. Following up by punching Wonder Man in his only weak spot, his entire head apparently.

Once again, Hydro-Man stomped the Avengers. This time he stomped a whole additional Avenger.

The mysterious blond man shows up but now sporting brown hair. Is consistency really that hard to pull off, Marvel?

The guy reveals that he's Loki and takes away Hydro-Man's big smartness. He only wanted him to beat up the Avengers a little. Their deaths will be at Loki's discretion.

Because this is Acts of Vengeance. Hydro-Man's never fought the Avengers so Loki arranged the fight? Remember that premise?

Anyway, without being super smart, Hydro-Man immediately gets beaten up by the Avengers who woke up pretty quickly.

Hawkeye flare arrows him, Wonder Man punches him, and Dr Pym finishes enlarging the containment tank so they can contain him.

Once trapped Hydro-Man gloats he's going to use his smartness to escape but the three Avengers all suspect he's an idiot again.

So Hydro-Man changes tacks.

Remember him mentioning a contingency plan? Well, while he was smart and waiting for the Avengers to show up, he planted a bomb big enough to take out a square mile. It's going to go off in fifteen minutes and only he knows how to disarm it!

Despite not liking it, the Avengers agree they'll have to let him out so he'll reveal where the bomb is.

But Hydro-Man is such an idiot he blurts out the location right when they're getting ready to let him go.

Hydro-Man: "Hah! You guys are such jerks! You didn't even realize I snuck into your own compound -- and planted the bomb in the pipes under yer pool!"

... Loki, did you take some excess intelligence away when you were returning him to normal?

So the Avengers keep him in the containment tank and fly back to the Avengers West Coast Compound. Dr Pym dives into the pool and finds the bomb and unfortunately it's so advanced, it'd take him hours to disarm it.

They demand Hydro-Man tell them how to turn it off but wouldn't you know it? He doesn't remember! Because he lost his smartness!

And then it explodes!

I'm skeptical that Wonder Man, dude on the level of Thor who claims he could survive meteoric reentry, would be killed by a bomb that small.

But whatever.

This isn't even the 616 anyway. This whole comic took place in an alternate timeline. Like that one time where Colossus and Storm were on the Avengers but it turned out to be an alternate timeline being targeted by an alternate Kang?

Which explains why Hawkeye is there, with no explanation.

It's pretty neat, actually, that after all the historical moments going a different way and creating branching timelines, that we see Immortus trimming a timeline that branched in the much more recent past.

Acts of Vengeance was only a couple days ago, in-universe. Maybe.

So despite being a fill-in issue, it's trying to continue the Immortus plot Byrne left behind. Well, less continue. You could do dozens of filler bits like this of Immortus reacting to history going the wrong way. Spin the wheels. But doing a whole issue about it at least means someone is thinking about having to wrap the arc up.

The Avengers got screwed in Acts of Vengeance. They didn't get to fight a lot of people they haven't already fought. So a story where Hydro-Man fights them does give the Avengers West Coast book a little more of that Acts of Vengeance flavor it didn't get much of.

It's not a great story though. There's a lot of villains that have really scary power sets that are chumps because they don't have the smarts to really capitalize on them.

Sometimes, there are comic stories where they get smart or the power gets used by someone smarter and we get to see how devastating it would really be.

This was not really that.

Sure, Hydro-Man got smarter. But he didn't use his power in any very creative ways.

Despite Hydro-Man suddenly being super smart, the whole thing came off like any other Avengers stomp.

Like that one guy from the Bloodhawk fill-in arc? Stinger or something. He was able to solo the whole Avengers team not through cool action scenes or being particularly smart in battle. The story just needed him to beat up the Avengers so it could get to the rest of the plot.

It's a shame. With a Hydro-Man that was actually fighting smarter and using his hydrokinesis to devastating effect, we could have had a smarts vs smarts fight against Dr Pym pulling random crap out of his pockets.

But, whatever, all this issue had to do was keep the wheels spinning another month while a more long-term writer was brought on board. Actually following up on one of the dropped subplots is a bonus.

Next Avengers West Coast time, Roy Thomas and then-wife Dann Thomas will pick up the book as the writers and will more or less be the writers until the book is cancelled.

I asked for long-term writers and that's what I'm getting. Next time, we pick up the Wanda is Evil and Crazy arc again, under new management. But next week, we swap back over to Avengers East Coast. You know how this works.

Follow @essential-avengers. Like and reblog this post maybe. I'm too tired today for a more elaborate solicit.

#essential avengers #avengers #west coast avengers #hydro man #loki #hawkeye #wonder man #dr pym #hank pym #immortus #a bunch of people at a funeral but hell if i'm going to tag them all #rover the cool air car that thinks Hank Pym is the best

4 notes · View notes