Comics That Made Me: West Coast Avengers #46

West Coast Avengers #46
“Franchise”
Writer/Penciller: John Byrne
Inker: Mike Machlan
Letters: Bill Oakley
Color: Bob Sharen
Cover: Byrne
Editor: Howard Mackie
Editor-in-Chief: Tom DeFalco
Released: March 7, 1989

I've watched the first three episodes of “Wonder Man” on Disney+ so far, and I'm enjoying it. But if I'm being honest, the title character is only ranks third on the list of draws to the series.

No disrespect to Simon Williams, who I met in the '80s on my foray into West Coast Avengers. I remember thinking he was pretty cool, but... I don't remember why. So if you came her looking for a rundown of Wonder Man's greatest appearances and what makes this character tick, well, first of all, did you see what I posted when the “Black Widow” movie came out? Or “Spider-Man: No Way Home?” Second, while we are going to be looking at an issue of West Coast Avengers, Wonder Man is MIA outside of the cover's corner box.

Number one on my list for the show, hands down, is Trevor Slattery. I know some folks were bummed by the bait and switch of Sir Ben Kingsley in “Iron Man 3,” and I'm sure there are Mandarin fans out there who felt cheated. But I love Trevorm – “it's complicated!” Love the guy; glad he came back in Shang-Chi; sure hope he returns in “Avengers: Doomsday” and future installments.

To my knowledge, he has not appeared in the comic book 616, so we're left with the character I'm second most-excited about: Doorman.

I heard Doorman would be appearing in the series, which I was already planning to watch because it's Marvel. Granted, it would have been exciting to just hear his name dropped in the first episode without knowing that. I also still wonder what it would have been like to recognize Hawkeye's debut in “Thor,” rather than know it was coming months in advance and see it in a trailer. But, as Phil Collins once sang with Cable's son, “This is the world we live in.”

I met Doorman in the late '80s in this very issue I started off the post with, very likely purchased from a Waldenbooks. If I thought the West Coast Avengers were cool, how much cooler would an even more geographically specific version be?

The answer, very, especially when the Great Lakes Avengers were my introduction to the idea that super powers might not always be awesome. Some aborted attempts at GLA fan fiction and a half-formed pitch to Marvel when they had a contest definitely influenced how I thought about “Support Group,” my three-issue* webcomic I co-created with Nathan Arnold, about a support group for people with lame super powers.

We open not with Doorman, but Mr. Immortal, the leader of the group transformed from the norm by the nuclear goop. Wait. Wrong team.** He's the leader of this colorful band of heroes foiling a bank robbery in Milwaukee. He is agile, and fearless, but he is not bulletproof.

He's also not alone as Flatman, a two-dimensional Mister Fantastic riff, slips in to rescue the hostages; Big Bertha busts through the wall; and the pink Dinah Soar flies in through a glowing man-shaped portal. That's Doorman, who we later see looks kind of like black-costume Spider-Man, minus the spider emblem that turned out to be a dragon.

His power allows him to stand on one side of a wall or other solid object and create a portal through it. Specializing in ingress, he allows the rest of the team to dispatch the bank robbers, including Mr. Immortal, whose moniker is not, it turns out, just a clever name. He can't die, although he comes back a little enraged, calmed only by what we experience as a blank word balloon from Dinah.

The new team hits the news, much to the consternation of Hawkeye, recently an ex-member of the titular team after the government added USAgent to the roster. Whether the split was ideological or Hawkeye was jealous of the fact that USAgent has one of the best costumes in the Marvel universe, I don't know, because my West Coast Avengers collecting was very sporadic. I don't think I'd bought an issue since 42.

He's estranged from his wife Mockingbird, who tracks him down at the hotel where he's crashing to see if they can reconcile. Their split involved the Phantom Rider and a series of circumstances that I didn't read about in the issues where they happened and didn't understand as a lad of single digits. Making the tale even more awkward is that Marvel recently retconned it to eliminate the sexual assault aspects, which is understandable, but also seems to undercut why Mockingbird let the ghost-themed cowboy vigilante die. I'll not judge a story I haven't read yet. Let's just say Clint and Bobbi are trying to decide whether to get back together.

She sees investigating this unauthorized team of regional Avengers as a good activity for them to do together, so they embark for Milwaukee, around an interlude where USAgent gets to know the staff at the Avengers' compound and catches Tigra chasing mice. Ah, the glamorous life of an Avenger.

The Great Lakes Avengers investigate some mysterious lights and demonstrate their powers all over again. Mr. Immortal finds the source of the lights is a guy “dressed as Hawkeye.”

Of course, we know it is Hawkeye. The obligatory superhero meet-fight ensues, until Mr. I backflips off the roof. Mockingbird is dismayed until Flatman lets her in on the team leader's secret. Cooler heads prevail and they all meet up at the snazzy apartment of Big Bertha, who looks like the female version of the Blob when she's heroing but is actually supermodel Ashley Crawford. I don't think it's spelled out here but I believe her power involves controlling her mass so that she can be a brusing, bullet-resistant behemoth or a breathtaking beauty.***

Hawkeye sees that these folks potential and decides what they need is the proper leadership, a very Hawkeye thing to do that he would later attempt with the Thunderbolts. Or so I'm told – another storyline I need to read.

I haven't talked a lot about Doorman here, but we don't learn that much about him except that passing through his portal gives Flatman a weird feeling, “as if I'm not on Earth anymore;” he can float; and he's Black. Or at least not Caucasian. The bit about the mystery of his portal power is a nice bit of hinted depth, whether Byrne intended to do much more with these guys or just lay groundwork in case somebody else wanted to pick them up later.

They did return in issue 49, at which point the book had been renamed “Avengers: West Coast.” That is one of the favorite single issues from my youth, a la “X-Factor”#32. In fact, “West Coast Avengers” #41 is on that list as well, and obviously this one has a spot in my heart too. Not bad for a 10-issue stretch I read half of. I guess I need to finally check out “Vision Quest.”

I haven't seen Doorman yet on “Wonder Man,” and who knows how much that version will have in common with the comic book source. Mr. Immortal didn't in She-Hulk, with the writers opting instead to explore the comedic possibilities of his power set.

But regardless, we now have 40% of the founding Great Lakes Avengers in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That rises to 42.9% with the addition of Hawkeye and Mockingbird to the team, and 57.1% if you believe, as I do, that “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” and therefore Mockingbird, is canon. It may not be a direct adaptation, but at least one aspect I love about the comics is being translated to the big and small screens: In a world of Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and the X-Men, there's room for Howard the Duck, the Great Lakes Avengers and, perhaps the GLA's most famous alumna: Squirrel Girl!

* - And one of these days, more.

** - But unlike Raphael, he is the leader.

*** - If I try really hard, I can sometimes get slightly less husky. But it's always temporary.