Avengers: Disassembled - Atop the Fourth Wall

Linkara's wholly justified rants about pointless character deaths has inspired me to remind everyone that Bill Foster is still dead.

Wanda Maximoff is Jewish and Romani. She would not make illusions of Nazis as a defense mechanism

The Spectacular Spider-Man comment made me realize a "Top Worst Retcons Caused by Movies" would make for a hell of a list episode.

Okay, so I might have mentioned this to you on Twitter at some point, but here's the deal on Bendis and the Avengers. I started working for Marvel as part of their Official Handbook team around the same time New Avengers was in its first arc. For the larger part of the ten years I worked with them, our team was sent issue scripts for pretty much everything, even before the artists started working on them - part of this was to glean information for any of our own upcoming books to keep them timely, but we also served to give feedback to editors/writers on continuity hiccups we found; most of the time, these were appreciated and fixed by the writers/editors prior to publication, sometimes they were ignored for various reasons. But the only writer whose scripts we were EXPLICITLY told we could never ever ever send Notes/Corrections back about? Bendis.

Captain America: "Why have you all come here?" Moon Knight: "Well, I was hunting Dracula when-"

"No such thing as Chaos Magic." When Dr. Strange lost his connection to his regular sources of power in the late 1990s, he had to replace them with Catastrophe/Chaos Magic. This is another example of Bendis not doing research, just like when he made that ridiculous Inhumans origin for the Beyonder because he didn't bother looking to see if his origin had been established beforehand.

Ya know, Spider-Man's 500th issue saw him stop Dormammu from conquering the Earth and culminated in Dr. Strange granting him one last talk with Uncle Ben, who told him how proud he his of Peter (in a sequence drawn by John Romita Sr. RIP to a legend). Also, what makes this entire storyline funny (and facepalming) in retrospect? The reason guys like Vision and Ant-Man were killed off is because Marvel wanted to stack the Avengers with characters who were either in a movie (Spider-Man and Wolverine), or had projects in the works (Captain America and Iron Man). The ones who were killed were assumed would never be popular enough to be in the films. Whoops.

Tony Stark Voice: I wanted Linkara to use the drunk voice again, but not like this. Linkara: NOT LIKE THIS!

To be fair, Peter isn't wrong. If he ever dated a robot writers would probably use it to call him a loser and have characters constantly mock him for it then spend countless volumes building up their relationship, before making her dump him off-screen. Still inappropriate for him to snark there though.

You know, Dr. Doom eventually being responsible for this mess makes it kinda funny that the actual disassemblement started with Tony ranting towards a Latverian diplomat.

I love that the example you use for why continuity is important is "If a character blows up and then comes back" because years later in Civil War 2, Bendis had Doc Samson just show up, back from the dead, and there is zero explanation for it.

I love the little panel at the end of the page where everyone explains to Dr. Strange the history of Wanda & her two kids, and Dr. Strange's reaction is essentially "Dudes! points to self I'm a literal master of magics... and NONE of you thought to contact me to help you guys and/or Wanda out with any of this?!".

Everytime I think about this comic, I remember a line from an interview Bendis did after, saying... "I also hope that when people read ‘Avengers Finale,’ they’ll see the love and care, which’ll help them appreciate the story and they’ll see it was done with the utmost love and respect." What about this was love and respect? The murder, abuse, sexism, demonizing mental illness, and so much more. Where was it? It's like how Identity Crisis was a "love letter" to the Silver Age.

I love when the cats appear in corner. I can hear them saying “Hoomin! I sense you need emotional support. The comic is bad, but I am fluffy.”

The difference between a good writer and a bad one is that a good writer changes the story to fit the character, while a bad writer changes the character to fit the story.

See, this is why I love writers like Al Ewing. He will dive deep through decades of continuity (something that should be easier now than ever with the internet as a tool), and no matter how obscure, he will make sure to reference it and that it makes sense. And if something on that continuity contradicts what he has planned, he won't ignore it. He will use it to the advantage of the story.

Between how hes treated here, civil war 2, Ultimate End, and the new Avengers run, I'm convinced Bendis hates Hawkeye.

"Hulk feels comic book reviewer's pain, Hulk goes bar to get drunk!"

This storyline really shows off Bendis's weaknesses as a writer. He's good at writing down to earth street level heroes, but when he's put in charge of massive events with a large cast of characters he fumbles the ball more often than not. It also shows that he hates Hawkeye for no reason

Me after hearing about the Dr Doom part, "Even Doom doesn't understand why Scarlet Witch came to him for help. He's just rolling with it right now."