Vengeance is…
Revenge may be a dish best eaten cold; but its best-known agents, The Avengers, are hot: Joss Whedon’s superhero mash-up is breaking box-office records at home and abroad.
Vancouver-based artist Jer Thorp has immersed himself in the foundation of the film, the Marvel series that has been published pretty much continuously since 1963…
All 570 Avengers covers (to date)
The blockbuster that opened in the U.S. this past weekend features six Avengers– Captain America, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, Hawkeye, and Black Widow. But lest we worry about available grist for sequels, Thorp reminds us that there are 127 more Avengers… The featured sextet appeared early and often; but as this plot suggests, there are plenty more heros where they cam from:
Number of appearances of each Avenger
Much more (sequence of appearance, gender balance, etc.) here. And that’s not all: in the best Hollywood tradition, Thorp teases his own sequel…
…the clever ones among you might be wondering if these patterns are tied to historical periods, or if they are linked to the preferences of specific writers, editors, or artists. Is that crowded patch of Gods in 1985 due to a cultural fascination with myth? Or do Mark Gruenwald & Jim shooter just really, really like Thor? Great questions, and ones that I’ll take a look at Part 2 of this post.
Like S.H.I.E.L.D., Thorp is just getting started…
[TotH to Flowing Data]
Fans of the other, wonderful-in-a-completely-different-way Avengers might go here.
***
As practice our Tony Stark impressions, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965, in the wee hours, in a motel room in Clearwater, Florida, that Keith Richards awoke, grabbed his guitar, turned on a small portable tape recorded, laid down the signature riff of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”… then dropped back into the arms of Morpheus.
“When I woke up in the morning, the tape had run out,” Richards recalled many years later. “I put it back on, and there’s this, maybe, 30 seconds of ‘Satisfaction,’ in a very drowsy sort of rendition. And then suddenly—the guitar goes ‘CLANG,” and then there’s like 45 minutes of snoring.”
