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If Vengeance Fails!
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This issue kicks off right where the last one ended, with a furious Namor ready to kill Dr Dorcas for murdering his wartime girlfriend. Angry Heroes Intent On Revenge is nothing new in the Marvel Universe - raw human emotion was the main selling point after all - but usually the hero would be talked down from actually hurting people by their friends. Here Namor's friend is Doctor Doom, who simply watches the ensuing fight for a while before zapping everybody with a "stun-shock" to stop them.
Doom knocks Namor unconscious, who later wakes up to see Doom chatting with the other villains. This cues up another fight, and this time Doom does try and calm Namor, begging him to calm down and not be ruled by his emotions.
This is a bit rich coming from him, as we shall soon see, but before the group can start thumping each other the pair are teleported away to Doom's ship, where Namor collapses again.
When he wakes up he finds he's been transported to a health facility in Doom's castle, where loyal Latverians are happily serving their master.
Namor considers this, and comes to a similar conclusion to Betty in the previous issue. "Can the man the world fears be not the wicked despot he is painted? And yet... Namor is feared also," he thinks. Here Jim Shooter, taking over for this issue from Tony Isabella, is similarly casting doubt on the trustworthiness of Marvel's own "reporting" of their storyworld. It's a really nice way of helping the reader to sympathise with characters who they should really be booing.
Doom offers "constructive" criticism, telling Namor that he was stupid to go into battle unprepared. This leads to heated words during which Doom also loses his rag.
The pair quickly come to their senses, and then set off back to Hydrobase, where Doom has concocted a plan of attack. It all goes brilliantly well, with him distracting Attuma's armies to allow Namor to sneak into the base to free the prisoners - once again, Tiger Shark, Dr Dorcas and Attuma are shown to be the baddies of the story by the fact that they've kept hostages, while Namor and Doom are the liberators.
With that done Namor returns to the main battle to continue the plan, using a freeze-ray gun given to him by Doom to stop his enemies in their tracks. It's all going really well, until Namor decides that this isn't how he wants to win, and smashes the gun up so he can have a proper fight instead.
It's noticeable that Namor says again that he wants to kill them - there's no chance of him tying them up and dropping them off at the police station like Spider-Man would.
This is all well and good for Namor, but it leaves Doom high and dry without reinforcements, and he is soon overwhelmed by Attuma's army. As Attuma's jester mocks him, Doom scrabbles around in the sound and finds a couple of handy high-explosive missiles which he is able to slam together, killing everybody else around him.
There's no escaping, and no robot doubles here - Doom has just killed a whole bunch of people. Namor then does the same, throwing Tiger Shark at a nearby Octo-Mek, forcing it to collapse and apparently kill Dr. Dorcas.
There's more murdering to come, as Namor heads back to the beach where he finds Doom taking his revenge on the Jester, giving him a couple more missiles which he asks him to smash together, so that the poor Jester explodes.
Namor is not impressed, but Doom tells him to mind his own business, which in the circumstances seems fair enough.
And so ends a story where a pair of self-obsessed villains merrily murder a whole bunch of people, and then stand together at the end proposing an alliance that neither of them expect to last long. It's all a bit bleak and oddly unsatisfactory, at least for someone used to conventional superhero stories where, in the end, something good comes out of it.
link to information about this issue
posted 20/6/2019 by Mark Hibbett
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