Avengers #39: Review

Dec 2020

Jason Aaron, Dale Keown

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Story Name:

The burnt place

Review & Comments

Rating:

Avengers #39 Review by Rob Johnson (December 11, 2020)

Scott Hanna helps Dale Keown with some of the inking.

The Mother Storm is also known as the God Tempest and its story was told in Thor (2015) #12, amending the origin of Mjolnir. The dwarves did give Odin a chunk of Uru metal but it wasn't that special. Then the galaxy-large Mother Storm threatened Asgard until Odin tamed it and trapped it in the Uru block, which he then got the dwarves to fashion into a hammer. But Mjolnir proved uncontrollable so Odin enchanted it so that no-one could lift it. Which is the state it's in during this issue.
However we've seen him wielding the mallet as part of the Avengers 1MBC, so there's an untold story there which we may see in some future issue.

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Gwen Stacy, beauty queen of Standard High School, was Peter Parker's (alias Spider-Man) first great love.

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Synopsis / Summary / Plot

Avengers #39 Synopsis by Rob Johnson

Time for the origin of another of the Avengers 1 Million BC.

A baby girl has been left in a circle of bones and ash known as the Burnt Place. Buzzards close in for the kill but wolves drive them away. However they don't kill her but take her to their lair.

10 years later she's a feral child hunting boar with the pack. Sometimes she returns to the Burnt Place, and this time she finds another child there with only 1 eye in the middle of its face. She drives away the buzzards and then someone floating in the air behind her speaks in her mind. She doesn't understand the concept of words and runs away, and the man takes the child.

However her curiosity overcomes her fear and she follows the levitating man to his cave. He speaks in her mind again. She still has no idea what he's saying but she finds him friendly and calming. We however understand his explanation:- The local tribes all leave their strange babies (in her case it was just having red hair) in the Burnt Place because they fear anything different. He watched as she was left but was too afraid to intervene as the wolves took her, but he swore never to let another baby die. And now she herself has returned alive, and he invites her to stay.

She goes back to say goodbye to the wolves because she knows he is her real kind. He calls her Firehair and introduces her to the Tribe Without Fear. We see many different mutations, some of which are abilities that the man she now calls Highwalker has trained them to use.

Then 1 day Firehair finds that she herself has an ability as she senses the approach of men from all the tribes and can tell from their thoughts that they are coming to kill them. Highwalker tells the others to run and hide deeper in the cave system. Firehair knows Highwalker could mentally kill all the men but he chooses to try to calm them down. In response they throw spears and rocks but he protects himself with a mental forcefield. Firehair doesn't run away but uses *her* mind to cause the men agony. Highwalker pleads with her to stop, but his distraction allows his defence to slip and a spear pierces his chest and kills him. Enraged the other mutants rush the men and in the ensuing battle everyone dies but Firehair.

She walks out of the cave and returns to the Burnt Place to let the buzzards kill her. But instead they burst into flame as the Phoenix Force shows up. It turns out that the Burnt Place was the mark it left on the world long ago. Now it takes her over, and flames seek out the tribes. Firehair would have let the Phoenix burn the whole world to destroy all trace of mankind. But then she sees the wolves and holds destruction back for their sake.

Next we visit Asgard where Odin is trying to lift Mjolnir and curses the day he trapped the Mother Storm inside it (Thor (2015) #12). He needs it now to protect Asgard against an invader, but the hammer won't budge. Then we learn that the invader is the grown-up Firehair called Lady Phoenix. She's here with a pack of wolves to invite the Lord Of Asgard to join a team to save the world from itself and others like her and him.

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