Synopsis
Avengers, The (1963 series) #218 synopsis by
Rob Johnson
Rating:
A young boy comes to Avengers Mansion on a matter of life and death. Wasp invites him in but he doesn't like her condescending attitude. He rushes into another room where Captain America watches Thor hold up a huge machine so Iron Man can repair the underneath. (Reminiscent of many similar scenes with Thing and Mr Fantastic.) He almost causes a disaster.
Cap denies that the boy is anything to do with him - unlike the kids he showed round in CA#267. Wasp also denies responsibility when she catches up with him. The boy frustratedly interrupts to tell them he's a man cursed with eternal rebirth. And to prove it he whips out a gun and shoots himself in the head.
The Avengers watch horrified as the body crumbles to dust. And then in stunned amazement as it almost as quickly regrows into the young boy.
The boy tells them his story. He has had many incarnations throughout history, but only now can he remember them. His last identity was Morgan MacNeil Hardy who was found as a 15-year-old boy in the ruins of the 1906 San Francisco fire (see Spider-Woman #33). He died in CA#264 after trying to use a group of telepaths to restructure reality more to his liking. It was the psi-energy involved there that caused his current incarnation to remember his past lives.
He's tired of life, but committing suicide just causes him to be born again. He wants the Avengers to cure his problem, and moved chairperson Wasp agrees. After days of study Iron Man concludes that Hardy's life is tied to that of the Earth, and he'll survive as long as the planet does. Shellhead says that understanding the problem is the 1st step to finding a solution. But the other 3 have at last realised that what this boils down to is assisted suicide, and they back down.
The disappointed young lad sees a newspaper headline and slips out of the Mansion. He hops a freight train south, and then blags his way into Cape Canaveral a few days later. There he stows away in the NASA Star Core probe destined to orbit the Sun. The stress of takeoff kills him several times over. But eventually he uses Hardy's scientific knowledge to redirect the probe into the Sun.
When the Avengers hear about the probe and the boy who was seen on the base Wasp briefly wonders if it could have been Hardy, but Iron Man dismisses the idea as unlikely.
However Morgan still doesn't die. He keeps being reborn and destroyed in the raging fire until he evolves into a plasma being that is able to survive, and then escape. And then heads towards Earth and New York.
Wasp leads the team against this new fiery menace. The police can't stop it and various Avengers' tactics fail. Even Thor's thunderstorm can't quench it's flame. But at last it finds its voice, and they recognise the tones of Morgan Hardy. They try to reason with him, but the plasma being is only intent on revenge.
The substance of Cap's shield seem to hurt it, so he lodges it in the being's body. The other Avengers attack that spot and seem to be weakening the Hardy monster. But instead it starts to go nova. Thor summons a vortex which sucks the plasmoid into space, where it explodes safely.
The Avengers think that Hardy's eternal life is at last ended. Until he reforms as a boy again in the hole left by the vortex, as they leap in to retrieve Cap's shield. The boy now appears to have lost the memories of his former lives, so they take him to be adopted. But Iron Man wonders what if the amnesia is faked?