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Today, we look at how Sandman was written out of the Avengers by being unbelievably dumb.
This is “In The Spotlight So Clear,” a feature where we spotlight times in comics where characters or plots need to be cleared out of the way to make room for a new status quo. Like, for instance, you want to introduce a new Captain Superhero, you might want to first get rid of the previous Captain Superhero. Or if you want to do a new Captain Superhero series, you might want to wrap up all of the plots from Captain Superhero’s previous series first. Stuff like that. Stories that are specifically meant to clear things up for upcoming stories.
This one is tricky, as I have another feature called “Beg Steal or Borrow,” spotlighting times that comic book series deal with editorial determining that a character has to leave a team. This one is sort of both, but I lean towards the first one because stories setting up future stories are a BIT rarer and thus a bit more interesting to me.
The amusing thing about this is that literally the last installment I did of this feature was specifically about this same era of the Avengers, the Bob Harras/Steve Epting run of the 1990s.
HOW SANDMAN JOINED THE AVENGERS
Recently, I discussed how Sandman was slowly rehabilitated throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, with the big turning point occurring in Web of Spider-Man #50 (by Gerry Conway, Alex Saviuk and Keith Williams), when the Sandman joins a group of former Spider-Man foes as a new team known as the Outlaws…
In Spectacular Spider-Man #170 (by Gerry Conway and Sal Buscema), the Outlaws are manipulated by the Space Phantom into helping Spider-Man fight the Avengers (the Space Phantom impersonate She-Hulk, leading Spider-Man to think someone turned her evil and so he turns to the Outlaws for help)…
Things are resolved eventually and the Avengers are impressed by the Outlaws.
Apparently impressed enough that soon after, in Avengers #329 (by Larry Hama, Paul Ryan and Tom Palmer), Sandman was made a member of the team as a reserve member…
That was during Larry Hama’s run, though. As I pointed out in the previous “In The Spotlight So Clear,” Bob Harras was brought in to do a six-issue bi-weekly storyline called “The Collection Obsession,” and while working on it, Harras was asked by the new editor of the series to just remain on the book full-time, so Harras used that story arc to bring in some characters for his then-upcoming run on the book, including Black Knight, Hercules and Crystal.
However, there were still some members on the team that he wasn’t planning on using, so other writers wrote them out (I’ll address another one of the heroes who was written off the team in the future) and one of those members was Sandman.
WHY SANDMAN QUIT THW AVEGNERS LIKE A DUMMY
By the way, I forgot to mention a somewhat relevant plot point. While Sandman joined the Avengers as a reserve member in Avengers #329, that same issue also saw the Sandman’s old foe, Spider-Man, officially join the Avengers for the first time, as well, much to the chagrin of J. Jonah Jameson…
Spider-Man’s first stint with the Avengers didn’t really end much better than Sandman (I’ll look into Spider-Man’s first Avengers stint in the future), but anyhow, that’s the context behind Amazing Spider-Man #348 (by David Michelinie, Erik Larsen and Randy Emberlin), where Sandman is asked to move out by the family with whom he had been living with as a boarder because the publicity of their boarder now being an Avenger was too much for them to handle, even as Sandman was still dealing with how happy he was to actually be an Avenger…
At the same time, Spider-Man was also coming to terms with his new status as a superhero, but his wife, Mary Jane Watson-Parker, did not seem to be particularly impressed by his new role…
Sandman and Spider-Man both independently follow clues that a military convoy involving atomic weapons is about to be hijacked. Sandman gets a little kid to warn the Avengers and then he and Spider-Man both independently swing into action…
After a big fight, it seems like the bad guys might be about to get away when suddenly the full “Staring lineup” of the Avengers shows up…
It was really fun to get to see Larsen cut loose drawing the Avengers like this. Boy, he would have been an amazing Avengers artist. Obviously Amazing Spider-Man was the better gig at the time during the speculator boom, but boy, a Larsen-drawn Avengers would have still been very cool.
Okay, the Avengers make mincemeat out of the bad guys but while Sandman was still basking in the glow of a job well done, Captain America burst his bubble a bit by explaining that technically, since the Avengers had organized under an international charter in connection with the United Nations, they really weren’t supposed to be getting involved as a team in low level domestic incidents like this one…
Sandman, sensing that he is about to be fired, decides to beat Cap to the punch and quit as a protest over what he finds to be a pretty awful rule that the Avengers had…
A shocked Captain America notes to Sersi that he was just going to tell Sandman to be more careful. Well, not only was Sandman now off of the Avengers before Harras took over the book, but it also worked as a DOUBLE set-up for a future story, as Michelinie then used Sandman in a story arc in the 1991 Spider-Man Annuals (Sandman goes to work for some bad guys but is convinced to switch sides when he runs up against Silver Sable and the Outlaws).
Okay, so that’s it for this installment of In the Spotlight So Clear! Feel free to suggest other examples to me at brianc@cbr.com!
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