Category: Comics

Reading a reddit comment about helicopter rooftop landings being banned in NYC, apparently following a 1977 accident at the former PanAm building in which 5 people were killed (4 on the rooftop, one on the ground,) my immediate (and frankly, obvious) reaction was “ha, not even the Avengers can land in New York.”

But I didn’t have the details to back up the claim until an awful lot of Googling, so I share them with you now.

First, the Avengers’ jet of choice is called a Quinjet, which you might (?) recognize here:

But probably are more familiar with here from the movies:

These things used to take off from the third floor of Avengers Mansion (I think part of the wall would flip down) but in 1985 the FAA revoked their privileges, as seen in Avengers 261.  So they got 8 more years than the non-super people did in their helicopters, though this change wasn’t due to an accident as much as blowback from an overall loss of security clearance, I think because the Vision tried to take over the world a few months before.

The Mighty Avengers had to trek over to something called Hydrobase (which at one point was the HQ of the evil Doctor Hydra because comics) to launch from that point onwards. Well, “for a time,” anyway, according to everything I read.  But when did they get their flight capabilities restored?

As near as I can tell, it was around 1991 or maybe 1992. Around that time, the Avengers got a charter from the UN (as seen in Avengers 329) which presumably came with some power. They also just finished rebuilding Avengers Mansion, which had been badly damaged or destroyed a while back in a, uh, final battle.

While I didn’t find any direct references to Quinjets around this time, there’s a mention in 1992’s classic (?) New Warriors 22 where the New Warriors plan to steal one from the Avengers’ headquarters. So my best guess is the UN charter combined with a new mansion (and maybe a short memory on the constantly changing creative team around that era) led to a restoration of flight privileges.  I’m going with that anyway.

Siri totally should have been able to answer this for me.

OK, so this came out this week – the teaser image of Aquaman from the upcoming Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice movie:

I’m told the actor’s from that Thrones show or something. It’s possibly he’s really tall. I think that show has a really short guy in it too. Is that diversity? I haven’t seen it, because I’m too busy keeping track of other pop culture, mostly in the form of really bad movies that I know nobody in my house will want to watch so I can enjoy things on my own weird schedule.

ANYWAY.

I guess it’s exciting? Aquaman gets a lot of flack for being relatively useless (he can swim and talk to fish, blah blah) but as with all things it comes down to how he’s written. And do you know how he’s written?

As a total jerk. Observe:

Yeah, that’s Aquaman using his fish mind-control powers to bring all the fish into a cove, and then he’s telling some fishermen to go there and kill them all.  And it’s not a trap for the fishermen, and you can see even they’re like, “dude, what the hell?” because they’ve got that “!?” at the end of their sentence.

Nobody thinks a lot about what Atlanteans eat, but part of me always assumed they’d be more into mosses and stuff. OK, maybe not everyone, but mathematically speaking, I figured Aquaman wouldn’t be eating fish, because if I ate fish and had the ability to tell them what to do, I’d be sitting on my aqua-couch all day with food just floating into my mouth. I’d have a massive aqua-gut pretty quickly, is what I’m saying, and while Aquaman’s design varies, as you can see from the movie picture it tends towards the other side of the BMI continuum.

Now, DC has a pretty horrible track record with movie sequels where they try to put more and more characters in it, and we’re seeing the same thing happening with Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, where it started as a Superman sequel, and then they added Batman right there in the title, and there are reports of Wonder Woman and Cyborg and Aquaman and who knows who else getting some screen time, so unless it’s 47 hours long there probably isn’t going to be enough time for a lengthy Aquaman dietary subplot, but I’d like to see at least a little bit where his secret identity is as a sushi chef. A really, really big jerk of a sushi chef.