Aviax

Straining toward a serious raison d'etre that's just out reach...

This week's Wanderer is perhaps the poster-child of how a promising rebirth of 30th century ronin went completely off the rails.

An earlier post discussed the Ornitho.  When "reborn" he chucked this in favor of the name Aviax.  As with Dartalg/Dartalon, I think the rebirth name was an improvement.

The costume, however, is  a different matter.  While Ornitho's original outfit wasn't particularly inspiring, neither was it a trainwreck.  When I was eleven, I thought Aviax's threads were cool...but as I said, I was eleven.  With the wisdom and perspective of age, I gotta admit that Aviax's look has not aged well.  In the first place it just looks a little goony.  (What's the purpose of those giant shoulder wing pads?)  The color scheme is a bit loud.  In addition to the gooniness, the costume is largely dysfunctional.  

Where most of the other Wanderers either got a new costume or a new costume plus power upgrade, Aviax got both...plus a highly-limiting weakness.  While Aviax gained the ability to transform into any type of flying creature he could imagine--in addition to those that actually exist, as he had in his Ornitho form--this came at the cost of having porous hollow bones (like a bird's).

Now when you think about it, that's a pretty serious weakness for a guy who's going to travel around the galaxy fighting.  Furthermore, if you know going in that that's a weakness then would you wear...I don't know...a few more clothes than this?  Maybe some kind of padded armor or something to keep you from constantly having broken bones?

At a more fundamental level, does this weakness even make sense?  Clonus is able to give Re-Animage the ability to resurrect people from the dead, but he couldn't figure out how to clone Aviax in such a way that his bones wouldn't shatter under a strong wind?!

But the greatest fail...the coup de grace of SMH moments came in Wanderers #12 (MAR 1989), when at long last Aviax is able to demonstrate his usefulness to the Wanderers.  In this story, the team is trying to save a planet of dinosaurs from impending extinction due a radiation cloud spreading slowly over the planet.   What's the solution?  Why, to transform into a prehistoric bird and have sex with another prehistoric animal so as to (supposedly) imbue the creatures of the planet with Aviax's own genetic resistance to the radiation.

Yeah.  I'm not makin' it up.  That was actually, a real story as told in a professionally-published comic book. If you want the last vestiges of your illusions shattered, you can read more about this debacle in Brian Cronin's piece for CBR.  But even if you don't, just take a look at the cover for that particular issue.  It'll basically tell you everything you need to know.

And the series was cancelled after the very next issue.  I know...shocking, right?