In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, find out what whether Sam Wilson was named after the man who was the real life inspiration for Uncle Sam!
Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and eighth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends. Click here for the first part of this installment’s legends. Click here for the second part of this installment’s legends.
NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I’ll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!
COMIC LEGEND:
Marvel has removed a sex scene from reprints of an issue of Avengers.
STATUS:
True (at various points in time)
It seems like it was so long ago, but it was less than a month ago that it was a big deal that there was revelation made by Justin Halpern, the co-showrunner of the HBO Max Harley Quinn TV streaming series, that there was a scene cut from the show’s third season where Batman was performing a sex act on Catwoman, “It’s incredibly gratifying and free to be using characters that are considered villains because you just have so much more leeway. A perfect example of that is in this third season of Harley [when] we had a moment where Batman was going down on Catwoman. And DC was like, ‘You can’t do that. You absolutely cannot do that.’ They’re like, ‘Heroes don’t do that.’ So, we said, ‘Are you saying heroes are just selfish lovers?’ They were like, ‘No, it’s that we sell consumer toys for heroes. It’s hard to sell a toy if Batman is also going down on someone.'”
So I did a Comic Book Legends Revealed about an Avengers issue who everyone was reminded of when we heard about that scene.
In 2003’s Avengers #71 (by Geoff Johns, Steve Sadowski and Andrew Currie), the issue opens with Janet Van Dyne saying, “No Hank! Not again!”
This was to make the reader think that Hank was abusing Janet, like he did when he struck her in Avengers #213 (leading to their divorce). It’s actually specifically in the script that it is meant to make people think domestic violence is occurring).
In reality, Hank has instead used his superpowers to shrink down and apparently do what Batman was not allowed to do to Catwoman…
As I wrote in that legend, people tended to believe that the issue was recalled over the incident, but that wasn’t the case. Marvel simply told retailers that the scene shouldn’t have appeared in a comic book rated PSR (Marvel’s term for a PG-13 comic at the time) and that retailers should tell customers that it is a Mature Readers book and that if retailers wanted to return it, they could. Obviously, no one was returning it as it became a bit of a “hot” book because of the controversy.
So that was that legend. However, a number of people wrote me to say that I should do a follow-up legend about how Marvel has handled it since. As it turns out, rather than just have one issue of Avengers be “Mature Readers” in the midst of a bunch of PG-13 issues, Marvel just edited the page out of some digital versions of the issue, including at least one digital trade collection.
So now we go right from Wasp saying “No, Hank! Not again!” to them lying in bed after the fact.
Is it still decipherable? I guess so, but it’s also a pretty big gap in the story. I know from one reader that this page was missing from a digital trade collection of Geoff Johns’ Avengers, and Ryan Higgins of the popular comic book store, Comics Conspiracy, just let me know on Twitter that the page is ALSO missing from the first printing of the physical trade, so it’s not just in digital works that the page is missing. Thanks for the head’s up, Ryan!
Reader Drew, though, notes that it looks like the page IS visible right now on Marvel Unlimited. I guess with digital comics, you can change things back and forth pretty easily, so they might have gone back and forth over the years. Thanks a lot for the info, Drew!
Honestly, I don’t begrudge Marvel for this at all, it’s just kind of funny.
Thanks to all of the readers who asked for the follow-up!
CHECK OUT A MOVIE LEGENDS REVEALED!
In the latest Movie Legends Revealed – Was the man who gave Indiana Jones his fedora in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade originally intended to be Indy’s future father-in-law?
MORE LEGENDS STUFF!
OK, that’s it for this installment!
Thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo, which I don’t even actually anymore, but I used it for years and you still see it when you see my old columns, so it’s fair enough to still thank him, I think.
Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well! Also, if you have a correction or a comment, feel free to also e-mail me. CBR sometimes e-mails me with e-mails they get about CBLR and that’s fair enough, but the quickest way to get a correction through is to just e-mail me directly, honest. I don’t mind corrections. Always best to get things accurate!
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See you next time!
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