Morrison Does the Avengers

Here's a minor Morrison work you never hear about!

STEED AND MRS. PEEL, Eclipse/ACME Comics, 1990-1992The comic that couldn't be titled "The Avengers" because of, well, that other comic, this was an early Morrison mini-series that was meant to commemorate the tv show's 30th anniversary. I really don't remember it coming out at a yearly rate, but apparently it followed a Pitt-like schedule. Rereading it now, I'm a bit underwhelmed, but that's probably due to my not having seen very many episodes of the Avengers.

No, scratch that. It's because there's not enough Emma Peel. The sexy, sexy Diana Rigg in a catsuit has always been my best reason to watch the show when I came upon it, and artist Ian Gibson is certainly good at drawing her likeness (and Steed's):
Gorgeous. But Morrison doesn't do enough with her. And where Gibson is good at likenesses, I'm not sure his idea of Mrs. Peel's martial arts is the same as mine. It just looks like she's slapping hands left and right.
Bad boy! Well, that's not necessarily inappropriate...

Morrison's story deals with a gamester who's killing off other gamesters and while it fits the Avengers' quirky world fine, it could just as easily have been a Batman story. Some nice images, but nothing that really captured my imagination. The ending did have me flipping back to see if I could figure it out like Steed did however, so that's good.

Issues 2 and 3 have a back-up feature which I thought was much more interesting: Telling the story of Emma Peel leaving when her amnesiac husband is found living with the Leopard People of Bolivia after three years. It's a fun acid trip with plenty of Mrs. Peel fighting a lost Inca tribe that wears rainbow sweaters.
Now that's the kind of acid I want Morrison dropping! I especially like how part of the story is told in Inca pictograms. Just look at this panel showing Mr. Peel crashing his plane in the jungle:
Gibson has a great time with this stuff and I love it. The second part of the story a incredibly muddled though... and then I check the credits more closely and find that Anne Caulfield wrote the Incan vicar stuff (her first ever story... was it her last too?). WHAT!?! Aw man, Morrison got out-Morrisoned by a rookie!
Further Morrison reading:
Kill My Boyfriend
The Invisibles
Vampirella

Comments