Avengers #200 is unlikely to ever leave the memory of many comics fans of a certain age. And certainly not in a good way. This infamous storyline saw Ms Marvel give birth to a baby should couldn't remember conceiving, following a pregnancy that last all of three days yet still resulted in the delivery of a healthy bouncing baby boy. Things only got stranger from there. It was revealed that the superheroine had been kidnapped by Avengers villain Immortus, taken to an alternate dimension and impregnated so that she would give birth to baby Marcus, better known in his adulthood as...Immortus. So not only was there a bizarre time paradox and incest bent to the story, but also the heavy implication that one of the Avengers' few female members had been the victim of sexual assault. And then the story was "resolved" by Ms Marvel forgiving her attacker, going to live with him in space, and none of her fellow Avengers bothered to stop her. The frankly ludicrous story caused a storm with both fans and within Marvel itself, one of the many presided over by then-editor Jim Shooter. In fact one member of Marvel's Bullpen, X-Men legend Chris Claremont, was so incensed that he wrote an issue of Avengers expressly to address how terrible the whole thing had been. Ms Marvel is rescued from Immortus and, on her return, lambasts her teammates for allowing such a thing to happen to her, doubling as a righteous rant by Claremont against the creative team behind the original story.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
