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The Debut of Valkyrie* in Avengers #83, Buscema Cover Art at Auction

The 1970 Avengers #83 story titled "Come On In... The Revolution's Fine!" features the debut of Valkyrie (sort of), and a theme that has made it a topic of discussion.

Avengers #83 has been a topic of discussion since the month it came out in October 1970, for reasons that go well beyond the first appearance of Valkyrie (Sort of. More on that later).  This issue, titled Come On In… The Revolution's Fine! has been discussed at length in blog posts and podcasts in recent years, due to its inclusion of themes influenced by the Women's Liberation Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.  At the time of its 1970 release, much of the media seemed predictably caught off guard by the rising trend of comic books with cultural and social themes.  This was the era of the now-famous Green Lantern run by Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams, tackling a range of social issues, Amazing Spider-Man being published without Comics Code Authority approval to take on drug addiction, and a range of cultural and social topics making their way into a number of DC and Marvel comic books.  About a week after Avengers #83 hit newsstands, its cover was prominently featured with the caption "Women's Lib: Superheroines rough up superheroes in The Avengers" in a New York Magazine article titled The Radicalization of the Superheroes.  A short time later, a New Jersey newspaper article on the same subject featured a double-page spread from Avengers #83, calling the all-female superhero team featured in the issue, which included Valkyrie, the Wasp, Medusa, Black Widow, and the Scarlet Witch, "a cast of super Fem-Libbies."

What is it about this issue that generated this kind of coverage at the time and plenty of discussion since? Led by the new character Valkyrie, an all-female group with the on-the-nose name the Lady Liberators had taken over Avengers Mansion.  Explaining that she has devoted her life to "the downfall of male supremacy," Valkyrie has convinced the group that they have been sidelined or excluded by the men in the various teams they are affiliated with.  For this reason, the Avengers and possibly even the Inhumans must be defeated.  It's a seemingly unserious and now-dated take on a serious subject, about which writer Roy Thomas would later say, "Come On In… The Revolution's Fine! was my own admittedly 'lite' take on women's liberation. I had no serious point in mind, and one or two of my feminist friends — particularly Trina Robbins, whom I've known and admired since the late '60s — took me to task for it. I didn't consider the story as making a statement, really, either for or against "women's lib" — but I felt the Liberators wasn't a bad name for an all-female group."

Beyond the first appearance of Valkyrie, much of the attention on Avengers #83's cover by John Buscema with inks by Tom Palmer is due to the phrase the figure of Valkyrie shouts on the cover, "All right girls — that finishes off these male chauvinist pigs!"  The term "male chauvinist pigs" had begun to work its way into the mainstream in Canada in 1969, with a protest against Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, which used signs that said "Our PET is a male chauvinist pig" ("PET" referring to Pierre Elliott Trudeau here).  The phrase had one of its most mainstream moments during the period in a May 1970 incident which may be indirectly related to its usage by Roy Thomas in Avengers #83, when during a live airing of the Dick Cavett show, hecklers in the audience shouted the term at guest Hugh Hefner.  In a sequence of events that attracted attention and criticism both then and now, Playboy Magazine publisher Hefner "had ordered his editors to commission a satirical takedown of superfeminists," his editors pushed back on that idea and hired writer Susan Braudy, Hefner rejected Braudy's article as not being tough enough on feminism, and a rather vicious article by writer Morton Hunt which has been described as a ranty, mocking "takedown of feminism" was published instead.  As has been pointed out, Valkyrie's longer battle cry in the story moment leading up to the scene we see on the cover was borrowed directly from the title of Hunt's Playboy Magazine article, Up Against the Wall, Male Chauvinist Pig!  That title itself comes from a familiar expression of the era, "Up against the wall, motherf***ers!" which gained currency with a poem by Amiri Baraka and was then popularized in a song by Jefferson Airplane in 1969.

Perhaps taking its cues from Hefner's satirical intentions for the Hunt article, Thomas's "lite" take on women's liberation seems incongruous with its subject matter, and it's unsurprising he was taken to task for it.  Another aspect of the plot of this issue, the Avengers' attendance at the obscure but now legendary Rutland Halloween Parade, would seem to underline the fact that the whole issue was meant to be unserious. By the end of the issue, we've learned that Valkyrie was actually the Enchantress, using her powers to influence the other women.  The character then appears the next year in Incredible Hulk #142, when the Enchantress transferred the power of Valkyrie to a women's rights activist who had befriended the Hulk and… taken him to a party… earlier that issue in a story that somehow manages to be even more strange than Avengers #83.   The cover for this issue by John Buscema and Tom Palmer is up for auction at Comic Connect this week, and it's both the debut of an important character and an unusual symbol of a time when comics' attempts at inclusion of social issues were on the rise.

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