Avengers #50

Issue Details

Synopsis

"To Tame a Titan!" The story opens as the Wasp is intervening in a furious shouting match between Hawkeye and Goliath. Recent events, particularly the disastrous standoff with Magneto at the United Nations, have reduced the Avengers’ active membership to three members and Goliath has seemingly lost the ability to grow larger. The Wasp suggests they search for Hercules, as he has been MIA but never officially resigned from the team as Captain America, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch all have. They take off in a Quinjet following his trail to Greece. Each of the three disheartened Avengers secretly wonders if the team should simply disband.  Meanwhile, the Titan known as Typhon has taken control of Olympus and banished Hercules to a limbo dimension. In this netherworld, Hercules finds his father Zeus and the other members of the ancient Greek pantheon, who have all having exiled there as well. (Zeus remarks on Hercules’s clean-shaven appearance with distaste.) Having only enough power to return one of them to Earth, Zeus sends Hercules whom he believes can vanquish Typhon.   Having grown restless ruling over an abandoned Olympus, Typhon has descended to the Mediterranean Sea below where he encounters U.S. naval ships. He attacks them to demonstrate his might and sinks a submarine. The Avengers arrive and oppose him but are seriously outmatched. At one point, Goliath is cornered and unable to grow. He is forced to shrink to Ant-Man size to narrowly elude the Titan’s blows.   Hercules arrives on the scene and combats Typhon one one one, ultimately defeating him. Hercules’s victory enables the Olympians to return from their exile. Typhon is dispatched to Tartarus (the lower depths of the Olympian underworld) while a once banished Hercules is welcomed back to Olympus. Hercules therefore resigns from the Avengers as well. Yet back in his immortal home, he thinks to himself of the pride and respect he has for his fellow Avengers.   Returning to New York, the three remaining Avengers realize that there will still be menaces to confront and that the Avengers must remain active, even if it is only the three of them.