Looking for Immortality--The Count Nefaria Trilogy, Part 3

cover art by George Perez

Avengers #166 (December 1977) brings this entertaining three-parter to a very satisfying end.  Jim Shooter's script remains strong and John Byrne gives us a truly epic fight scene.

To recap: Count Nefaria has used super-science to give him Superman-level superpowers. But now he's in a dizzy about being mortal and one day dying, despite being perhaps the most powerful person on the planet. He's curb-stomped the Avengers, demanding to have Thor brought to him. We discover that he's working on the erroneous assumption that Thor's hammer will make him immortal.

Thor shows up on the last page of the previous issue and starts whaling away on Nefaria. The Count, still new to having powers, comes near to panicking at first, but soon discovers he can go toe-to-toe with the God of Thunder.

In the meantime, Yellowjacket (who seemed to have run from the battle in the last issue) is busy trying to revive Vision (injured in a previous story arc). He succeeds and the android immediately joins in the fun. Unfortunately, Nefaria is "too charged with super-energy" for Vision's usual trick of jamming an incorporeal hand into an enemy's chest to work. Gee whiz, Viz, anyone versed in the basics of Comic Book Science could have told you that!

Most of the other Avengers revive and rejoin the tussele. With so much raw power being thrown at him, Nefaria is staggered. But he's still not going down.

The whole battle truly is epic. Byrne's art sometimes seems to jump off the page as characters drop buildings on one another and throw ultra-powerful haymakers.

But the tone of the battle changes abruptly. Nefaria thought he had killed the scientists who gave him his powers (never work for a super-villain--they have terrible benefit packages), but one of them lives long enough to show up and tell Nefaria that these powers are aging him rapidly and he'll be dead in two days.

This sends Nefaria into full blown panic mode. He finally goes down, though, when Vision simply turns his body diamond-hard and FALLS on the villain from a tremendous height.

The last few panels seem slighty deus ex machina as it turns out the scientist lived just long enough to tell Hank Pym how to take away Nefaria's powers before the villain wakes up. But there's also a neat twist. The scientist was lying about Nefaria being doomed. In fact, his new powers would have made him immortal. It's the perfect way to end the story.

Characterizations for the individual Avengers continue to be spot-on and Shooter's script adds nice character touches to the villains as well. I like, for instance, that Nefaria is close to panic at the beginning of his fight with Thor. It makes sense--he's only had super-powers for a few hours at the most and now a literal god is slugging him with a super-powered hammer. Anyone would need a few minutes to get used to that.

Next week--giant robot caretakers of a dinosaur zoo. Why this isn't a real thing is beyond me.