While Thor and Iron Man help Black Panther seek his lost teammates, the missing Avengers are on a parallel Earth trying to stop the Brain-Child One rocket’s launch. The Squadron Supreme opposes them, but Nighthawk convinces his teammates to halt the launch. Investigating, the two teams confront the rocket’s inventor, Brain-Child. The embittered ten-year-old genius admits that his rocket would have destroyed the world, but he intends to kill the heroes before they can tell anyone. The Avengers and Squadron are mostly unable to penetrate Brain-Child’s defenses, though Hyperion and Goliath get through. An increasingly fatigued Brain-Child downs Hyperion with electrified cables, but Goliath uses broken cables to fashion an oversize makeshift bow from which he fires the unconscious, invulnerable Hyperion like a mansized arrow, stunning Brain-Child. The shock of defeat reduces Brain-Child to the intellectual and emotional level of a normal child, and Dr. Spectrum renders him physically normal as well. The Squadron promise to help make his childhood happy from now on, just as the Avengers are brought back via Thor’s power to their native Earth, where the team celebrates Goliath’s victory while a moody Vision wonders if they can ever be certain that they have returned to their original home reality.
Born a mutant genius due to his parents’ exposure to radiation, by age 4 Arnold Sutton is a brilliant chemist, but regarded as a freak because of his soon grotesquely enlarged brain. The boy becomes a top rocket scientist for the military despite feeling embittered and alienated (p). Goliath, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch and Vision see Earth-712’s possible apocalyptic near-future before shifting back in time to Earth-712’s present; they briefly and mistakenly battle the Squadron Supreme. Suspecting an imminent rocket launch will cause the disaster, the Avengers and Squadron member Nighthawk set out to stop the launch (Av #85, ’71).
This story’s title is a play on the title of Robert Browning’s 1855 poem, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” itself adapted from a line in William Shakespeare’s King Lear. Brain-Child’s base and accessories, apparently creations of his mind, all vanish upon his defeat. This issue features a LOC from future comics writer Mike W. Barr.
