If you take a look on the internet chances are if you’re going to read anything about the Avengers line of books, you’re undoubtedly going to read a lot of highly critical things about this particular decade. The 1990s was one of the wildest times in comics. The re-sale market was booming and it, in turn, drove sales as comic book companies tried to follow the next big trend. Marvel Comics in particular found itself in a particularly sore spot during this decade. After the departure of popular artists like Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld, and Jim Lee — who quit and started up Image Comics — Marvel found itself constantly playing catch-up as they attempted to trap the lightning in the bottle created by the new upstarts at Image. This was the era where characters went through wild reinventions, gimmick covers were all the rage, and writers stumbled to create edgier characters and stories to attract readers. Nowhere else was this seen more than in books that were not all that popular to begin with.

I keep mentioning how weird it is to say this, but before the Marvel Cinematic Universe came around, the Avengers and related titles were not that big a sell. This was the era where the X-Men was still king. Eventually, the Avengers became a book that frequently tried to adopt styles and stories that were popular elsewhere. They kept trying to revamp, update, and add grit to characters who had been in print for 30 years at that point. Looking at this period in general, it seemed that the various creative teams that handled the Avengers were throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck. Unfortunately for them (and perhaps as mercy to the rest of us) not a lot of this stuff had stuck.

It was a very bizarre time for this book and while it has been derided and mocked countlessly on the internet, I don’t feel like people really look past the superficial things about these books. It mostly focuses on the design choices and artwork and never really taking stock of the stories.

Years ago, when I took my deep dive into Fantastic Four, a book that had a similar reputation during this era, I read all the stories in succession and discovered that holy shit, the stories — despite all the ill advised design choices — were actually pretty entertaining. Not always the best of that book could be, but it was a far cry from being bad. There were many other periods that I would say were worse an 90s era Fantastic Four. So I decided to go into my reading of Avengers with an open mind. Was it really as bad as YouTubers and Bloggers paint it? Or are they merely critiquing the surface layer of these stories. If these Avengers stories are really so bad, where the hell did everything start to go wrong? I decided to find out.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, lets roll back the calendar and go back to January 1990 and move forward from there. The decade started as Marvel was wrapping up its latest cross-company crossover, Acts of Vengeance. In this storyline, Loki had rallied a group of powerful super-villains and orchestrated a mass conspiracy to attack Americas superheroes with villains they had never faced before. The final story in this arc, at least in Avengers proper, happened in issue #313, where the Mandarin gets fed up of the conspiracy and starts attacking the Avengers directly. It was written by John Byrne with Paul Ryan as penciler. At the time, Byrne was also writing Avengers West Coast and so a lot of the b-plots from this period intersected between the two books and the team roster between the two teams was interchangeable. There’s not really much to say about this one off issue, since the conclusion to the Avengers part in Acts of Vengeance was covered over in its sister book, West Coast, so I’ll comment on that another time.

Near the close of the last decade, Byrne was also building up a story involving the space pirate Nebula, who was trying to acquire a powerful weapon to take over the universe, as she was want to do at the time. The story has her almost wipe the universe out of existence. This scheme comes to fruition over the course of Avengers #314-318. The Avengers are, of course, there to stop her. This story arc is particularly interesting for a few reasons: Primarily, it is the story where Spider-Man finally gets membership in the Avengers, something that had been flirted with over the last 30 years. An occasional will-they-or-won’t-they story that popped up once a decade with Spider-Man usually bottoming out in recruitment or deciding that being an Avenger was not for him. This story plunges the wall-crawler into the type of cosmic menace that is quite common place for the Avengers, but is something that Peter Parker experienced in his own book, and as expected it is a whole lot for him to take in.

The second interesting thing about this arc is how, part way through, John Byrne goes from writer to plotter in issue #317, with Fabian Nicieza doing the scripting and then taking full control of the title in the following issue. Byrne himself cites a disagreement with Tom DeFalco over what he was doing in Avengers West Coast. The sudden switch to Nicieza as writer isn’t as rough as what happened over in West Coast, Fabian was a rising star at this time thanks to his work on New Warriors. The Nebula storyline gets wrapped up in a neat little bow, as far as cosmic stories go, it wasn’t really that epic in scope. The only thing to point out is that after this story concludes in issue #318, Spider-Man decides that being an Avenger is too much and quits. The character would retain reserve status and wouldn’t become a full time Avenger until Brian Michael Bendis started up the New Avengers in the following decade, making the character a mainstay on the team.

The next story arc was The Crossing Line a six part epic written by Nicieza with Richard Levins on pencils that took place in Avengers #319-324. The story is a political thriller, an odd choice for an Avengers story, but it works well here. In it, a terrorist organization called the Peace Corps steals a Russian nuclear submarine for the purposes of triggering a nuclear war to help the economy. It’s not the brightest of schemes, but that’s not where this story works. It’s rather that the Avengers find themselves working with other national teams, namely Russia’s People’s Protectorate and the Canadian Alpha Flight. This story also came out during a period where Marvel was trying to put out certain books twice a month. As such, a story that probably could have been told in three issues was stretched out to six. As such, there is a secondary story in these issues. Written by Mark Gruenwald with pencils by James Fry. This story focuses on the newly formed Avengers Support Crew as they are getting the Avengers new headquarters up and running. They become victims of Mother Night who brainwashes the crew to become her slaves in a plot to kill the Avengers for the Red Skull. This would culminate a full story in issue #325 where the Avengers foil this plot.

The Avengers Support Crew was something Mark Gruenwald was trying to push in the pages of Captain America, creating a team of recurring characters that would do all background stuff for the team. It was an interesting concept and created a supporting cast with something to do to necessitate them being in the Avengers. Prior to this, it was usually just Jarvis or whoever a given Avenger was banging at the time. Unfortunately, the Avengers Crew would be relegated to the sidelines and their part in the ongoing Avengers series would ultimately vanish.

Starting in issue #326, creative duties were passed on to Larry Hama with Paul Ryan back on pencils. In my opinion, Hama’s best work is on military themed stories since he had a lot of experience fighting in the Vietnam War. Some of his best works are war titles. He took a licensed book like G.I. Joe and spun it into a legitimate series even though it existed merely to sell toys. He also hit it out of the part with The ‘Nam, a series about — you guessed it — the Vietnam War. Where I find Hama’s work lacks is when he takes his knowledge of military equipment and warfare and tries to apply it to a superhero book that doesn’t really have much use for it. His work on various Venom titles are a good example of this.

Thankfully, his run on Avengers doesn’t lean into much of this. However, his contributions to the title weren’t that great. From issue #326 through 333 he took a lot of tonally different story elements and tried to do them all at once. In the same stretch of issues, Hama had the Avengers deal with a Russian operative that was irradiated at the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (how timely and topical!), that also brought them to another dimension where they fought monster, who then escape to Earth, leading to the Avengers into a battle with cosmic entitles called the Tetrarch of Entropy. On top of that, he introduces readers to a new character called Rage, a 13 year old Black kid who gets super powers after taking a getting bathed in toxic waste. He is basically Angry-Black-Man in luchador mask. He appears in the story trying to get into the Avengers and then accusing them of being racist when they decline to allow a new hero on the team just because he demands it. Also, tossed in the middle of all of this, is a gang war involving a crook named L.D. 50. It is a lot happening all at once. The other dimensional monsters are all uninspiring and have names like Ngh and Orm, as though Hama just smashed his keyboard and went with whatever nonsense came out.

The racial issues regarding Rage being added on the team could have been something really interesting to explore since, by this time, the Avengers has been predominantly White with only a handful of Black characters being on the roster at any particular time. However, this doesn’t go much farther than Rage having arguments with Captain America about how Cap — the least bigoted character in the Marvel Universe — was in fact bigoted. Coming out at a time where racial inequality was a huge issue (and depressingly still is as I write this, because we never really learn anything) it could have had a lot to say, but doesn’t really push very hard. As a Japanese American, I think Hama could have drawn better inspiration from the discrimination that Japanese-Americans (like his parents) experienced during World War II, he instead when for the inequities that African-Americans were suffering at the time which… I don’t feel is the exact same thing? I don’t know, I’m just a 40 year old White guy.

At any rate, the issue with Rage becoming an full time Avenger becomes a moot point when the team discovers he’s only 13 years old, as revealed in issue #328. The Avengers instead decide to make Rage a reserve member in training so they can teach him how to be an effective hero.

Also during this time, the Avengers gets their government clearance with the United States government pulled, apropos to nothing. In past stories, there was usually a reason, but here it’s just a contrivance that is thrown their way out of left field. However, it does serve a purpose.

Issue #329 unveils the Avengers new headquarters, after the original Avengers Mansion was destroyed during Acts of Vengeance. It also sees the team roster shaken up, and the Avengers getting selected to being a United Nations peace keeping force, so they no longer need clearance from the American government to do what they do. Since the Avengers were becoming more international in scope, this would actually make a lot more sense.

I also happen to like the new Avengers Headquarters. It’s very Hall of Justice-y, but I found it sleeker than the old Stark mansion. Unfortunately, this cosmetic change wouldn’t last very long as it would be undone five years later, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Hama ends his run with a two part story in issues #332-333, where the Avengers are throwing a party to commemorate their new headquarters. For some reason, Doctor Doom is invited to the party and he tries to blow the place up. He is ultimately stopped thanks to reserve Avengers Rage, Spider-Man and Sandman.

Bob Harras would pick-up the book from here on out, writing almost consistently until 1996. Harras is a bit of a divisive individual during his time at Marvel Comics. He was primarily the Editor-in-Chief of the company during the worst of the 1990s when the comic book bubble burst and Marvel Comics had to file for bankruptcy to stay afloat. A lot of the direction of Marvel’s books at the time were under the guidance and his name is the subject of a lot of muckraking, particularly for his involvement in the much maligned Clone Saga that was being done in the Spider-Man family of books.

Like a lot of runs from the 1990s, I feel that perhaps the online scorn is overly dramatic and has been amplified in recent years due to the echo chamber that is the internet and comic book vloggers whose histrionic takes and faux outrage just makes those perceptions worse. I often find that, when revisiting these stories 30 years later, that they weren’t necessarily as bad as everyone paints them to be. That is not to say that these stories are free from scrutiny. This was the low point of the industry for a reason. Still, I wouldn’t necessarily blanket the entire decade as being the “worst” the Avengers have to offer.

I don’t think the full blame should fall at the feet of Bob Harras either. For whatever sins he committed with the Clone Saga, I don’t think his run on the Avengers was particularly that bad. Certainly a lot of the plots were derivative to what was proven popular over on the X-Men titles, but if you ignore these attempts and read the stories on their own merits, they are actually quite good more often than they were bad. I’m getting ahead of myself here, so follow me into the weeds so I can explain what I am talking about.

Bob Harras would pick up the book again as it went into another bi-weekly publication cycle for a six-part story called The Collection Obsession in Avengers #334-339. The first issue featured artwork by Andy Kurbert before he really hit it big doing artwork on X-Men after Jim Lee’s departure on the book. The rest of the arc features work by Steve Epting, who would become a mainstay on the Avengers until 1994. Epting would go on to do some of his landmark work during Ed Brubaker’s iconic run on Captain America about a decade later. The Collection Obsession is… a bit of a trial to read. It’s another one of Marvel’s attempts to better integrate Jack Kirby’s Eternals into the Marvel Universe proper, something they had been doing for over a decade at this point.

The story features a group of aliens called the Brethren, which were evolved by the Celestials from bacteria on an alien world. After the Celestials lost interested in this experiment, the Brethren were then made part of the Collectors collection of intergalactic curios. The story works to further cement the Eternal Sersi on the team, a position she will hold for a good chunk of the 90s. Less lasting was a revamp of the Collector who was previously depicted as a wrinkly old man. They attempted to make the character more menacing and alien. Unfortunately, this new look was quickly abandoned by the end of the decade when they brought the character back to his classic look. Kind of a shame, I actually liked this new take on the character.

After this, there were a few fill in issues with guest writers. Of note are issues #341-342, written again by Fabian Nicieza. It is a Sons of the Serpent story that also introduces a brand new Hate-Monger, two of the big R racists of the Marvel Universe. The story revolves around Rage wanting to do more about Carmello Martinez, an old school friend who was brutally beaten by the police. This story was clearly meant as a commentary about the real life beating of Rodney King, an Black man who was brutally beaten by the Los Angeles Police on March 3, 1991, the incident was caught on tape. The story polarized America as racialized police brutality became a hot button topic for the years that followed. In this story, Rage tries to get the Avengers to do more about racial injustice that affects the average non-white American only to realize that this is not in the Avengers usual scope. This is also the story where the Avengers find out that Rage is only 14, and he promptly leaves the group to run with the New Warriors, the novice team of teenaged superheroes who Rage believes can better deal with street level injustices that the Avengers can’t.

Nicieza was best known for telling stories that were more down to Earth and tackled real world issues. However, I find that the problem with his work on these kinds of stories is that the heroes in them usually realize that social issues such as drug addiction, bigotry, and other societal injustices are not on their usual radar. Invariably, most of these stories end with the immediate bad guy defeated, the heroes saying they need to do more, but then going back to their usual super-villain/cosmic menace of the month until the next “ripped-from-the-headlines” inspired story comes along where the characters will wash, lather, and rinse the same plot beats over and over. Even street level heroes like Spider-Man, Daredevil, or Luke Cage don’t really seem to do much to combat real world injustices very often.

I kind of get it, comic books are an escapism. Reading stories about real world problems isn’t as sexy as having the Avengers fight Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet for the 50 billionth time. The writers, just as the heroes they create, wish they could do more, but just go back to doing the same old stories that move more copies.

Harras would be back on the book starting in Avengers #343, and he started changing things up. The core team becomes Captain America, the Black Widow, the Vision, the Eric Masterson Thor, Hercules, the Black Knight, Sersi, and Crystal. This team would remain more or less unchanged throughout the Harras run. While people decry this run as not having any “well known” Avengers on the team, I feel that not having the Avengers trinity on the team is a refreshing change of pace. It gives other characters that wouldn’t get an ongoing series of their own a chance to get more developed and a chance to shine. With lesser known characters, there is also more fertile ground for shaking things up, or making big changes. People are going to shit a brick if you change anything about Captain America, but the Black Knight? You can do a ton of crazy shit with him and people won’t even blink, and that’s exactly what Harras does here with the title.

While later stories, such as the love triangle between Black Knight, Sersi, and Crystal, overstay their welcome and don’t really go anywhere, the interpersonal relationships and drama between characters is actually quite good. The characters also don’t take everything seriously all the time and we start seeing the entire team start making wisecracks, something that was usually left to the token “funny guy” of the time (usually Hawkeye). This sort of light hearted humor would grow and evolve and be used by other writers until the Marvel Cinematic Universe baked snarky Joss Wheadon-esque sarcasm into all things Avengers. Still before than, I’d say that this is where the team starts finding its sense of humor as an ensemble rather than just one — usually insufferable — character cracking wise while everyone else remains pretty dour. Sure, other writers have arguably done it better, but it pretty well gets its beginnings with Harras.

Issues #343-344 also introduce a new Swordsman and his ally Magdeline, setting the stage for Bob’s massive story arc involving the Gatherers. The Gatherers are a group of former Avengers from alternate realities led by Proctor, a version of the Black Knight that has gone bad after getting dumped by his version of Sersi. He then goes across the multiverse trying to kill ever other alternate Sersi. While the motivation is kind of cringe by today’s standards, where the Gatherers make interesting antagonists is the fact that they are evil alternate reality versions of the Avengers. This is the first time that someone did a whole story arc about Avengers gone bad and not like an issue where someone gets brainwashed or temporary duplicates are made or whatever, and that alone makes it an interesting read because it was the first of its kind, really.

However, before that plot thread can develop, the Avengers books entered into their first major crossover of the 1990s, Operation: Galactic Storm. This was a 19 part epic that was told across the Avengers and all of its sister books: Avengers West Coast, Captain America, Iron Man, Wonder Man, and Quasar. This was another first and its success would lead to the same gimmick being repeated in the X-Men and Spider-Man line of books with such crossover events as the X-Cutioner’s Song and Maximum Carnage and yes, the Clone Saga.

Here the execution is a lot better, the story focuses on an intergalactic war between the Kree and the Shi’ar with Earth caught in the middle of it all. This story is certainly trying to recreate the energy of Roy Thomas’ famous Kree/Skrull War arc from the 1970s. However, this time, the stakes are much higher and the Avengers find themselves in a moral quandry. Over the course of the series, the Avengers try and fail to stop the Shi’ar from detonating a nega-bomb in the Kree galaxy, decimating the entire empire and killing billions. When they learn that this was all orchistrated by the Kree Supreme Intelligence — in an effort to jumpstart the Kree’s stagnant evolution — the Avengers are rightly horrified. However, the team finds themselves divided over how to handle it, with Iron Man leading a faction of the Avengers who decide to execute the Supreme Intelligence. This will be the first schism within the Avengers that will have a ripple effect across the rest of the decade feeding into the Avengers West Coast disbanding and becoming Force Works as well as setting the stage for the much maligned Crossing story arc.

After Galactic Storm ended, the Avengers went back into their ongoing titles. Whereas most of books were constantly interrupted by crossover after crossover during this period (this was the period of Infinity Gaultet/War/Crusade after all), Bob Harras and the other creative teams on the Avengers did not have to deal with these constant event distruptions. Perhaps it was the fact that a lot of those other books needed a push in sale and Avengers didn’t, I couldn’t tell you.

Issue #348 is a touching story that calls back to an earlier issue of Avengers Spotlight. In the final issue of Avengers Spotlight the Vision helps a scientist named Miles Lipton expose a Roxxon murder cover-up and then had the brain engrams of Miles’ late son, Alex, downloaded into his brain. This story follows up with that, by having the Vision allow Alex’s personality to come to the fore so Miles could talk to his son one last time. At this point in history, the Vision was devoid of emotions after having them wiped out in the pages of West Coast Avengers. The attempt to bring Alex out was a failure but the Vision — seeing how important this is — puts up an act so Miles can die in peace. The story ends with the Vision shedding a single tear while watching the sun rise, suggesting that the Vision is now capable of emotions once again. The crying moment a call back to the end of his second appearance in Avengers #58. It’s a touching story, and was a hint that the Vision was going to begin exploring his feelings again. However, this sort of revelation isn’t explored full until the 1994 Vision limited series. However, such ramifications are barely touched upon in the mainline Avengers title as focus was turned to other things.

While this does seem like a total missed opportunity, on the other hand, it seems like this was something that would feel like a retread of an old plot thread.

For issue #348, the seeds of an ongoing plotline involving Hercules was begun. In this story, Hera and Ares decide challenge one another to break Hercules' spirit. In this story, Ares tries and fails, while Hera sets the sage of her grand scheme, making Hercules fall in love with a woman named Taylor Madison. This plotline would drag on for almost 3 years and not get the attention it really needed unfortunately. Herc would meet with Taylor, she would get cold feet and hint at having a terminal illness and Hera would pop up every once and a while to remind readers that something was going down. This plot wouldn’t be resolved until Avengers #384, when it was revealed that Madison was actually a construct created by Zeus in order to catch Hera red handed. Hercules of course, doesn’t appreciate this, and gets stripped of his Olympian heritage for speaking out against it. This apparently made Herc mortal and for some inexplicable reason he starts talking like a normal person for a time. However, that last change is inconsistent as it was baffling. I think they were trying to follow what was going on in Thor whose titular character was going through the same sort of bizarre creative change. This is almost immediately forgotten as Hercules would go back to his traditional way of speaking by the time he appears in Incredible Hulk: Hercules Unleashed #1. The first of many changes wrought during this period that would be summarily ignored by later writers and for good reason, but I’m getting head of myself.

Also during this period was Avengers Annual #21, which was part of that summer’s Citizen Kang storyline. It was an effort by writers to make sense of long running Kang plotlines that stopped doing so for some time, namely explaining who the female Kang who called herself Nebula actually was since, as we discussed above, the space pirate of the same name had clearly distanced herself from the role. Through the magic of convolution, it turns out that Nebula was actually Kang’s old love interest Ravonna from way back. The ramifications from this story would not be seen until the limited series Avengers: The Terminatrix Objective, and would be criminally ignored later on in The Crossing and not fixed until years after the fact, but we’ll cross that bridge a little later. It should also be pointed out that this annual has some of the most wretched artwork that long time Marvel penciler Herb Trimpe put to paper. Trimpe, who made a name for himself thanks to his long run on Incredible Hulk for decades, decided in the 1990s that he was going to try and imitate the style popularized by younger artists like Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee. What he produced during this period was some of the worst artwork I have ever seen in a comic book in my life, period. End of list. People like to chirp Rob Liefeld, he was not the worst of the era.

Issues #350-351 featured a clash between the Avengers and the Starjammers, fallout from Operation: Galactic Storm and setting up later conflicts with the Kree Lunatic Legion, as well as planting early seeds for the upcoming Blood Ties event that was to celebrate the 30th anniversaries of both the Avengers and the X-Men.

Issues #352-354 was a three part epic written by Len Kaminski with art by M.C. Wyman that had the Grim Reaper — reanimated as a zombie — create a new Legion of the Unliving to fight the Avengers. It’s dark and moody only marred by the fact that the demon Lloigoroth — a massive hand with eyes on each finger — looks really fucking ridiculous.

Harras and Epting were back in issues #355-356 and they brought back the Gatherers and the revelation that they were Avengers from other realities that had been destroyed. We learn a little more about Proctor and his goals as well as an increase in tension between the Black Knight, Crystal and Sersi. This would be the growing drama in the book as Sersi was slowly going insane. The Black Knight found himself torn between his love of Crystal, who was still technically married to Quicksilver, and Sersi’s interest in him. This would play out through the Avengers title until issue #375. Proctor’s whole thing was that he was dumped by Sersi after she made him her life mate and he went from universe to universe killing each Sersi he encountered. It’s really cringe, as I said, and ultimately ends with the Knight and Sersi deciding to flee into another reality following Proctor’s retreat in order to save Sersi’s damaged mind.

This happened shortly after Marvel had bought Malibu Comics and continued printing their line of Ultraverse comic books. Whitman and Sersi would become members of the Ultraforce. It was part of Marvel’s efforts to try and attract interest to this new imprint by having the heroes of both titles interact with one another. It didn’t really work and eventually, the Malibu titles were canceled and Dane and Sersi were brought back to the Marvel Universe proper.

One of the more baffling creative choices was, after Black Knight was made Sersi’s Gan Josin (or life mate) his eyes were turned black with red irises. This, I’m guessing, was trying to make him more like Gambit from the X-Men for reasons I cannot fathom. Sure enough this artistic choice was soon scrapped and ignored once the Proctor storyline was resolved.

Other changes at this time was restoring the Vision to his original red skinned/green costume form. This was chronicled over the course of issues #362-363, where Proctor and his Gatherers recovered a Vision of another reality and mind swapped them so the evil Vision (aka Anti-Vision) could be planted among the Avengers. It was a means to an end, since a lot of people didn’t particularly like the changes John Byrne did to him in West Coast Avengers. Not the worst creative choice during this period, and also a welcome one. The “ghostly” version of Vision was visually bland and unappealing if I were being honest.

Then we have the inclusion of Deathcry to the group starting in issue #364, a Shi’ar warrior forced into exile on Earth for ill explained reasons, she first appeared in the book as an edgy warrior that I’m guessing they were trying to make into a Wolverine archetype. Issues #378-379. She would be front and center with repeat clashes with vengeance seeking members of the Kree in those two issues as well as issues #378-379.

To call Deathcry an under developed character is being charitable. This becomes more apparent when, in later stories, Deathcry’s personality suddenly shifts from being an edgy warrior to a typical 16 year old girl complete with 90’s slang by issue #385. They tease a mysterious past involving the character all the way up to issue #399 and then send her off into space with Hercules.

Speaking of Hercules, he is the subject of another series of baffling creative choices. In issue #349 when they introduce a love interest for the character named Taylor Madison. This plot is all part of a grand scheme by his step-mother Hera to break the demigod’s heart. This plot doesn’t get resolved until issue #384. In that story, it is also revealed that Madison was actually a construct created by Zeus to catch Hera in the act. Hercules obviously doesn’t take having his emotions played with very well and calls his dad out on it. Zeus then responds by stripping Hercules of his godly heritage. This also causes a baffling decision to make him stop speaking in a Shakespearian patois for a more contemporary dialect. This is applied haphazardly and is ultimately ignored when Hercules starts making appearances outside of this run of the Avengers.

At any rate, following the end of the Gathering story arc, Steve Epting ends his run on the Avengers and we are given a string of guest artists while we go into an arc about Quicksilver and Crystal. The pair are on the same team again after the Bloodties event and they go into yet another gerrymandering attempt at trying to make their marriage work. Something that the couple is forced into time and again over the next while as writers seem to be stuck with what to do with them.

By the time we get into Bob Harras’ final run on the Avengers, the series picks up Mike Deodato, Jr. as the regular artist. Despite the fact that his work during this period is lifting design choices that were popularized over at Image Comics, his artwork is still pretty solid. The only shame here is that his work will be associated with one of the worst Avengers storylines ever, but I’m once again getting ahead of myself.

Bob’s final story arc on the Avengers is called Taking AIM, which serves as a means of returning MODOK to life after the character was killed off in the last decade. This story is somewhat interesting in that it features Captain America wearing a suit of battle armor. This was one of the more ill-advised creative choices during Mark Gruenwald’s lengthy tenure on Captain America. I won’t get into it too much here as I will be covering it elsewhere later on. I will point out though, that this design must have been really hated as the Avengers issues in the Taking AIM arc make an effort to get Captain America out of that stupid looking suit of armor as often as possible and it’s fucking hillarious to read them coming up with excuses to do it.

Following this, writing duties were taken over by Terry Kavanaugh whose resume includes nearly every ill advised storyline Marvel put out in the 1990s. If there was a bad decision to be made, a horrible design choice, or a stupid status quo change from this decade, chances are Kavanaugh had his hands in it. It’s interesting to note that he basically dropped out of comics after the 1990s and last heard of trying to do a tech start-up in the 2010s that failed miserably. So at least he’s consistent in whatever he does, I guess. 

Anyway, Kavanaugh is responsible for one of the worst Avengers stories ever put to paper. I’m talking about The Crossing. The concept is actually not that bad, what makes it bad is the execution. See, the storyline is one of those epic time-spanning conflicts with Kang the Conqueror and centers around the revelation that Iron Man has been a sleeper agent for Kang since the very beginning. The execution however, was horrendous. When we are reintroduced to Kang, he is now shacked up with Mantis who has gone bad for reasons that are not fully explained. There is a cast of time traveling villains that are all incredibly boring due to their “mysterious” backgrounds and tepid characterizations. On top of all this, the Avengers solution to stopping the evil Tony Stark is going into the past and getting his younger self to fight him. In the end, the present day Tony Stark breaks free of Kang’s mental control and sacrifices his life to save his friends. His teenage self then decides to stay in the present day and make a life for himself. 

The idea that an Avenger has secretly been working for the bad guys the whole time and ultimately makes a noble sacrifice in the end is an interesting story and killing off Tony Stark wouldn’t have been such a bad idea if it was done properly. However, the motivation was all to create a younger Tony Stark to better relate to the reading audience and it was a huge misstep. Readers didn’t like the idea at all because there wasn’t any effort made to make us like the character. 

The Crossing was such a bad idea that, a few years later, when Kurt Busiek wrote Avengers Forever, he went in and explained it all away as some complicated scheme created by Immortus to affect the Avengers destiny, which was both brilliant and the only way you could have done away with something so monumentally stupid.

Either way, the writing was on the wall for the Avengers and its family of books as Marvel struggled to try and make these underperforming titles relevant to readers again. This would culminate in Heroes Reborn, but Marvel still had to buy time before they could relaunch these books under this new initiative. 

After the hatchet job Kavanaugh had done on the title, Mark Waid was brought in to write the final few issues of the Avengers before the title reboot. Waid is a competent writer whose work has revitalized flagging titles many times over. He knows how to write interesting stories about these characters. He was tapped to do the 400th anniversary issue and it pits the current roster against Loki, a call back to the Avengers first adventure. While it does go for that “heroes are forced to fight constructs of their entire rogues gallery” trope that has been tired by this point, it is still leagues better than any of the garbage that was put out during The Crossing. The final two issues were then part of the Onslaught event which would bridge the books over to Heroes Reborn.

Heroes Reborn was an event that pulled the Avengers and Fantastic Four out of the mainstream Marvel Universe into their own self-contained pocket universe. Their origins would be re-told in a modern context and have some of the biggest names in comics at the time taking the helm.

After the shitty run by Kavanaugh, you’d think that Marvel learned their lesson and decided to put competent people on the creative team. Unfortunately, no lessons were learned.

Because when I say Marvel picked the “biggest names”, I need to stress that this was the 1990s and “biggest names” were people who had left Marvel to join Image Comics. I’m talking about Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld. Or rather, these titles were farmed out to the studios that these two icons ran. Jim Lee would take on Fantastic Four and Iron Man while Liefeld took on Avengers and Captain America. I won’t really get into the nitty gritty on Jim Lee’s work, that’s a topic for some other primer. Let’s talk about Rob Liefeld. Rob fucking Liefeld.

Now, taking potshots at Rob Liefeld is low hanging fruit. I don’t need to tell you how wildly inconsistent his artwork is, or that he’s not a very good story teller. This is a well beaten path. People have covered it ad nauseum elsewhere. If you like his artwork you like it, if you don’t, you don’t. For me, I don’t like his artwork. However, I can say that sometimes he can do a decent job if he puts the time and effort into it. That said, it really seems to me like the guy is constantly rushing through his work and his run on the 2nd volume of the Avengers is a prime example of that.

Rob’s run on Avengers only lasted seven issues and they are so devoid of any actual story elements that you can literally read through them in under five minutes. This is because most of the stories are wall to wall action scenes with no character development, no chemistry between characters, and one-dimensional foes. Between trying to make the Avengers edgy like the stuff put out by Image, there is also a startling lack of development. The stories have no teeth. Liefeld’s plots rely on the fact that you vaguely remember these stories are adapted from older tales. Basically, Liefeld took the rich stories created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and boiled out everything that made them so iconic. What’s even more shocking is that a lot of these stories are co-written by Jeph Loeb. Yeah, Jeph Loeb the guy who wrote the critically acclaimed Batman: The Long Halloween and the Marvel Colors limited series (Spider-Man: Blue, Daredevil: Yellow and so on) co-wrote these steaming piles of garbage. 

As many of you reading this already know, Liefeld’s work on Avengers and Captain America were so poorly received, Marvel cut their 12 issue contracts with him early and had Jim Lee’s Wildstorm Studios wrap up both of these books. 

To clean house, Walt Simonson was brought on with artist Michael Ryan to wrap things up. The only thing  they really had to work with was that the Avengers kind of remembered their old lives pre-Heroes Reborn and they kept on fighting villains with no rhyme or reason. Simonson tried his best with what he had to work with. However, it’s clear to me that he thought Liefeld’s version of Thor was offensive enough that he brought in a second Thor. One that was less a Conan rip-off with a hammer and killed Liefeld’s off. Anyway, with only four issues to work with before the final story arc fast approaching, there wasn’t really much Simonson could do to save this turkey.

Issue #12 was a final crossover issue with the other Heroes Reborn books titled Heroes Reunited, where everyone teams up to save Earth from Galactus. For whatever reason, there is almost no continuity between all four parts as Doctor Doom time jumps after each failed attempt to stop Galactus only for events to play out completely differently without any clear explanation.

The final issue of this run, issue #13, was yet another big crossover event titled World War 3, again playing out in all the Heroes Reborn titles. This one is particularly interesting because it featured the Avengers and the Fantastic Four interacting with the heroes from Jim Lee’s Wildstorm Universe. It was the whole merged realities trope that has been done many times before and after to varying degrees of success. I’d say this one wasn’t that great because a lot of Jim Lee’s Wildstorm characters are all so generic looking, yet so wildly different from Marvel’s line of heroes that it just doesn’t strike me as a very interesting or memorable read. What makes this crossover interesting in any respect is that since then Wildstorm was bought by DC Comics and its line of characters have been somewhat integrated into the DC Universe, although the Wildstorm characters are seldom utilized. Regardless of this, the Wildstorm purchase ensures that the 13th issues of the Heroes Reborn run will probably never see reprints again so long as Marvel and DC have frosty relations. As I write this, the two companies only agreed to reprint JLA/Avengers in honor of George Peréz just so long as it was a limited run. So if you’re dying to see these stories reprinted, you better not be holding your breath.

Anyway, depending on how you look at it, Heroes Reborn was either a success or a complete failure. However, I think what it did do was make readers realize why the Avengers and Fantastic Four were so integral to the Marvel Universe. They were as important to it as the X-Men or Spider-Man books. When Marvel announced that they were bringing these characters back to the mainstream Marvel Universe and that actual competent creative teams were being put on board, these new volumes exploded in popularity. They were instant hits.

The 3rd volume of the Avengers in particular because it was going to be headlined by the creative juggernauts of Kurt Busiek and George Peréz, two of the most celebrated creators in all of comics. You couldn’t ask for a better creative team as both men had the utmost love and respect for the franchise, could tells visually interesting stories with interesting characters, and stories that were both accessible to new readers on top of having enough easter eggs for long time fans. The Busiek/Peréz run was to the Avengers what Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum were to Uncanny X-Men, or John Byrne was to Fantastic Four. They went back to basics and told the type of stories readers were long denied after a half decade of drek. It is arguably one of the best runs on the Avengers ever put to paper. With 23 issues published from February 1998 through December 1999, all the bad taste left by the Kavanaughs and Liefelds of the world were washed away Avengers stories had not been this good  for a very long time and it was only going to get better from here, but that’s a story for another time.

Busiek has a great deal of respect for continuity and his stories, while accessible to readers, dig deep into the rich history of the Avengers. Not only did he propel the book forward, but he did so with the respect of everything that came before. Picking up plot threads from the mid-90s that most other writers would have rather just have forgotten. He tied up loose ends, and formed cohesive bridge between the pre-Onslaught era and this brand new revival. It is masterful and some of the best continuity wrangling that would have done Mark Gruenwald proud.

However, Busiek’s landmark run on the Avengers wouldn’t be entirely flawless as we’d soon learn in the following decade. The Avengers would need at least one more push before they were to rocket to the pop-culture phenomenon they have enjoyed for nearly 20 years.