Avengers in the 2000s: Some Disassembly Required
In the early 2000s, the Avengers was finally getting out of the dark cloud of the 1990s. The title nearly brought to the brink by tired tropes, stupid gimmicks, and poorly conceived attempts to compete with industry newcomers. The decade ended with the series being revitalized by the combination of writer Kurt Busiek and artist George Pérez. However, this legendary run was reaching its end, as Pérez would leave the book after issue #34. This was so Pérez could focus his talents and have all the time he needed to do the artwork for the long awaited JLA/Avengers crossover, arguably Pérez’s greatest work.
However, there wasn’t really anything huge going on during these last few issues. There was a two part follow up to the Ninth Day crossover, wherein the Avengers rescue the Juggernaut from the Exemplars. Issues #26-27 continues the Triune Understanding sub-plot. This time, the organization tricks an ad-hoc team of Avengers into attacking their headquarters, making a PR nightmare for the heroes. This leads to another roster shake-up with both Captain America and Thor quitting the team. The Avengers also reluctantly accept Triathlon, the Triune’s poster child, onto the team. While his handlers are secretly plotting against the Avengers, Triathlon is not privy to these plans. While his membership with the Avengers starts off confrontationally, all parties eventually learn to respect one another and work as a team.
Issues #28-30 is a three part story where the team comes to the aid of Silverclaw, whose city is transformed by the magic of Kulan Gath. It’s your typical Kulan Gath story where he transforms a location to match his home era and the heroes smashing whatever McGuffin is required to turn everything back to normal. The only thing different is that the spell causes Hank Pym to split into two distinct versions of himself: One representing Hank’s intellect in his Goliath identity, while the other is governed by his emotions in his Yellowjacket identity. The two live independently of one another but the longer they spent apart the sooner they’ll both die, forcing the pair to merge together once again months down the road in the Avengers Annual that was published in 2001. I don’t this idea gets a whole lot of time to breath and be explored, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Pérez’s final story arc on the book happens in issues #31-34 and runs concurrently with Thunderbolts #42-44. Picking up from the Iron Man Annual from 1999, this tale has Count Nefaria enslaving Wonder Man and Atlas and using them to go after his daughter Madame Masque. This prompts the Avengers and the Thunderbolts to team up to protect her. While it is overall an entertaining read, it also sweeps up the (terrible) plot threads that were left hanging during Terry Kavanaugh’s awful runs on Iron Man and Avengers in the 90s, particularly the plot hole involving the mysterious Masque. Busiek would clean house one last time in the 2001 annual, with a back-up story where Jarvis answers reader e-mails about the plot holes left by dangling since The Crossing. A lot of writers would have looked at that shit and decide to ignore it or come up with some kind of lazy retcon to get rid of it. Not Kurt Busiek. As terrible as the stories or ideas may have been, Busiek knows that someone put work into those stories. While most of these wrap ups are to sweep things under the rug, Busiek at least has the dedication to come up with some kind of satisfactory resolution.
From here, the Avengers get involved in the Maximum Security crossover, which took place mostly in its own limited series with special crossover issues across Marvel’s line of books. The plot involves the Supreme Intelligence hyper-evolving some of the Kree into a new race called the Ruul. Then they trick the galactic council to turn Earth into a prison planet. This was so they could utilize Ego the Living Planet as a bio-weapon or some such thing. Maximum Security isn’t a very good crossover by any stretch of the imagination. Mercifully, one one issue of the Avengers is bogged down by this dumb crossover. It does feature art by John Romita, Jr., so it’s not all bad.
The next two issues has Steve Epting filling in as artist. I’m a fan of his later work (particularly when he was doing Captain America with Ed Brubaker) and this work is pretty close to that. The story is not as great, the whole ongoing story with the Triune Understanding is starting to show its cracks as it is quite rudderless.
Following Epting’s departure, Alan Davis hops on the book, another massively talented fan-favorite artist. I am a huge fan of Davis as well. Unfortunately, Davis’ tenure on the book is incredibly short, working on six issues before he was replaced. I couldn’t tell you why that is. However, it’s a shame because Busiek was about to launch his most ambitious story arc yet: The Kang Dynasty.
Busiek’s story structuring by this point was usually a story in three parts: The first part was usually for exposition of past storylines to get readers up to speed as well as checking in on character b-plots of the period. It was a time to check in on characters personal lives, and inch them forward a bit. It was a two fold purpose, it engaged ongoing readers while at the same time educating new comers coming onto the book. If you walked in blind to the first part of a Kurt Busiek multipart epic you weren’t going to walk away not understanding what was going on. This story would usually end with the start of an encounter with a villain, a hook to buy next issue. Story two would raise the stakes, pepper in some hints to upcoming storylines, and then end with a cliffhanger. The third act would be nothing but non-stop action.
The thing about Busiek though is that his prose is dense. It has a lot of narration, a lot of dialogue, a lot of references. In the 2000s, Marvel was starting to drift away from that kind of storytelling. With enhancement in digital imaging, printing, and paper quality, artists were able to become more and more detailed in their work. Comic books were shifting in a more visual medium. Less text, more action. The visuals were becoming more cinematic. Writers were telling their tales with fewer words as the artistic and presentation limitations practically vanished. Narration blocks became a thing of the past because describing what was going on wasn’t as necessary anymore.
Even in this shifting environment, Busiek shone. The Kang Dynasty storyline was slowly adopting the new Marvel style and Busiek’s swan song on the title was an epic beyond all others. He turned the Avengers into a global fighting force. It was a 14 part epic that pulled no punches. Never were the stakes getting any higher. It also depicted Kang doing something that you seldom actually saw (except for the odd panel or two for exposition) Kang conquering something. Shit got blown up. People died. It was a bold choice publishing a story where Washington, DC gets annihilated during a time when people were still processing the 9/11 terror attacks. Yet it was told unflinchingly with a lot of raw emotion. The ending where a giant holographic Captain America fights a giant holographic Kang was a bit much, but sometimes it’s about the journey, not the ending.
Busiek’s final issue of Avengers was issue #56, and after such an epic storyline he decided to have the final outing be something kind of fun and silly. It’s a story about how the Maria Stark Foundation audits the expenses caused by the Avengers on a given case and how that’s handled. I won’t get into it in too much detail because it would spoil the story, but it’s a delightful read.
From here the book slides into the type of story telling that was ever present at Marvel in the early 2000s. Stories were told in five part arcs that were light on continuity so that new readers could hop on board and long time ones would be entertained. Continuity wouldn’t be forgotten (although sometimes it was sloppy, at least in other books), but it was a looser way of story telling and vastly different to the style Busiek was pumping out month after month before hand. Are these stories better or worse than the old way? I’d say that it depends on the creative team involved in the story arc.
One thing about these five part arcs was that once they started going in this format, it was like clockwork. You signed on a writer and an art team and off you go. They would at least be committed to that one arc so gone were the days where an artist had to be changed mid-storyline and the fill in guy was someone you didn’t like. It gave these arcs a visual consistency. Also, if a writer and/or art team that you didn’t like was jumping on the book, you could skip it entirely and not feel like you missed anything super important.
The first writer to take over for Busiek was Geoff Johns. Johns is a very capable writer even back in these early days before he went on and became one of the most prolific modern writers over at DC Comics. He wrote 3 story arcs for Avengers and a few one-off stories between issues #57 and 71.
His story arcs include “World Trust” (issues #57-60) with artist Kieron Dwyer, “Stand Off” (issues #61-63) with Gary Frank, “The Red Zone” (issues #65-70) with Oliver Coipel, and “The Search for She-Hulk” (issues #72-75) with Scott Kolins. The artwork between each artist is different, but everyone shines here. I am particularly fond of the works of Gary Frank and Oliver Coipel.
These multi-part story arcs also see a sudden shift in the style of stories. The visuals were becoming more cinematic. Things became more fast paced. There was less dialogue and more action. However, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t any proper story telling. Writer and artist began leaning on visual story telling. Technology had gotten to the point where artists could create full rendered scenes, add more detail, and create more dynamic page layouts. Gone were the six squares, monocolored backgrounds, and text heavy narrative blocks of old, which were a necessity due to the limitations of that bygone era.
However, the real stand-outs of Johns’ run are the one off stories. Issues #64 (with art by Ivan Reis), 71 (with art by Stephen Sadowski), and 76 (Also by Sadowski). Each one following a story arc acts as a cooling down period where Johns tells stories about individual Avengers and builds on their relationships with one another. Something that was usually crammed in with all the action is instead given their own unique issues to give these dynamics room to breath and develop further. Issue #64 is a solo story featuring the Falcon and his dislike of government liaison Henry Gyrich expands on an old annoyance harkening back to the late 70s when Gyrich insisted Falcon join a team he had no interest in joining.
Finding the little man in the boat is easier when you’re only 1 cm tall.
Issue #71 allows us to explore the current status of the long and troubled romance between Yellowjacket and the Wasp. We see that the two of them are deeply in love with one another but getting remarried is not in the cards. It also presented a relationship of great complexity and a more modern approach to relationships. While the end goal of a romance in the 1960s (the era where the two got married) is not the reality in the 21st century. This story also is “infamous” for a page being culled from the print. For those not in the know, the story originally had a scene where it’s implied that Hank — at Ant-Man size — was performing oral sex on Jan in their hotel room. The moment, while tame by today’s standards, is surprisingly explicit for a comic book particularly one that is rated for teens. If you’re curious, I’ve included the page on the right.
According to the official account, the editor was asleep at the switch and this issue went out with this page when it wasn’t supposed to. Or at least not without the age rating it was printed with. This strikes me as silly since Marvel had just recently dumped the Comics Code Authority in favor of their own rating system. But whatever. Marvel even offered to accept returns on the issue in exchange for a copy without the offending page. The presumption is that nobody really cared that much. Regardless, all reprints of this story (including digital editions) no longer include this page. Which doesn’t really affect the story in anyway. The type of people who get upset that something like this being pulled out of a comic targeted at kids should probably unclench and check out this thing called PornHub everyone is talking about. But I digress…
Geoff Johns would leave the book and it the title was passed on to Chuck Austen for two story arcs. Austen gets a lot of criticism for his work, particularly his run on Uncanny X-Men. However, here, I don’t find anything wrong with his stories. The first arc, “The Lionheart of Avalon” (issues #77-81 with art by Coipel) featured the creation of a brand new female Captain Britain. It was an interesting new take on the character that never had much room to breath because of what came next and the character was summarily dumped the moment Austen stopped writing the character.
His next arc was “Once and Invader” (issues #82-84 and Invaders (vol. 3) #0, art by Kolins), saw a new team of Invaders created by US Agent. The team being revived to help fight the War on Terror that was on that was ever present in those early years after 9/11. Reimagining the World War II heroes as modern day terrorist busters. It’s an intriguing story that offers a wider commentary on how America reacted to the biggest terrorist attack on American soil in modern history. It is a capsule of that time period and is interesting to read primarily for that and that alone.
From here, the Avengers experienced their biggest shake-up during a line-wide event called Avengers Disassembled. Then rising star Brian Michael Bendis and artist David Finch were tasked with revamping the Avengers into something new. Take them out of the old and make them relevant to a more modern audience. Make them cool with the kids. Bendis’ approach here was in order to fix the Avengers you had to irreparably break them. That’s what he did. In four issues, the Scarlet witch systematically tears down the Avengers. Their government backing is revoked, the mansion is destroyed, and some of the mainstays on the team were killed off. Including fan favorites like Hawkeye and Vision. It was such an epic and important story, Marvel even brought the title back to its legacy numbering.
A bold move and controversial at the time, I don’t think readers really appreciated what was going on. Marvel was laying the groundwork for the next decade of stories. Without Dissassembled you wouldn’t have the New Avengers, you wouldn’t have epics like Civil War, Secret Invasion, Dark Reign and Siege. There would be no MCU, since many of the stories that came out as a result of Disassembled have been adapted into these early Marvel films.
This also brought the end of Avengers as a title. For almost a decade you could find spin-off books such as New Avengers, Mighty Avengers, and the like, a proper Avengers book wouldn’t grace comic racks until 2010. Since then, Avengers has almost consistently been published ever since. The title might get re-named or briefly ended but it’ll always be back. In July of 2023, the series will enter its 9th volume of publication.
