Avengers Classic: Sometimes You Can't Go Home Again
Avengers Classic is something of an interesting series. Editors Mark D. Beazly and Andy Schmidt stated in the first issue that this series was a spiritual successor to Classic X-Men/X-Men Classic from the 1980s. That series was published at the height of the X-Men’s popularity and ran from 1986 to 1996. It was a means of getting new readers caught up with what was going on in Uncanny X-Men while the series was helmed by its longtime writer, Chris Claremont. However, it wasn’t entirely a reprint series, and this is where it got interesting. The series first 44 issues included additional material. This allowed Claremont to go back and tighte up some of his earlier X-Men tales as well as add back-up stories that expanded on the lore of each issue. This provided extra characterization and insight into the interpersonal dynamics and relationships between the various X-Men and their supporting cast. Certain things that weren’t properly fleshed out, or had to take a back seat for the core stories as they were originally told. The majority of these expansions were written by Claremont himself, and I think that’s what makes Classic X-Men really stand out. It wasn’t some other writer going in and adding stuff later. It was the guy who originally wrote the reprinted stories and knew the each story intimately. He knew what these characters motivations were in each story and how to build off his own work.
Avengers Classic was an attempt to do the same thing but I don’t think it really stuck the landing. The reason is because they decided to do reprints of the original Avengers series starting from issue #1 and then tack on a back-up story set in that era. The problem with that is that most of this work was done by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Don Heck. This is where you hit some problems since none of the original creators came back to expand on their work. Some of that was obvious given that Kirby died in 1994 and Heck died the following year. Stan Lee was still around, but his work for Marvel was greatly diminished at this point. In 2007, when this series started, Stan was in his 80s. The only work he was doing at Marvel (other than being the Editor Emeritus), the most he did was cameo appearances in Marvel movies and occasionally penning short 8 page bits. Most of these were basically fluff or were self-insertion metajoke stories. Case in point, his story in Avengers Classic #1, “The Real Origin of the Avengers” was about him breaking the fourth wall and interacting with the Avengers.
To be brutally honest, these stories weren’t very good. As much as Stan was revered for his story telling back in the 1960s, his stories beyond Marvel beyond that period are a case of diminishing returns. The last stories he ever wrote for the company were mostly phoned in and done as a novelty because he was one of the architects of the fiction. Fame and money created a real disconnect between him and the Stan Lee of the 60s who really put some effort into his work. I think that it also really showed that Stan wasn’t hot shit without the collaborative efforts of the artists he worked with back in Marvel’s hay day.
That’s not to say that there weren’t very talented people on this book. You had writers like Dwayne McDuffy, Macon Blair, Tom Beland, Bob Burden, Brian Patchett, and artists like Michael Avon Oeming, Jorge Lucas, Nick Dragotta, Juan Doe, Kano and Sergio Aragonés on the book. These are all very good creators.
That problem was that they weren’t the original writers. That’s where Classic X-Men was a hit and this series wasn’t so much so.
The problem was that these early Avengers tales are so much simpler and from a much different time. Classic X-Men was only dealing with stories that were about 10 years old so to write back-up stories that fit with the style of the reprints was fairly easy. Avengers Classic had a lot of heavy lifting to do. While it did find matching the visual esthetics and recontextualizing with modern sensibilities, the stories by themselves did not have much to say. These were all stand alone stories that did not really expand on much, didn’t provide any new insights, and didn’t give us a whole lot that was interesting to read. There were no stakes.
From a sales stand-point, the series didn’t make much sense to me either. Why am I going to buy a reprint series for the full cover price of $3.99 USD (at the time) for reprints each month when I could have went out and bought the Marvel Masterworks printing of these stories for around the same price all told? I think that’s why this story only really lasted for 12 issues. While the concept was good and had success in the past, the readership had changed and access to reprints of back issues was much easier than it was in the 1980s. Also, when Classic X-Men first hit the shelves they didn’t start with the original run from the 60s, they started with the All-New All-Different X-Men popularized by Claremont. Yes, Stan and Jack’s work on Avengers iconic, but do they translate well to a book of this type? I don’t think so. I think this book could have been much more successful had they instead focused on a more popular run of the Avengers, ones where the original creative teams behind those runs were still capable of writing/drawing tales that expanded their original stories.
This is a title that has been written by greats like Jim Shooter, David Michelinie, John Byrne, Walt Simonson, Roger Stern, Bob Harras, Kurt Busiek, and Brian Michael Bendis. It could have easily been a series that reprinted essential Avengers tales and brought back some of the original creative teams on those books. I think that would have gotten more eyes on the book if you brought back some of these writers.
That is not to say that stories set in the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby era aren’t impossible to do. There are some great Avengers tales that harken back to this era such as Joe Casey’s runs of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, Iron Man: Enter the Mandarin, Mark Waid’s Captain America: Man Out of Time, Alan Davis’ Savage Hulk, and more recently Paul Levitz’s Avengers: War Across Time. These are all great examples of revisiting earlier eras of Avengers history and actually adding something to the lore. Be it retelling a story from a different perspective, or expanding on what was already there. It’s doable. This just didn’t hit the mark. Oh well, maybe someone else will do better in 2030 when they probably end up doing Squirrel Girl Classic or some such thing.
