I don’t really have much to say about this series. It’s pretty straight forward: What if the Avengers were all bad guys? And yes, we kind of got a glimpse of what that could be like with the Thunderbolts — at least to start — but a concerted effort to do a story like this hadn’t really happened in a big way at this point in Marvel’s publication history. I think the closest we got prior was the Age of Apocalypse and House of M, but those involved time travel and reality alteration shenanigans. I also argue that when it comes to the X-Men the delineation between who is a good guy and who is the bad guy gets kind of blurred unless you’re using a genocidal character (like Apocalypse, or a group like the Friends of Humanity, for example). Like Magneto, he’s a complex character and if his motivations are just really depends on how you’re looking at it. Particularly after the 1960s. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter and all that.

Dark Avengers fits this niche nicely, by having Norman Osborn (the Green Goblin of all people) in charge of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. His roster is mostly stocked with villains posing as established heroes, or characters amoral enough or crazy enough not to care. This is an entirely different beast all together.

The idea that Osborn could be given such a position of power in the Marvel Universe sounds ridiculous given his history. I would even go so far to say that all the times that Normy has managed to deflect the fact that he was the Goblin are, at best, flimsy, but this is comics. Sometime, suspending your disbelief has to do a lot of heavy lifting.

I think the underlying social commentary here is what’s more important. Much like War Machine volume 2, I think this story is the product of American sentiment toward the government nearly a decade after 9/11 and the War on Terror. The chorus of people speaking out against the Bush administration and their handling of the war. Corruption was the theme of the day.

I can’t speak about what BMB’s political leanings are, but a lot of his early works with Marvel were rife with anti-establishment themes. Where the government could not be absolutely trusted to do what’s best for society. While other Marvel books by other writers kind of leaned into the patriot fervor Post-9/11, Bendis’ books leaned into the more conspiratorial aspects of governance and power. But I should clarify that this wasn’t some Proto-QAnon, tinfoil hat, wearing, refutation of facts type bullshit that has captured the mainstream today. But one that looked at what was going on and saying, something isn’t right here. The politicians at this time were unabashed in their crooked nature as they had yet to master the verbal obfuscation that has become modern political discourse of today.

I’m going to sound like a bit of a broken record as I’ve said it many times about other titles in this era, but I feel like that this book did not get a whole lot of time to breathe. It only ran for 16 issues and was done after Siege. Bendis does the best he can given the constraints and the artwork is consistently great with the lion share of issues being drawn by Mike Deodado. The series is bogged down by event crossover after event crossover. The establishing storyarc being part of Dark Regin and it follows right into the Utopia crossover with the X-Men family of books. The Utopia issues being done by Matt Fraction, and actually didn’t really feature the Dark Avengers all that much, making their presence in this event somewhat pointless, but I digress. Then following a one issue crossover with Secret Warriors we get one stand-alone story arc involving the Molecule Man, an annual about the AWOL Marvel Boy and his transition to the Protector, before diving right into Siege. While we got a lot of mini-series and crossover issues that focused on individual characters during the Dark Reign phase, I feel that the Dark Avengers didn’t get enough time to play out as a team book.

Dark Avengers did prove one thing: That flipping the script and placing a villain in the role of the hero actually opens up an interesting avenue for storytelling. This was repeated with much more success in Superior Spider-Man. Also, the concept of the 2010s Axis event (where heroes and villains had their personalities flipped) also played around with these themes, the biggest one being Superior Iron Man. Taking from that same page, post Secret Wars 2015, we also saw Doctor Doom become a hero of sorts in Infamous Iron Man for a bit.

That said, after Siege and the downfall of Norman Osborn the book ended as it’s original premise was now a moot point. In the 2010s, Marvel would briefly change the Thunderbolts over to a new Dark Avengers series, but that proved to be short lived. I think that’s because people tended to like the Thunderbolts better and really, that was scratching the itch for a team of villains turned heroes. I don’t think you could do a Dark Avengers book in this style without feeling redundant next to a Thunderbolts book. I guess that the powers that be have decided that this title doesn’t really have some relevancy unless you’re going to play the same playbook each time. I think for there to be a lasting Dark Avengers series is if you recontextualized what the book is about. I think that the only challenge is that DC Comics already did their own similarly titled Justice League Dark, which didn’t feature villains, but characters that dabble in the world of the occult instead of your cookie-cutter spandex clad heroes. While Marvel and DC tend to crib off each other a lot (just look at DC’s Absolute imprint that came out just months after Marvel revived their Ultimates line in the 2020s), but I think doing a similar book would be too on the nose. Besides, Marvel seems more inclined to keep the Avengers name off their spooky occult characters and is mostly focusing on revitalizing Midnight Sons and other horror team book titles instead.

But hey, anything can happen in comics, and I’ll be interested to see how and why this title could be revived in the future!