Solo Avengers/Avengers Spotlight Primer
Solo Avengers (later Avengers Spotlight) started as a call back to the early days of Marvel. In the inaugural issue, editor Mark Gruenwald liked the series to books like Journey into Mystery, Tales of Suspense, Strange Tales, and Tales to Astonish. During the silver age, they quickly became shared books that featured two title characters (and most of those were Avengers characters for the most part) Although Marvel had done anthology titles after that (Amazing Adventures, Astonishing Tales and so on) none of them intentionally captured the flare of those earlier books.
I think probably there was another reason that they decided to do this series for practical reason: The Avengers weren’t Marvel’s most popular characters (crazy to think that now) and so committing to a series focused on individual Avengers on their own just wasn’t going to cut it. Throughout the 1980s, Marvel put out a number of Avengers-adjacent limited series, Hawkeye, West Coast Avengers, the Falcon, Balder the Brave, X-Men vs the Avengers, and Black Panther all had limited series. With the exception of West Coast Avengers, none of these other books appeared to be big enough hits to justify ongoing series. There was interest in solo Avenger stories, but not that much interest. The one character who seemed to have the most pull (ha ha) was Hawkeye.
As such, Hawkeye was the character they used as the face of the book. He was what they were relying on to bring in the readers and hopefully they’ll stick around for the back-ups. These tales were mostly used to expand upon existing plot threads that fall on the wayside on a team book, or revisit an old character that hadn’t been seen for a while, or perhaps give a character an opportunity to do something solo for once. This format proved amazingly resilient, being the standard format until very late in the run. After issue #20 the title was renamed to Avengers Spotlight, which to me was a better title for the book. Still, the run didn’t last overly long. Starting in issue #35 the two story split format was replaced in favor of single stories. However, this didn’t save the title, after a four part “Avengers Reborn” (which featured the return of characters that had fallen on the wayside at the time) the series came to an end with issue #40.
Even though the 1990s saw an explosion of new books being put out each month (even to the determent of Marvel itself), I guess the Avengers couldn’t become popular enough to support even an on going anthology title. Which isn’t to say that these types of books weren’t popular. Started around the same time, Marvel Comics Presents outlived Solo Avengers, but that probably had more to do with that title always featuring at least a story by the X-Men’s Wolverine and (later) fan popular Ghost Rider as the faces of the book. The Avengers kind of went back to the way it was before, with a smattering of limited series. None of the characters weren’t quite ready to spread their wings and fly on their own just yet, that wouldn’t happen for another 20 years, give or take.
Still, it was an interesting book and there were a number of interesting stories to be found in their pages. Other than building on Hawkeye’s origins and later focusing on his then-troubled marriage to Mockingbird, the rest of the stories were low stake affairs. They were usually one-off tales that were just the right length to be enjoyable but not so heavy that you needed an encyclopedic knowledge of the character to follow what’s going on.
Some of the more memorable stories include…
The first four issues had Tom DeFalco (and a rotating cast of artists) flesh out Hawkeye’s origins, introducing yet another person who taught him archery, Trickshot. In past stories, Hawkeye was said to have been taught by the Swordsman. However, DeFalco was like “why would a swordsman teach someone archery?” As though someone couldn’t have multiple skills. Trickshot was a dumb character. He doesn’t really add much to Hawkeye’s origins except add an unnecessary character, but he stuck.
Issues #16, 18, and 20 featured a three part story that saw the resurrection of love-her-or-hate-her Avenger Moondragon getting resurrected after she was killed off in the Defenders. It also introduced Sundragon, Moondragon’s cousin, although they never really did much with her afterwards.
Issues #14-16, on the surface, looked to be a generic Hawkeye and Black Widow team up and fight AIM story, but it was also a backdoor to picking up a thread that was dropped in West Coast Avengers involving Hank Pym and his first wife Maria Trovaya. During Steve Englehart’s run on the book he did a story where Hank’s first wife was supposedly alive and turned into a MODOK-esque character and Hank quitting the team to help cure her. When John Byrne took over the book he immediately ignore this to bring Hank back onto the team and try and rekindle the romance with him and his second wife, Janet Van Dyne, aka the Wasp. Issue #16 ultimately tried to put the Maria Trovaya issue to bed, by claiming that she might be an impostor who stole Maria’s identity. Something that has never been fully confirmed and even refuted in later stories in the following decade, but I digress.
Issue #22 through 25 featured a story where all of Hawkeye’s old foes team up to try and collect a bounty put out on him. This is interesting insomuch that the bounty didn’t ask for Hawkeye’s death, but rather the severing of his right arm so he couldn’t use a bow anymore. While an interesting idea, only having one arm doesn’t necessarily make you unable to use a bow, heck Green Arrow in the Dark Knight Returns was able to hold his own pretty good, but I digress.
Some of the one-off stories are also pretty interesting. Issue #15 has as story where the Wasp goes it alone against the Red Ronin, a giant robot from Marvel’s licensed Godzilla series, while issue #22 provides a proper origin story for the Swordsman, and issue #24 has a story in which Firebird learns that her powers weren’t divine, but the result of careless aliens. The latter story made an overly preachy character at least somewhat bearable.
At any rate, Solo Avengers/Avengers Spotlight is a fun book and a light read. I highly recommend you check it out. What’s a shame about this title though is the haphazard nature in which Marvel has chosen to reprint it. Unfortunately, a digital edition of the full run is not yet available as of this writing (March, 2022) and only a smattering of stories having been released. The other, more annoying part of this is that Marvel haphazard reprinting is usually because they are doing Epic Collections of individual Avengers, such as tradepaperbacks that focus on Hawkeye or the Black Widow. The end result is that only those stories have been reprinted and the secondary feature of the book being left out.
However, this has always been an overall problem for digital reprints as a whole that negatively impacts anthology books like this. If you go onto Marvel Unlimited or buy individual issues digitally, these anthology books are often incomplete. Marvel has gotten a little better about this in more recent years, but there are still issues in their back catalogue that have huge chunks of a particular issue missing and Solo Avengers/Avengers Spotlight is one of those effected books. Also since this is not a overly popular series we will have to probably wait a long time for this to be fixed or for an entire series run to be digitized. So buyer beware if you’re trying to get digital editions of this series. Really, I’d strongly recommend hunting these ones down in the back issue section of your local comic book shop since these stories aren’t overly popular and you can probably pick them up for a steal.
