Avengers Re-Read: The 2000s — Part 3

The Avengers Re-Read continues its progress through the 2000s. Check out past installments in the Re-Read Archive.

Breakout (New Avengers #1–6)

The team of Brian Michael Bendis and David Fitch relaunched the Avengers franchise in a way that would quickly make it one of the world’s best-selling comics. A mysterious figure hired Electro to engineer a breakout at The Raft, an island prison for super-powered criminals in New York Harbor. The breakout attracted several heroes to fight off the escaping villains: Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Luke Cage, Spider-Woman, Daredevil (in his civilian identity) and the long lost hero Sentry (a voluntary prisoner on the Raft). In the aftermath, Cap and Iron Man formed a new Avengers team with Cage and the Spiders as the core. They pursued a lead to the Savage Land and came into conflict with the local mutates, who had engineered the breakout to free Karl Lykos, the unstable mutant known as Sauron. Lykos claimed that mutants were being captured and secretly incarcerated, forced to undertake dangerous missions for S.H.I.E.L.D. Wolverine crossed paths with the new Avengers and eventually joined them as the team stumbled onto a rogue S.H.I.E.L.D. faction conducting an illegal mining operation to support a clandestine weapons program. Spider-Woman concealed some shadowy dual allegiances as the New Avengers found themselves facing a murky conspiracy involving the top echelons of international law enforcement.

The new direction was certainly a departure for long-time Avengers fans. The attention-grabbing addition of Marvel’s two biggest characters (Spider-Man and Wolverine) worked out far better than expected and Bendis helped develop b-list characters like Cage and Spider-Woman into compelling star attractions. Cap and Iron Man provided continuity from the past incarnations of the team. If Bendis’s dialogue-stuffed approach could sometimes be a distraction, he generally did a strong job with characterization. The coarser dialogue and humor and amped up sexuality were other elements to which old school fans had to adjust. This storytelling approach didn’t always seem to be a change for the better. Finch (with inker Danny Miki and colorist Frank D’Armata) provided moody, shadow-drenched art that fit the grittier, conspiracy-cloaked plot that Bendis was building. While a certain contingent of fans was never going to be happy with this new direction, Breakout proved to be a strong opening arc that completely revitalized the franchise and helped make the Avengers team the prize commodity in Marvel’s multimedia stable.

Sentry (New Avengers #7–10)

The New Avengers team continued to pursue Raft escapees, including a memorable showdown in the suburbs with the Wrecker. Fans became aware of the Illuminati for the first time, a secret group including Iron Man, Mister Fantastic, Doctor Strange, Professor X, Black Bolt and Sub-Mariner, that helped guide events in the Marvel Universe without their colleagues’ knowledge. They wrestled with the conundrum of the Sentry, a powerful hero none of them could remember. Eventually, the Fantastic Four, X-Men and Inhumans joined the Avengers to help unravel part of the answer. The paranoid Sentry feared that using his powers would incur the wrath of a vengeful foe he called The Void and even believed he’d killed his wife, Lindy (who turned up alive and well). The gathered heroes dealt with the deadly effects of Sentry’s paranoid break, while a band of characters determined that the mutant Mastermind had been hired by one of Sentry’s enemies to force the entire world to forget he existed. Emma Frost helped Sentry begin to heal, but the road wasn’t smooth.

Bendis continued to do some nice character work in this second arc. The bonding of the new team produced some entertaining passages. His ideas underlying the Sentry’s plight were interesting, far more so than the actual hero, who always seemed like something of a momentum drag. Meanwhile, the introduction of the Illuminati may have been the single best idea of Bendis’s entire run. Steve McNiven stepped in for this arc, turning in his usual clean, dynamic work. His approximation of an old school Marvel style on the “forgotten flashbacks” to Sentry’s erased past were especially inspired. New Avengers continued to chart a fascinating course that was worth following.

Secrets & Lies (New Avengers #11–15 and Giant-Size Spider-Woman #1)

Spider-Woman took the spotlight in this stretch that may be Bendis’s high point in the early going of New Avengers. The mysterious ninja hero Ronin cut a swath through the Japanese criminal world at Captain America’s behest. The Avengers found themselves in Japan, caught between Hydra (and its unstable faction leader The Viper) and the Yakuza, both sides wanting to use Silver Samurai to seize power. The fearsome assassins of The Hand joined the fray on Hydra’s side, attacking the Avengers. Ronin was eventually revealed as deaf adventurer Echo, who agreed to stay in Japan as the Avengers’ spy in the criminal underworld. Meanwhile, Spider-Woman’s link to Hydra began to emerge. After Cap confronted her, Spider-Woman revealed she’d been approached by Hydra with an offer to restore her powers if she became a double agent within S.H.I.E.L.D. Nick Fury convinced Spider-Woman to accept the offer and infiltrate Hydra for S.H.I.E.L.D., but Fury’s disappearance had left Spider-Woman with no one to vouch for her. By the end, her loyalties were still unclear, though the team accepted her story. Carol Danvers, then recently returned to her Ms. Marvel identity, visited to cheer on the new team as they were introduced to the world, except for Wolverine, who declined to be put into the spotlight. An attempt to deal with J. Jonah Jameson backfired on the team, setting them up for negative public scrutiny.

Bendis did some truly good work in these issues. The Japan-set story was well done and the revelation of Spider-Woman’s Hydra ties made perfect sense. Bendis found a way to provide some answers without sapping the plot of suspense. Ronin/Echo proved to be an interesting new addition, but in what would prove to be an ongoing issue, a variety of artists would have difficulty remembering that the deaf woman needed to look someone directly in the face in order to hold a conversation. The detour with Jonah was a nice nod to Spider-Man’s checkered past and having Carol on hand to support her friends was a welcome guest spot. Finch handled the art on the Japan-set issues and came across with the right tone and feel for the story in what would turn out to be his swan song on the book. The series brought in another high profile art star in Frank Cho to handle the Spider-Woman and public revelation issues and he did his usual strong work (even if editorial fell down on visual continuity from Finch’s last pages to Cho’s first). In all, this was the strongest arc in the early days of New Avengers and is worth checking out.

The Collective (New Avengers #16–20)

A big nimbus of space energy descended on a small Alaskan town, engulfing one man who emerged from the wreckage, glowing and powerful. He began a slow trek eastward, at one point wiping out the Alpha Flight team. S.H.I.E.L.D. reluctantly tagged in the New Avengers, who’d been engaged in some “community policing” activity in Detroit. Ms. Marvel and the Young Avengers version of the Vision pitched in to fight the menace. S.H.I.E.L.D. did some nasty things to Spider-Man and Vision when they were dispatched to help figure out the nature of the energy field. In a follow-up to the climax of House of M, the cloud was the displaced energy of all the depowered mutants. As part of the fallout of the battle, Magneto regained his full powers.

The Collective was a fairly solid story. Bendis ramped up the tension between the New Avengers and S.H.I.E.L.D., making both sides look not exactly sterling. The summary dispatch of Alpha Flight caused a lot of anger among fans of the Canadian heroes, but the prominent role of Ms. Marvel was welcome. After a single, strong issue from Steve McNiven, Mike Deodato illustrated the rest of the arc, using a scratchier, shadowy style that matched the moody tone of the story. In some ways, this stretch felt like a holding pattern, setting up tensions for the upcoming Civil War story, but New Avengers fans (especially those who love Ms. Marvel) will certainly want this collection.

Civil War (New Avengers #21–25)

Some major cracks in New Avengers formed here and it would be a long time before the franchise overcame them. At least from a structural standpoint, these issues had an advantage to future event cross-overs. As a series of character-focused vignettes set during Civil War, these tales could be read without mandatory reference to the main series. That almost seems like damning the stories with faint praise.

This stretch of New Avengers suffered from the same glaring flaw as Civil War, but did a far less elegant job of managing it. Marvel wanted the buzz of basing a major cross-over on events with real world resonance, but then almost comprehensively refused to deal with the issues raised in a fair or realistic way. At least in Civil War itself, Mark Millar made a half-hearted effort to present the logic of the pro-registration side. But in New Avengers, Brian Michael Bendis didn’t even bother, blatantly casting the pro-registration faction as villains, while the rebellious heroes who refused to register were outlaw saints. Even that set-up might have worked, except Bendis’s insufferable approach to dialogue and characterization included frequent accusations of “selling out,” corporate condemnations and outright insults to the concept of the legal process and a country’s right to insist on respect for its laws. Because apparently he wrote the series in an alternate dimension where New Avengers was about a flower power collective whose anti-establishment rambles were published by a scrappy, indie co-operative and not a superhero series published by the largest comic book company in the world. Cage’s self-righteousness was especially grating, while the “Everything is Tony’s Fault” ethos wore out its welcome on arrival.

The problem is that, once the story dispatched the protective cover of “comic book logic” and installed a real world paradigm, the anti-registration side had no leg upon which to stand. In the real world, there is no conceivable way that governments around the world wouldn’t have passed laws regulating super-powered vigilantes who held themselves above police and military authorities long before. It would have happened in the ‘40s, shortly after those heroes first emerged. The entire Civil War story wouldn’t have happened, because by 2007, registration (or something like it) would have been settled law for more than six decades. The story aspired to be a thinly-veiled swipe at the post-9/11 security regime of the Bush administration, but its inability to reconcile its aims with the real world realities with which the story trafficked hobbled it in a way that was unsalvageable. The closest real world correlates to “law enforcement freelancers” that superheroes represent don’t get carte blanche. Private investigators are regulated by state law and are licensed only after significant training. Private security firms and bounty hunters are obliged to carry hefty liability insurance and to have up-to-date firearms permits. The “wild west” approach to superhero freedom is something that could ONLY exist in comic books.

That said, a few beats did work. The Spider-Woman issue was probably the most successful, since it used the fallout of the Civil War completely upending the heroine’s complicated espionage game as compelling plot fodder. The Cage issue had a couple of nice moments between Luke and his wife Jessica Jones, wringing some realistic domestic drama from the overblown umbrella story. And the Iron Man issue played with the dynamic between Tony Stark and S.H.I.E.L.D. commander Maria Hill in some entertaining ways.

While the writing mostly failed the series (and would be hobbled by what was set up here during the Initiative-set arcs that followed), fans could at least enjoy some strong work from an impressive roster of A-list artists: Howard Chaykin, Leinil Francis Yu, Olivier Coipel, Pasqual Ferry and Jim Cheung. They all turned in some strong stuff that was the true saving grace of this stretch of stories. Nothing here is really vital, but completists of either New Avengers or Civil War will be interested in this collection.

Revolution (New Avengers #26–31)

In the wake of Civil War, Captain America was apparently dead, while Iron Man and Sentry decamped for a sanctioned Avengers team. The other New Avengers were joined by Doctor Strange, Iron Fist and a new Ronin, who would turn out to be old friend Hawkeye, back from the dead. That fact was confirmed at the outset. Hawk had returned to the land of the living after House of M, but elected to share that news only with Doctor Strange. Instead, he tracked down an apparently amnesiac and depowered Scarlet Witch, living in the shadows of Wundagore Mountain. In a controversial move, the duo had sex before Hawkeye returned to the States and reconnected with his old friends. The plot picked up Echo’s story and her use of the Ronin identity to cut a swath through the Japanese underworld. When she ran afoul of Elektra and The Hand, she sent an S.O.S. to the New Avengers, who responded after dodging several attempts by Iron Man’s Mighty Avengers to bring them in for non-compliance with the Registration Act. After a bloody battle, Echo killed Elektra. Except that in death, her corpse turned into that of an alien Skrull, leaving the Avengers at a loss.

The “rebel” Avengers concept took root in this arc. It was a big departure from the roots of the classic team and not always a good fit. Bendis continued to trowel on the “sell out” rhetoric and accrued hate for Tony Stark at a rate that made none of the supposed “rebel heroes” look remotely good. That disparity in the “morality” level assigned by Bendis to the two factions sapped what could have been potent drama from the set-up, so clearly were the writer’s sympathies telegraphed. The Japan-set sequences were far more engaging. It was a relief for the series to finally pick up Echo’s story after so long a lay-off, the fight with The Hand was well designed and the revelation that a Skrull had replaced Elektra hit with real impact. However, the unnecessarily complex time structure, switching back and forth from the Japan scenes to the New Avengers’ earlier clashes with the Mighty Avengers, was tricksy and distracting. It was nice to have Hawkeye back, even if he was calling himself Ronin and had apparently abandoned most of his hard-won maturity from the prior couple of decades. Leinil Francis Yu came aboard as the regular artist and his gritty, shadowy style was an apt mood match for Bendis’s darker story. Yu generally had a strong sense for storytelling and page design that served the story, even if his physical depictions, especially faces, could be somewhat distended and at times even grotesque. This was a transitional arc in many ways, but still had enough interesting moments to be worth a read.

The Ultron Initiative (Mighty Avengers #1–6)

The Avengers franchised for the first time in years with the launch of this second ongoing series. Looking back from a few years later, the limit of only two ongoings almost seems quaint. Iron Man established a new team with Ms. Marvel as field leader and a membership comprising Wonder Man, Wasp, Black Widow, Sentry and, in a surprise choice, Ares (yes, that Ares; god of war, etc.).

The newly minted team struggled to gel as the Mole Man attacked the surface world with a horde of monsters and various natural disasters assailed the planet. Ultron, the Avengers’ robotic foe, invaded Iron Man’s armor and created a human/metal hybrid form from Tony’s electronics and body. Who was also a woman. Wasp fairly quickly realized who they were facing and the team struggled with Ultron’s various attacks while Hank Pym was brought in to devise a way to overcome his creation. In an alarming turn of events, Sentry was shown to be powerful enough to resurrect his wife after Ultron had murdered her. In the end, Ultron was defeated and Tony’s body was restored.

Brian Michael Bendis assembled a more classic “Avengers” team for this book, which many fans appreciated. The panoramic action of the first arc was a nice fit in that classic ethos. Bendis utilized thought balloons to play the contrast of the characters’ inner monologues against their verbalizations, with mixed results. Sometimes it produced entertaining interactions, while at other times it came off as juvenile and puerile. Characterizations were mixed. Tony Stark was still in “Blame Tony” mode, Wasp came off as a bubble-headed, oversexed sorority girl and Bendis found plenty of new scorn and disrespect to heap onto Hank Pym (who saved the day anyway). Black Widow, meanwhile, almost seemed like she was on the Autism scale. But Bendis handled Ms. Marvel really well and she made for a compelling focal point of the series. Ares was an inspired addition to the mix and Wonder Man (complete with his classic leisure suit) was a dependable anchor character. Frank Cho illustrated this first arc and was a great fit for the classic, widescreen adventure ethos of the series. Overall, this was the entertaining, well-produced book that long-time fans had wanted desperately. It’s worth checking out.

The Trust (New Avengers #32–37 and Annual #2)

The New Avengers disagreed on what to do with the body of the Elektra Skrull. The possibility of a Skrull infiltration caused some serious trust issues among the team. After an ill-timed plane crash in the Mid-West, Spider-Woman absconded with the Skrull corpse and took it to Iron Man. The others retreated to Doctor Strange’s New York Sanctum, unsure if they could trust one another. Wolverine stumbled onto a new scheme led by The Hood, who had acquired great power via a deal with an unnamed demon. The Hood organized a small army of other villains to work as part of a loosely affiliated organization. The New Avengers worked on their trust issues and then got drawn into the “Venom Bomb” story unfolding in Mighty Avengers. The Hood led an ugly, gratuitous attack on the Avenger Tigra, which the villains taped and put on the internet. It was particularly horrifying for readers after the disrespectful way Bendis had presented Tigra a couple months earlier in a Mighty Avengers story. The New Avengers clashed with The Hood’s crew, who later tracked them to Doctor Strange’s Sanctum for a bloody fight. At least Tigra showed up for that and was shown getting in some decent licks. Doctor Strange went to extreme lengths to defeat the villains, but ordered the Avengers out of his Sanctum, feeling he’d failed in his duties as Sorcerer Supreme. In the end, a fearful Jessica Jones turned up at Avengers Tower with her baby, willing to register with the Initiative to protect her child.

There was still plenty of the “sell out” accusations going on in this arc, but they often took a back seat to the developing mystery of the Skrulls and the threat of The Hood’s new villain army. As those plot threads were far more interesting than Luke Cage’s latest tirade about the Registration Act, it made for a much more compelling stretch of issues. The distrust sown among the heroes by the potential alien infiltration was well-handled and was the catalyst for some compelling drama. The battles with The Hood and his crew also demonstrated that Bendis could handle action sequences quite nicely. Yu remained on board as the regular artist and his work sharpened up, making it some of his best on the book. Carlo Pagulayan stepped in to handle the art for the Annual and did a very strong job, especially with the character-packed fight sequences. Overall, this was a strong run-up to Secret Invasion, which would displace the regular story for much of the following several months. This is a definite “must read” for fans of the series and provided some important set-up for Secret Invasion.

Venom Bomb (Mighty Avengers #7–11)

Spider-Woman “came in from the cold,” bringing the corpse of the Elektra Skrull to Iron Man and joining the Mighty Avengers (though she refused to give up her New Avengers teammates). As Tony Stark began suspecting those around him, a rogue satellite pelted New York City with “Venom bombs,” alien symbiotes that took over many innocents and several heroes. The New Avengers also joined the battle with the Mighty Avengers, which got fairly nasty before Iron Man devised a way to free everyone from the symbiotes. The Mighty Avengers traced the attack back to Doctor Doom and invaded his country Latveria. A fearsome, time-traveling clash ensued, with Doom coming out the ultimate loser.

The symbiote attack and the clash with Doom were all handled pretty well, as was the growing atmosphere of dread caused by the potential Skrull invasion. Unfortunately, this story featured possibly the worst moment of this era of Avengers stories, when Hawkeye (using the Ronin identity) ridiculously blamed Iron Man for the death of Captain America. It was horrifically warped story logic and not remotely in character for Hawkeye. Meanwhile, the oversexed horniness and crude humor and dialogue were reminders that this wasn’t quite a classic Avengers saga. Mark Bagley came aboard to handle most of the art duties and did his usual clean, classic work. He especially excelled in scenes set during the Marvel Silver Age, going so far as to design the pages to mimic a book of that era (complete with breathless declarations of what awaited readers ahead in the bottom margins). It was clever and greatly enhanced the story. Marko Djurdjevic contributed a few pages, illustrating Doom’s trips to a past century to interact with Morgan LeFay; the dark, impressionistic sequences were an effectively moody counterpoint to Bagley’s bold, bright work. Overall, this was still a story worth reading for Avengers fans and was an effective lead-in to Secret Invasion, which would supplant the main story for several months to follow.