The Failure of Heroes Reborn

AVENGERS as a title has gone through some embarrassing plot lines, some devastating changes in talent, and some rotten stories. But until September of last year it had never gone through cancellation. As bad as a few of AVENGERS' 402 issues may have been, there were many incredible ones, classic stories created by the people who shaped the Marvel Universe and comics as we know them. AVENGERS at one time has been home to such luminary scribes as Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Steve Englehart, Jim Shooter, David Micheline and Roger Stern. AVENGERS has sported art by giants like Jack Kirby, Don Heck, John Buscema, Neal Adams, Tom Palmer, George Perez and John Byrne. AVENGERS has been the very core of the Marvel Universe for decades by virtue of its huge cast of characters, its complex history reaching into every corner of Marvel's firmament, and its stable of creators who have woven the Marvel tapestry. In 402 issues, AVENGERS explored time and dimensions, confronted warring intergalactic empires, pondered the nature of sentient life, and even sampled the menace of bureaucratic red tape.

In its earliest stories, Marvel redefined the character of a comic-book hero. They took beings that were flawless and larger than life and humanized them, gave them Achilles' heels. During the sixties and seventies Marvel became very successful at getting readers to care as much about the social, sexual and psychological traumas of its characters as they did about the fights, the feats and the fury. These new kinds of heroes may have had fancy costumes and wonderful powers, but underneath it all they were still regular people like you and me. These changes to the super-hero landscape occurred in all of Marvel's titles, but it was AVENGERS that led the way. The large cast of characters gave writers the opportunity to delve into the personalities and character interactions between the heroes. Writers were able to evoke moments of sadness and elation that had nothing to do with the "villain of the month."

However, in recent years AVENGERS has become less marketable than it once was. A trend began to make heroes larger again. They began to sport mammoth muscles and gigantic guns displayed in huge one- or even two-page panels. These heroes are flashy, bulky and ready to rumble. Unfortunately, ass the panels and the characters became bigger, the stories and the dialogue became smaller. There seemed to be little time to waste on affairs of the heart with so much butt-kicking to do. Up against this hulking bunch of armed bruisers, I suppose the Avengers had begun to look a bit old-fashioned.

So Marvel decided to do what anyone would do. They decided to go with the flow. In August of 1996, they did the unprecedented and canceled four of their most respected and senior titles and then leased them to the major creators of another company to revitalize, i.e., the studios of Rob Liefield (YOUNGBLOOD) and Jim Lee (W.I.L.D.C.A.T.S.). The contract would run for one year (12 issues) with a possibility of extending it further. One of these titles was AVENGERS.

The idea was certainly an intriguing one. To my knowledge it had never happened before. It would be the equivalent of DC Comics giving Superman to Marvel Comics in the 1970s and asking them to make him more relevant or angst-ridden. (This did not happen and eventually DC was able to nudge Superman back to the top of the heap without any help from anyone.) Marvel was giving its oldest licenses to the upstart Image Comics, a company they helped to create with their rigid and often unfair policies concerning creators. It was ironic and poetic perhaps, but was it the right move? Could a new IMAGE make the Avengers cool?

The new creative team (Rob Liefeld and his Extreme Studios crew) first redesigned the look of the Avengers. They became bulkier, more heavily armored, or in the case of the women--sexier. Bodies were portrayed all out of proportion so there would be extra room for muscles, teeth were set in a perpetual grimace, and exclamatory lines were drawn all over the faces and bodies to give extra energy to the figures. They were promptly placed in large angled panels (or--panels be damned--they received full-sized splash pages). Next, they were put into the new story format: light dialogue, loose plotting, randomly shifting scenes, de-emphasized character development, cursory motivation, and very little actual storytelling.

Admittedly, these are stylistic changes, and while readers on different sides of the fence might bandy about arguments as to why they are or aren't good changes, the next step for "Heroes Reborn" is the one that really counts. The thirty-plus years' history of the Avengers' characters was wiped clean and replaced with a fresh new one.

Erasing decades of continuity in the hopes of making a fresh start is a mistake and a waste of a valuable resource. There are plenty of new companies out there TRYING to invent a past for their characters. Marvel has something unique in the comic book publishing industry: its thirty years of more or less unbroken continuity. DC has long ago relinquished its true history. Only Marvel actually has what all the new "universes" are desperately trying to create for themselves--a past. A past that should enhance the new stories as the new stories should enhance the old. Either should be enjoyable without the other; but taken together they should compliment one another and increase the enjoyment gained from either separately. That is why it is important to be delicate with continuity. Let's face it, no one is ever going to retell the early Marvel stories better than Stan and Jack and Steve did. It can't happen. No matter how much they add or take away or how many interesting changes are made they can't ever improve upon the original. Remember, if a creator tells a mediocre tale about something so fresh and new it needs to be spanked on the bottom, it is still a mediocre tale. If a good writer and a good artist do the 30th story about the Lava Men I've read this year and it's a good story, then it's a good story, period.

I could expand upon such specific plot points as why fights between Hulk and Thor should be draws, as opposed to Hulk beating Thor with one punch; why Thor shouldn't be "in love" with his hammer; what unmitigated gall it is to take the "A" off of Captain America's forehead in AVENGERS, when the very thing that the "A" has come to stand for in my opinion IS "Avengers"; the problems in Wanda being the Enchantress's daughter; and on and on. But those things are merely the symptoms, not the disease.

Heroes Reborn failed in part because the attention given to the stories, the characters and the artwork were terrible in many places, mediocre in most, and excellent in only too few spots. But even more than that, it failed because the classic Marvel heroes (for whom the Avengers are the heart) do not lend themselves to the artistic and literary style that was imposed upon them. The Avengers were meant to be inspiring and wondrous. They were not necessarily meant to be cool. The Avengers are characters created for a certain world filled with certain types of events. For much the same reason, you can't take the Batman out of Gotham and expect him logically to act like the Batman; he'd be labelled a lunatic. Some characters exist best in their natural habitat.

This is not meant as a slam against differing creative styles. Diversity is good. There is much to be gained from different artistic and literary styles in the comic marketplace. The Image style is great for Image comics. In fact, the Image way was born of necessity. But it isn't appropriate for The AVENGERS. For example, imagine the reaction if Roy Thomas and John Buscema were to revamp SPAWN or WILDCATS. The characters would be drawn like ballet dancers and speak like long-winded poets. Why should it be expected that the reverse would work any better?

It is no longer necessary to court the next generation of younger readers. Today, comics enjoy a wide audience of varying ages. Given a prodigious boost largely by the efforts of Marvel, the comics industry now stands at a point in which its fans no longer outgrow the medium. Readers now continue to enjoy comics into their twenties, thirties, forties and beyond. As more older people read comics, it will become more acceptable for older people to read them and thus a more mature audience will develop over time. An AVENGERS geared toward older fans might be just the title to meet the needs of this expanding readership.

The Avengers are classic Marvel heroes, and must be treated as such. They cannot be remade into Image style heroes--that does not work any better than trying to make Archie "relevant" or Dennis The Menace into a shredder. Some characters have intrinsic needs to remain viable. The Avengers need their history intact and their exalted place in the Marvel Universe.

Many fans are eager to put Heroes Reborn behind them, and they should be. However, it should also be noted that he who is ignorant of history is damned to repeat it. I think we should all keep this fiasco alive in the back of our minds to guard against it ever happening again.