Tonight - Friday 17th December, 20.58 UK
This may be the least coherent piece I've ever posted on this blog, but perhaps that's appropriate. Because I really am coming round to the opinion that it's often just as useful for a blogger to explain how they came to their conclusions, and how confused they've really been, as it is for them to state what their conclusions actually are. That's especially true this evening, I believe, because in the next few days I'm going to post a few words about the storytelling in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's "The Mighty Avengers" # 1, and if I don't explain the context in which I'm going to do so, I'm going to appear, I fear, to be considerably more vainglorious and dense than even my low opinion of myself would concede.
For the truth is that I've ended up working backwards to Mr Lee and Mr Kirby's run on The Avengers from 1963 and 1964 to help me make sense of the work of Brian Michael Bendis on the property in 2010. This isn't the strategy of the self-appointed and ill-qualified expert so much as that of a rather baffled but, if I may say so, determined blogger. For I've often been quite perplexed by Mr Bendis's work on "Earth Mightiest Heroes". At times, the appeal of his many and diverse approaches to the franchise hasn't registered with me at all, although recently I've begun to belatedly suspect that that's because of the daft way I've been approaching the modern-day Avengers titles he's responsible for. Yet, once I did realise how irrationally I'd been approaching Mr Bendis's work, I could at least begin to grasp how the reason for my feeling as I have is rooted, in a rather strange way, in the work of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby on The Avengers so many years ago.
If I may, and just to show something of how I've struggled to make sense of all of this, the following is a slightly-tidied up version of some notes I' wrote about a week ago. (My notes tend to be more formal than the published blogs. Oh, well.)
Thursday 9th December
1.
Stumble over one preconception and the chances are that a proper conspiracy of them will get disturbed. I've been reading over some scrawls I'd made during the Summer about the Avengers titles which tied in to the Siege crossover, and I've stumbled over a particularly unhelpful and unrevealing comment that I'd made about them. Mr Bendis's Avengers titles, I'd written, don't feel like any take on the Avengers that I was familiar and comfortable with.
And then I'd written, and even, save me, underlined; "These comics don't feel right."
It's the kind of sentence that reveals a great deal about a blogger, and little if any of it is favourable. For though it's certainly true that I've never felt particularly fond of Mr Bendis's various Avengers books, and given there have been moments when I've been intrigued and even impressed by what I've read there-in, to say that my problems and pleasures with his work lie in a "feeling" is as uninsightful as can be imagined.
I might as well have scribbled that I don't like his books because I don't like his books.
2.
To say that one set of comics don't "feel" right is to presume that another run on the same title does possess some magical quality of appropriateness. But trying to track down such an ideal type, such an ur-text of Avengerliness, is a remarkably difficult thing to do. If Mr Bendis's take on The Avengers seems at times to lack familiarity, other versions of the team from earlier in the 21st century seemed at times to be too much like the Avengers. For all of their often considerable and distinct virtues, they seem to be locked into a decades-old groove, delivering aspects of an all-too familiar formula over and over again.
But then, putting my finger on what this formula might be escapes me too. This comic doesn't feel enough like The Avengers, and these comics feel too much like them, and I clearly don't know what I'm talking about.
3.
In the end, the only run on The Avengers that feels utterly like The Avengers to me is the original 8-issue run by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby from 1963 to 1964. I sit and skim, for example, through my collection of the Steve Engelhart issues, my personal favourite of all the runs on the property, and I find myself thinking that it's very good, and that in places it's excellent, but it often seems to be all about second-string characters who were never before or after central to the business of the team. Whatever Avengerliness is, it seems that Mr Engelhart had missed a key proportion of it out by regularly having the biggest brusiers of the team sidelined in his scripts.
Or so it feels to me, although I really do love those issues. They're great Avengers stories, but they don't feel definitive.
And so it goes, a conspiracy indeed of ill-considered feelings that stamp their feet and declare themselves for facts when they're so obviously nothing of the kind.
It's a disconcerting business, to discover that once again you're not even in control of your own opinions, or, rather, that you don't have any opinions at all so much as prejudices. "I like" because "it seems to me to be right" combined with "it makes me feel good" is the least productive of evaluative statements there is. It can't be proven wrong, so it can't ever be challenged. It just sits there, a great fat toad of a useless point of view.
4.
I can't help but wonder what it could possibly be about that first Lee/Kirby take on The Avengers that causes me to feel that it's the definitive version. There's no other run of initial issues from that early period that I'd feel I could regard as definitive without some substantial qualifications. Even the Lee/Ditko Spider-Man from the early-to-mid Sixties took a good few comics to hit its stride, for all that that entire run is clearly wonderful.
It certainly wasn't that I was exposed first to the Stan and Jack Avengers during those early and vulnerable reading years, that I imprinted onto their take of Earth's Mightiest Heroes and can't accept later digressions and developments. The first Avengers comic that I can recall reading was a battered copy of the Roy Thomas and Sal Buscema era, an epic of Kang and the Uncanny Growing Man. I didn't even know about Lee and Kirby and 1963 and all of that for years and years.
Tonight - Friday 17th December, 20.58 UK
Since writing the above, I've been having the time of my comic-book blogging life reading and analysing and re-reading that first tale, "The Coming Of The Avengers". Seriously. I've had such fun. I've always wanted to find a really good excuse to get properly stuck into one of the Marvel classics of that period, but, to be honest, such books are for the experts. Certainly, that's how it feels, and although talking about a specific run feels like an assignment that can be excused and forgiven, paying close attention to a single classic tastes like hubris. But curiosity has a habit of outflanking trepidation, and I did want to gain a glimpse of why Mr Bendis hasn't been writing stories of the Avengers that I've been comfortable with, while the founders of Marvel were managing to do so fifty years ago.
Or rather, that's how it'll read if I jump right into to putting up the pages I've written about that first Avengers issue without making it plain what I was trying to do. In truth, I'm making no such negative judgement about Mr Bendis's work on the title at all. The further I dig into my own prejudices where The Avengers are concerned, the more I enjoyed the BMB stories. So, as daft as this might seem, I thought I ought to offer up here the rough of the conclusion I'll be making about this matter of "Avengerliness" and "feelings" in a few blogs time. In such a way, if it does seem that I'm lambasting Mr Bendis for imaginary sins, or Mr Lee and Mr Kirby for the same, I can point backwards to here and of how I've already said that these pieces will be all about my failings and not theirs. At the very worst, all I'm going to say is that the exceptionally broad purpose given to the Avengers as a team at the end of the first issue has been a slightly poisoned chalice ever since.
But just slightly. A very mildly, readily detoxified, chalice.
Tuesday 14th December
For all the many strengths of Avengers # 1, there's apparently a single and obvious flaw in the very premise of The Avengers, or at least there would be if the book was being pushed out into the marketplace today, when mission statements and market share demand precisely-framed and deliberately directed product. It's a problem which has been constantly referred to, intentionally and not, in the almost 50 years since "The Coming Of The Avengers", and, of course, everyone has long since recognised it for what it is. For Mr Lee and Mr Kirby never came close to satisfactorily explaining what it is that the Avengers had gathered themselves together to do. We know what the commercial function of the book was, and we know a great deal about the many and various reasons for the team to exist that have been grafted onto the concept ever since. But in Avengers # 1, the only explanation we're given for the Avengers existence is that they can beat up anyone else when they stand together as a group. It's as simple as that. Justice is never mentioned, and beyond that questionable name that the team chooses for itself, vengeance is never referred to either. The title of the book, indeed, as has been so often mentioned before, bears no relation to the stated premise of the team's existence. "We'll never be beaten" declares Thor at the story's end, and that's why they're together. "Avenging" in any accepted sense of the word rarely comes into it. They're a group of superheroes who want to help each other dominate whatever brawls they find themselves in.
And, in many ways, that's been both the book's great strength and its fatal weakness. For The Avengers can be quite literally anybody from Marvel's list of properties who the book's creators choose to involve in their ranks. Beyond winning fights, there's nothing in that first premise of the Avengers to limit who can be a star in the book. And every editor, writer and artist who's worked on the book since has had to establish and re-establish to a greater or lesser degree what all that business of fighting and winning might entail. Usually, such calculations have involved building on the improvisations and extrapolations of those who've worked on the book before, which has meant that The Avengers eventually become a comic which was often more and more about how previous creators had defined what being an Avenger was, and less and less about settling upon a clear and simple definition of purpose. Paradoxically, the very act of trying to achieve the latter would always involve explaining away any change in terms of the first. Tradition was throttling the book, because it needed to be acknowledged and evoked even when it was being broken with.
Because of the initial vagueness of the Avenger's premise, it has always been impossible for any book under that title to appear to be as definitive as the first few issues can appear to be. Even when a considerably different take on the book has been attempted, the underlying and always pertinent debate about purpose has meant that the new never did replace what went before so much as it merged with it into an ever broadening definition of Avengerliness. Because whatever new and innovative deeds there are that these Avengers new and old can be shown performing, they're still Marvel characters standing together so that they're not being beaten. As soon as the pleasure of seeing new characters and settings passes, The Avengers remains as true to original purpose as before. It can't be otherwise. In such a way, The Avengers have grown into an army of superheroes with a multiplicity of responsibilities, and eventually even Spider-Man, who Stan Lee regarded at first as quite inappropriate for the team's ranks, has become a key member of the book. Indeed, pretty much everyone's a member of The Avengers because the concept is so broad that anybody can be one, and change and spectacle demands that everyone meets and every one responds to each other. Is it possible that there's a superhero who couldn't be in The Avengers, or who never will be? The simple premise underlying the team has been repeatedly shown to be so elastic that anyone and everyone can join, and they do. That's where new stories are created and new ambiances developed, in the business of absorbing into the Avengers the previously unfamiliar that once wouldn't have seemed appropriate at all. Everything and everyone in the end becomes the business of The Avengers. Gorilla Man? D-Man? Red Hulk? No problem. Squirrel Girl?
Sorted.
Because of this, a creator such as Brian Michael Bendis, with an enabling editor such as Tom Brevoort, can take the Avengers franchise and completely reinvigorate it, can lift it from a single top-30 title to a string of bestselling comics, and yet still not always be regarded as having produced the definitive Avengers book by anyone who knows much of the title's long history. For the Avengers isn't so much a distinct property anymore, so much as it's the entire superheroic Marvel Universe, and as it's become more and more about that universe, it's become less and less distinctly about The Avengers. In the very realist of senses, of course, it was always potentially so, but the process has gathered more and more momentum as time has passed. "The Avengers" has simply proceeded as it began, as a tag-team of super-powered folks with no excluding entry qualifications at all beyond offering something of worth in a knock-down, and yet, as a consequence, the Avengers is a book which has swallowed the whole immersive world of Marvel superheroes and then kept going. Outer-Space Avengers. Intra-dimensional Avengers. Cosmic Concept Avengers. Supernatural Avengers. "The Avengers" are whoever fights with The Avengers, and as more and more characters have been created and been introduced to each other, so the Avenger's numbers and importance have swelled.
And that's meant that the Marvel Universe has also swallowed the Avengers, just as the Avengers have swallowed it. At least at the beginning, back in 1963, there were only a few superheroes to be found who could be joined together in the team. There was a distinctiveness about The Avengers and their adventures, yes, but not because of who they were and what they were shown doing so much as because of the fact that the MU then was largely empty of superheroes. Today's teams can never recapture the uniqueness and the excitement of that first line-up, no matter how well they're written and drawn. They can be brilliant books, but they can't be what they once seemed to be, a distinctly purposeful sub-section of the MU.
It's not a question of the modern books feeling or not feeling like "The Avengers". The various lead books of the franchise can't feel exactly like a particular and distinct product anymore in terms of their underlying premise, but they do of course have a powerful and enjoyable identity of their own. For what makes the modern-era Avengers books feel distinct, if not definitive, isn't their subject matter at all, but the style of their various creators. There are Bendis-Avengers and Slott-Avengers and Brubaker-Avengers, for example, but no Avengers.
The Fantastic Four are a family, the X-men are mutants. The Avengers are everyone who can lend a hand in the winning of the big punch-ups. It can seem at times like a confusing and even homogenising business, but it's also a concept that can generate a huge number of fascinating possibilities. Time travel, Killraven and Martian Tripods! Roxxon mines and Serpent Crowns and Nova on the fourth planet!
What if The Avengers were absolutely everyone fighting absolutely everyone else, and often one another too?
Tonight - Saturday 18th December, 02.10 UK
Of course the very first issue of The Mighty Avengers appears in so many ways to be the most definitive take on the team. Every other version of the property has its roots in "The Coming Of The Avengers", and none of them can do anything which isn't permitted in Mr Lee's original and so effectively brief mandate, unless it's to gather a team of superheroes together with the express purpose of losing fights. And yet that conceptual latitude and freedom can be something of a trap. A creator who largely follows in the traditions of the book's history will seem respectful and yet somehow constrained and over-familiar, while the more radical writer and artist may stay quite true to the original purpose of never being beaten while producing books which aren't distinctly true to the comic's accumulated tradition. And all the time, the distinctiveness of The Avengers has been worn further and further away by the very ubiquity of the team's presence in the Marvel Universe.
It's a battle that can't be won, a circle that can't be squared, because The Avengers can be pretty much anything, and yet, quite obviously, its creators have to settle for being something. Better, in those circumstances, I'd suggest, to be Brian Michael Bendis, and re-invent, and re-invent again, even if, on occasion, it doesn't feel quite the Avengers at all.
Fantastic Four Avengers. X-Men Avengers. Marvel Knights Avengers. Super-Villain Avengers. Undersea Avengers. Scientist Avengers. Dead Avengers. Horror Avengers.
What a stupid idea of mine, that anything could "feel" like the Avengers in the modern-day Marvel Universe, and that anything should. That's not the job of The Avengers these days, and it can't be. No wonder it all felt wrong. I was reading 2010 and thinking without realising that it were 1963.
How daft ....
Next time, storytelling and the Avengers. And until then, and indeed beyond if I shouldn't see you here afterwards, A splendid day is wished for all, as always. "Stick together!".
.
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