The first half of it was, yes.
Roster 1: Iron Man, Captain America (Sam), Vision, Thor (Jane), Ms. Marvel (Kamala), Spider-Man (Miles), and Nova (Sam).
Roster 2: Captain America/Falcon (Sam), Vision, Thor (Jane), Hercules, Spider-Man (Peter), Unstoppable Wasp.
Then there's Avengers No Surrender. Jane (who'd just been depowered) and Peter (who'd lost the team's HQ during Secret Empire) both left before that event and the remaining four team up with the Uncanny Avengers (who'd been taken over by Jim Zub during Secret Empire), and U.S.Avengers (Al Ewing's team).
Champions was launched out of Civil War II, and Waid's last Avengers arc before No Surrender was a crossover between the two teams, so if you're going to read Waid's Avengers you'll need to read that as well. Zub replaced Waid on Champions while No Surrender was still running.
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Even though things were considered dire back in those days, I still liked Waid's first shot at the Avengers from 1996. It's been said that if Waid were allocated more than three issues (#400; #401; #402), he might have fixed a number of problems and made something really special of his run:
Last edited by K7P5V; 07-31-2020 at 04:20 AM.
I definately wish Waid had a longer run on Avengers the first time around (especially given how bad the Heroes Reborn Avengers stuff ended up being). I liked the roster and it had a pretty cool classic line up. But it got hikjacked by the Onslaught stuff and rebooted into Heroes Reborn before it ever got a chance. It was filler... though again good filler.
Waid's recent run only has two good arcs. The first one in All-New and the first one after Civil War 2. Run got derailed by mostly CW2 and Secret Empire.
Poor use of Spider-Man. Best Dark Avengers line-up.
6/10.
Last edited by Triniking1234; 07-31-2020 at 06:19 AM.
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Something definitely needed doing to Wasp. What were they thinking, mutating her like that? Looking at how she's coloured there, were they trying to attract Starfire fans?
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I got the first 2 story arcs in trade and I thought they were kinda fun, but I don't see them as being impactful. So you won't miss anything major if you skip it.
"We live in a world of cowards. We live in a world full of small minds who are afraid. We are ruled by those who refuse to risk anything of their own. Who guard their over bloated paucities of power with money. With false reasoning. With measured hesitance. With prideful, recalcitrant inaction. With hateful invective. With weapons. F@#K these selfish fools and their prevailing world order." Tony Stark
And Janet definitely SHOULD care, considering that her civilian career at the time was fashion designer (in fact, that was her main career until Secret Wars - when Hank died in Rage of Ultron she inherited Pym Labs, so now she's mostly managing the two companies instead of actually designing stuff). She should've been upset that her looks were ruined.
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I really enjoyed the first two trade paperbacks. I very much agree with the sentiment that it feels like a throwback to the Kurt Busiek era Avengers, with more emphasis on traditional team dynamics, a slightly more lighthearted tone, and so on. It isn't as important to the greater Marvel universe as the Bendis and Hickman runs were, but it's still a fun series, and it's what made me fall in love with Ms. Marvel as a character.
It was refreshing to have a more traditional avengers team after the Bendis and Hickman stuff, and I can say I personally prefer it to Hickman. I appreciate the high concept ideas he was going for, but his run didn't really do much for me (at least what I read) and I thought it was too abstract. I do genuinely like the Bendis run a lot, as I found it to be really fun and engaging, in spite of some event overload by the end. However, I understand the gripes that more old school Avengers fans gave with Bendis and I think those folks would really appreciate what Waid was doing.
I think I prefer the Jason Aaron stuff a bit, just because it's more ambitious (but not too ambitious like the Hickman run was for me). So, I would say that Waid's run is in the middle of the pack as far as modern Avengers runs that I have personally read.
I think the point of having multiple Avenger books published at the same time is you can have different sort of Avengers books. You can have a more traditional old school book, and you can have the bigger high concept summer block buster movie book at the same time. But the problem with Waids era is despite having multiple books, we didn't get that. But we were sort of used to getting at least 1 Avengers book like that with Bendis and Hickman, so Waids book was a big jarring.
But maybe that was intentional. Maybe marvel wanted a bit of a break from the BIG blockbuster Avenger stories between Bendis/Hickman and the run Aaron was starting. Though that sort of made Waids book seem like filler. To me at least. Pretty good filler, but filler nonetheless.
I like the concepts and the cast of both of Waid's books but I couldn't really recommend them. All-New, All-Different had a shaky start and then just as Waid was finding his feet and it was starting to get good the book was cancelled and relaunched with a new cast which also took a while to get good just before it was properly cancelled.