Why "The Avengers" is not the same popular ties with FF, Spidey and X-Mens

[Username taken]

LOL. Unlikely not even at the highest prime push when marvel started using the ''trick'' lets promote only the IPs we can still make movies off.

When it comes to comics sales , trust only IPs that never needed movies. It is not even about if any Avengers run can outsell, the issue is that many Avengers run tend to have little impact in marvel publishing. I always find it ironic that Joss Whedon X-MEN Run in the mid 2000s is still considered as one of and maybe objectively the best marvel run of the 21st century in marvel publishing and additionally I have heard more about the Krakoa noise of X-MEN and Spiderverse run than anything Avengers has put out in comics. I think the main issue of Avengers is, their comics run tend to struggle with been as influential as a Spiderman and X-MEN run in marvel publishing and that does affect sales in the later future. [B]And I am saying this as a person that has been begging marvel to stop putting traces of the now almost 40 years Dark Phoenix Saga in every current xmen run.

Ummm.....Avengers was already Marvel's top selling titles at least 7 years before the Avengers movie.

Secret Invasion and Age of Ultron have already been adapted into movies.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

This make me wonder does Avengers run has ever outsell Spider-Man and X-Mens run before?

Yes, it has. For a decade or more, Avengers outsold everything Marvel put out.

For a chunk of the 2000s, Avengers (i.e New, Mighty and Dark) were Marvel's top selling titles.

Avengers is still a top seller now but it doesn't outsell Spider-man anymore and is just around the top selling X-men titles now.

Bendis' NEW AVENGERS but that was when Spider-Man and Wolverine were part of the team.

Bendis specifically asked for them because without them The Avengers wouldn't have felt like "Earth's Mightiest Heroes" lol.

CIVIL WAR, the big Avengers crossover is also the event that put The Avengers at the center of Marvel and it sold very high, but again the one story event in CW which grabbed national headlines and made it to the mainstream press was Spider-Man unmasking.

Without Spider-Man unmasking, CW might have sold well but not gained the success it did.

So even the biggest period of Avengers' success, doesn't speak well for it as people might think.

[Sin Nick]

Yes, it has. For a decade or more, Avengers outsold everything Marvel put out.

For a chunk of the 2000s, Avengers (i.e New, Mighty and Dark) were Marvel's top selling titles.

Avengers is still a top seller now but it doesn't outsell Spider-man anymore and is just around the top selling X-men titles now.

I feel like the whole New Avengers era became successful mainly because of Spider-man and Wolverine. Without those fan bases following, would they have been as successful in sales? I don't think so.

[Castle]

I feel like the whole New Avengers era became successful mainly because of Spider-man and Wolverine. Without those fan bases following, would they have been as successful in sales? I don't think so.

Hence the whole movement when many spiderman and xmen fans did not appreciate the over use of their characters in Avengers books. I remember the Uncanny Avengers run, X-Fans were not amused that Rogue was in that book for years.

Also we need to also considered peak, No Avengers run has ever peaked as high or spiderman or xmen. Not to mention Spiderman/ X-MEN are at their best when they are self contained stories. Which is not the main function of why we need an Avengers team. One thing that was even very amazing about Joss Whedon X-MEN Run, was that the first 4 volume of the books was very very self contained for an xmen run. it had little ties to the longer running flag ship titles of Uncanny X-MEN 1963 and X-MEN 1991 that was still going on

Avengers has always been dependent on flashiness of using characters like Spiderman and Wolverine than actual story substance. Wolverine should never be Avenger and Spiderman works better as a lone hero. Avengers concept works only amazing well with ensemble D list marvel IPs. I think that is their charm.

[Username taken]

Bendis' NEW AVENGERS but that was when Spider-Man and Wolverine were part of the team.

Bendis specifically asked for them because without them The Avengers wouldn't have felt like "Earth's Mightiest Heroes" lol.

CIVIL WAR, the big Avengers crossover is also the event that put The Avengers at the center of Marvel and it sold very high, but again the one story event in CW which grabbed national headlines and made it to the mainstream press was Spider-Man unmasking.

Without Spider-Man unmasking, CW might have sold well but not gained the success it did.

So even the biggest period of Avengers' success, doesn't speak well for it as people might think.

All this is true.

The sales boost actually started with Disassembled. The Avengers titles dominated sales for well over a decade.

It wasn't just New with Spider-man and Wolverine even Dark and Mighty Avengers were top sellers too.

It really helped that Marvel put the Avengers at the center of its publishing which IMO it should have been for a long while (like JL at DC).

But I like that the Avengers is a top seller and a top brand for Marvel. I like the "democratisation" of the Marvel universe, for a long time Marvel cornered their top talent into the Spider-man and X-men universes, things are a lot more balanced now than before.

[Username taken]

I feel like the whole New Avengers era became successful mainly because of Spider-man and Wolverine. Without those fan bases following, would they have been as successful in sales? I don't think so.

Most likely.

Bendis positioned Avengers as the "JL" of DC with their premiere heroes of the universe.

[Castle]

Ummm.....Avengers was already Marvel's top selling titles at least 7 years before the Avengers movie.

Secret Invasion and Age of Ultron have already been adapted into movies.

Out of curiosity what Avengers run has had the impact that Tim Hickman Krakoa has had as well it been a top seller? This X-MEN Run is the closest thing Marvel has had to rivalry Tom King Batman 2016 run. I see the Krakoa thing everywhere, , even Entertainment weekly covered the Hell-Fire X-MEN Gala.

https://ew.com/books/rating-the-best...hellfire-gala/
Rating the X-Men's high-fashion Hellfire Gala outfits

take it from me a person who cringed when I saw Kevin Feige show up at the Gala because I still like my comics and movie separate. Avengers may have some of the sales now but their actual comics stories tend to have zero impact in the comic genre. We can also at least say marvel has tested X-Men and Spiderman by trying to replacing with Iron Man and Inhuman and that failed. Let see where avengers be if a very powerful entity like Disney starts giving them the same treatment.

One thing I have noticed about Avengers in general, there barely have actual loyal reading comic fan base, There are more cult following reading fan base of Fantastic 4 than Avengers. With Avengers it is all about their movies, even the many arguments I am seeing here, I can tell it is all movie influenced, which is not the greatest indicator of why you are or not going to remain a big player without marvel shoving you down our throats

[Castle]

Bendis' NEW AVENGERS but that was when Spider-Man and Wolverine were part of the team.

Bendis specifically asked for them because without them The Avengers wouldn't have felt like "Earth's Mightiest Heroes" lol.

CIVIL WAR, the big Avengers crossover is also the event that put The Avengers at the center of Marvel and it sold very high, but again the one story event in CW which grabbed national headlines and made it to the mainstream press was Spider-Man unmasking.

Without Spider-Man unmasking, CW might have sold well but not gained the success it did.

So even the biggest period of Avengers' success, doesn't speak well for it as people might think.

Civil War was a very tiring crossover, I feel this was when some comic fans started to see more gimmick comic story lines and yeah you are right that the unmasking of Spiderman was the main highlight.

Also Notice that Civil war latered failed to have the same impact as House of M, because unlike civil war, House Of M carried over to even better X-MEN story arcs like Messiah Complex and Second Coming.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

I feel like the whole New Avengers era became successful mainly because of Spider-man and Wolverine. Without those fan bases following, would they have been as successful in sales? I don't think so.

All this is true.

The sales boost actually started with Disassembled. The Avengers titles dominated sales for well over a decade.

Obviously, there are other factors. Bendis himself in the early 2000s was a "name" and seen as one of the best writers since the Miller/Moore/Gaiman/Morrison era. Today his reputation is not as high as it once was (nor is that of Miller, his biggest influence).

So Bendis himself helps explain some of the early success Avengers had, or the hype for the title, before the New Avengers era, but it's not a sufficient example because Bendis titles like Daredevil, Alias while cult titles and reasonably successful didn't scale the sales highs of stuff he did which was Spider-Man related.

I like the "democratisation" of the Marvel universe, for a long time Marvel cornered their top talent into the Spider-man and X-men universes, things are a lot more balanced now than before.

I am not sure I'd call that "democratisation". Quite the opposite.

Spider-Man came after Fantastic Four and for most of the '60s FF was the top and Spider-Man had to develop word-of-mouth and identity under its shadow and slowly usurped the FF. The X-Men were marginal until Wein/Cockrum/Claremont/Byrne in the mid-to-late 1970s where they took the least successful of '60s Kirby-Lee titles to making it the hottest comics of the market. Spider-Man and X-Men earned their success on word-of-mouth, by developing its own niche, through the commitment of its writers and artists. Whereas The Avengers' biggest period of success is "astro-turfed" for want of a better word. When Spider-Man developed it was a little known writer-artist called Steve Ditko who made it work and gave it its engine. When X-Men became big it was unknown figures like Claremont/Cockrum/Byrne. Whereas The Avengers got the red carpet treatment when Bendis came in. Marvel's biggest new writer, who got access to Spider-Man and X-Men, and basically all of Marvel Editorial and Promotion bent itself to make Avengers happen.

So that doesn't strike me as democratisation, that strikes me as Editorial putting its thumbs on the scales. Now of course, to some extent all editors and publishers do that but it's hard to ignore the number of second chances and special pleading and considerations and gimmes that The Avengers got. It's also hard to ignore that The Avengers got to change and alter the status-quo of Spider-Man and X-Men comics like Spider-Man's Identity being outed (which JMS, the writer of the time said should have happened in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man as it is by the norms) and the Mutant Population being decimated because of a New Avengers event. Remember historically, The Avengers titles focused on characters who didn't have titles because they couldn't upset the status quo of the Big Three (Thor/Tony/Cap) but somehow that same courtesy was denied to Spider-Man and X-Men when they joined in, and the Avengers didn't pay things forward.

[Panic]

The big difference between the Avengers and the X-Men properties is that the Avengers are a group of unrelated individuals coming together to do a job of work, whilst the X-Men are essentially family, living together, dating each other, even feuding with each other; the Avengers are just co-workers by comparison, they have little group identity because the membership changes often and the individuals go back to living their separate lives. The X-Men comic is a soap about a family, the Avengers an afterthought marketing had when they needed a new comic to publish. I've loved the Avengers since the seventies, when I first started reading comics, but it just never had the core identity that the X-Men has. The relationships between the various X-Men are essential to those characters, but the individual Avengers could never meet each other again and in most cases it wouldn't be a big deal. Only the West Coast Avengers felt like it was developing into a close-knit family, and that didn't last.

[Username taken]

Spider-Man came after Fantastic Four and for most of the '60s FF was the top and Spider-Man had to develop word-of-mouth and identity under its shadow and slowly usurped the FF. The X-Men were marginal until Wein/Cockrum/Claremont/Byrne in the mid-to-late 1970s where they took the least successful of '60s Kirby-Lee titles to making it the hottest comics of the market. Spider-Man and X-Men earned their success on word-of-mouth, by developing its own niche, through the commitment of its writers and artists. Whereas The Avengers' biggest period of success is "astro-turfed" for want of a better word. When Spider-Man developed it was a little known writer-artist called Steve Ditko who made it work and gave it its engine. When X-Men became big it was unknown figures like Claremont/Cockrum/Byrne. Whereas The Avengers got the red carpet treatment when Bendis came in. Marvel's biggest new writer, who got access to Spider-Man and X-Men, and basically all of Marvel Editorial and Promotion bent itself to make Avengers happen.

So that doesn't strike me as democratisation, that strikes me as Editorial putting its thumbs on the scales. Now of course, to some extent all editors and publishers do that but it's hard to ignore the number of second chances and special pleading and considerations and gimmes that The Avengers got. It's also hard to ignore that The Avengers got to change and alter the status-quo of Spider-Man and X-Men comics like Spider-Man's Identity being outed (which JMS, the writer of the time said should have happened in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man as it is by the norms) and the Mutant Population being decimated because of a New Avengers event. Remember historically, The Avengers titles focused on characters who didn't have titles because they couldn't upset the status quo of the Big Three (Thor/Tony/Cap) but somehow that same courtesy was denied to Spider-Man and X-Men when they joined in, and the Avengers didn't pay things forward.

I agree that Marvel had to "blow up" the core Avengers to increase sales (from Heroes Reborn, Heroes Return, The Ultimates to Dissassembled).

The thing is the nature of the market today doesn't generally allow for organic growth like X-men and Spider-man experienced back in the day. With the collapse of the market in the 90s and further constriction of the market, you can only have a few titles grow (like Immortal Hulk and Spawn) and even then not to Spider-man levels. Back in the day, news stand distribution was still huge and multiple distribution channels still existed, a lot of titles existed solely on the strength of news stands (a certain generation of comic readers never visited comic store until we were fully grown).

The current direct market doesn't really allow for as much experimentation as before, the only way to boost sales today is with "gimmicks"i.e reboots, relaunches and crossovers.

But I like that things are more balanced out now. X-men, Spider-man, Avengers, Thor, Hulk e.t.c are all selling well now. I come from a different generation of comic reader and I don't really separate the Marvel universe into disparate universes like some fans do. It was a bit of squable myself and Redjack (Geoffrey Thorne) got into on these forums because some fandoms organized themselves into "gangs" and started attacking other fandoms...all within the same Marvel universe (it was particularly bad during the Black Panther/Storm marriage and Inhumans push). I'm not sure if it was pre or post forum reboot but it was pretty bad back then (and it's why I completely abandoned the X-forums).

I understand that no one wants to see their characters get denigrated but the way some fans have acted like the X-men exist outside Marvel publishing and therefore must not interact with other Marvel characters isn't helpful at all. That's not how I grew up reading Marvel comics..back then characters just interacted with little fanfare.

[CosmiComic]

SLIGHTLY off-topic here, but I actually think Marvel/DC should try to incorporate superheroes with learning disabilities into their respective universes. I think kids who are "mentally disabled" should have heroes who can inspire them as well. That's a kind of representation that's been sorely neglected. I got this idea from Flowers for Algernon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon

Interesting idea.

But I kinda think this won't happen. It's easier to write characters with PHYSICAL disabilities rather than those with MENTAL ones. I can't think of even ONE superhero who has cognitive disabilities. And yeah, I prefer the Avengers over the Fantastic Four and the X-Men (although I respect their respective fan bases as well).

Yeah, we should respect all the fanbases whether we disagree or not.

[CosmiComic]

I agree that Marvel had to "blow up" the core Avengers to increase sales (from Heroes Reborn, Heroes Return, The Ultimates to Dissassembled).

The thing is the nature of the market today doesn't generally allow for organic growth like X-men and Spider-man experienced back in the day. With the collapse of the market in the 90s and further constriction of the market, you can only have a few titles grow (like Immortal Hulk and Spawn) and even then not to Spider-man levels. Back in the day, news stand distribution was still huge and multiple distribution channels still existed, a lot of titles existed solely on the strength of news stands (a certain generation of comic readers never visited comic store until we were fully grown).

The current direct market doesn't really allow for as much experimentation as before, the only way to boost sales today is with "gimmicks"i.e reboots, relaunches and crossovers.

But I like that things are more balanced out now. X-men, Spider-man, Avengers, Thor, Hulk e.t.c are all selling well now. I come from a different generation of comic reader and I don't really separate the Marvel universe into disparate universes like some fans do. It was a bit of squable myself and Redjack (Geoffrey Thorne) got into on these forums because some fandoms organized themselves into "gangs" and started attacking other fandoms...all within the same Marvel universe (it was particularly bad during the Black Panther/Storm marriage and Inhumans push). I'm not sure if it was pre or post forum reboot but it was pretty bad back then (and it's why I completely abandoned the X-forums).

I understand that no one wants to see their characters get denigrated but the way some fans have acted like the X-men exist outside Marvel publishing and therefore must not interact with other Marvel characters isn't helpful at all. That's not how I grew up reading Marvel comics..back then characters just interacted with little fanfare.

Yeah, I think everything being more level is generally better. Of course some sell more than others but acting like one individual or group should be above the rest isn't helpful. Or blaming one comic for what editorial does.

[Username taken]

Yeah, I think everything being more level is generally better. Of course some sell more than others but acting like one individual or group should be above the rest isn't helpful. Or blaming one comic for what editorial does.

Exactly.

The ire should be directed at the creatives/editorial and not the properties. It was quite bad here before the big CBR reboot.

Pre-reboot there was a lot more creative/fan engagement here but eventually things spun out of control and CBR had to reboot itself.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

The thing is the nature of the market today doesn't generally allow for organic growth like X-men and Spider-man experienced back in the day.

I don't buy that.

But I like that things are more balanced out now. X-men, Spider-man, Avengers, Thor, Hulk e.t.c are all selling well now.

They did so in the 1980s too. The X-Men and Spider-Man were at the top but the 1980s was the most all-round decade with great sales for Daredevil, Simonson's Thor, Stern's Avengers, Byrne's FF too.

I come from a different generation of comic reader and I don't really separate the Marvel universe into disparate universes like some fans do.

Ideally the Marvel Universe works best when it's bifurcated into separate universes. The Marvel Shared Universe was always about sales more than creativity and to the benefit of those who couldn't sell their own title than those who could.

I understand that no one wants to see their characters get denigrated but the way some fans have acted like the X-men exist outside Marvel publishing and therefore must not interact with other Marvel characters isn't helpful at all. That's not how I grew up reading Marvel comics..back then characters just interacted with little fanfare.

Well X-Men fans saw their titles reduced a shell of itself on behalf of characters and titles that needed special favor and publication kickbacks (Avengers, Inhumans). It would be one thing if those titles earned it fair and square.