Quote Originally Posted by Omega Alpha View Post
So, it's only a real Avengers title if it has Wonder Man, Jarvis and the Vision? Yeah...I don't buy that.

Mind you, Hickman also used Falcon, while Wasp and SW were in UA, and the latter one that had, and still has, significant baggage which understandably most writers want to avoid. He also used Pym and Hercules in Time Runs Out, as well as having Iron Lad, Kang and Immortus meeting Cap. America. He also had an event where Thanos shows up.

What more one has if someone is writing Avengers books, using Cap. America, Iron Man and Black Panther as the key players, and also having Thor, Cap. Marvel, Falcon, Hawkeye, Black Widow and Hulk on the team, while also using Henry Pym, Kang, Immortus, Hercules and Thanos, and yet is not considered "real Avengers" because he doesn't reference something Roger Stern wrote in 1984? That kind of narrow-minded non-sense is exactly why the book became so ignored and irrelevant over the years, appealing only to nostalgia of the diehards.
The issue with Kang, Immortus and Iron Lad is actually a good example of what I mean -- it was basically a cameo and a reminder that the history of the team had been pushed into the background for most of the run.

It would be completely possible to write an Avengers comic with an all-new cast that felt like a "real" Avengers book if it played on the tropes of the comic and the history of the team. (When Ewing did Mighty Avengers, though of course it wasn't an all-new cast, people commented on how it felt more like an Avengers comic than the main one, just because of the stories he chose to tell.)

It's OK to dismiss this as nostalgia or nitpicking, but I didn't get the impression Hickman thought of the Avengers as anything more than a generic superteam with Captain America and Iron Man in it. Which is fine -- we've already seen this approach successfully taken in Avengers: Infinity War, where the Avengers didn't even exist as a team. But I think the Avengers are as much their own team, with their own history and specific tropes, as the X-Men, and I felt like Hickman wasn't doing what Bendis did and consciously challenging the way the Avengers used to do things; he just, in my opinion, didn't want to write about the team as if it had a history at all.