Originally Posted by
Kurt Busiek
While Bob is a soap fan, from what I've heard, it was me -- after Bob's time on the book -- who described the Avengers as "Earth's Mightiest Melrose Place."
That was rooted in my reading of the Silver age Roy Thomas years, where the Big Three came into and out of the book (Roy used them as often as Stan would let him) while the ongoing character continuity was provided by the less-well-known characters who were there every issue, and the Bronze Age Englehart years, where the Big Four (Steve included the Panther in that, since he had his on book) kind of set policy for the team, and the character dynamics were about, again, the less-known characters who were living at the Mansion and there every month to do character stuff.
Out of all that came the extended Pym Family -- Hank and Jan begat Ultron, who begat the Vision and Jocasta, who link to Wonder Man and Mockingbird as siblings, and Mockingbird connects to Hawkeye who connects to the Black Window, and the Vision connects to Wanda, daughter of Magneto and brother of Quicksilver, and so on. That core "family" romances and feuds and spends time together and creates all kinds of interesting drama.
That's a flavor the Avengers has for me that other books don't -- the FF is a family, the X-Men are minority-rights crusaders (with lots of family within), the Inhumans are both family and a ruling clique, etc., but the Avengers are colleagues with that family stuff creating a lot of the interest within. It doesn't need to be all about the Pym family (though there's lots of good stuff there to be used), but that sense that they're all colleagues and there's that soap churning at its heart is what feels essential to me.
Whereas, say, the JLA doesn't (usually) have that same sense of family at most of its most successful points. They're a league of equals, most of whom have their own "territory," but they join together as needed to handle the bigger threats, but they feel much more like colleagues than they do like family, and the relationships that happen in the team (Superman-Batman, GL-GA-Canary, etc) seem to come from their other books more than happening in JLA.
So, oddly, it sometimes feels to me like Giffen, DeMatteis and friends successfully turned the JLA into the Avengers for a while, and Bendis and crew very successfully turned the Avengers into the JLA.
But that's comics for you. Anyway, I think I'm the guy who first brought in Melrose Place (a show I've never watched) as a comparison.
kdb