Earth's Mightiest Heroes - The Avengers Appreciation 2024

[Tony Stark]

I'm sure there is a work-around The Crossing but it hurts man. It hurts.

Brother after all these years later it still does!

[kcekada]

Oh, I never doubted that the Crossing sold well. It was engineered to increase sales and started off strong enough. But once all of the reasoning was revealed, the story fell apart, and it wasn't long before Heroes Reborn debuted.

[Marvell2100]

Brother after all these years later it still does!

I skip that whole storyline across all titles when I go back to re-read certain titles.

[Nomads1]

Yup. Loved his redesign for Wanda. It's the inspiration for her current in some ways. She was going one of the strong parts of the Crossing - nuff said- and was in a good place heading into Onslaught. Then the Liefeld reboot ......I often wonder if her agency would have just continued to grow as it had been post AWC/Force Works and HoM would have never seen the light of day. Interestingly I lived blocks from a very old established comic shop a bit back and the owner told me that Avengers actually picked up dramatically in popularity and sold very well during the Crossing and post Crossing, haha despite Crossing's many inconsistencies, picked up more and more. He said the Liefeld reboot sold well - but he hated it - and then it lost steam whereas Avengers had been gaining steam previously. Yes Wasp would have been reversed back to normal. She did look a bit like a housefly......

I doubt anything would have stopped HoM or any of Marvel's Bendis' era events from happening. A strong attatchment to previous continuity was never a strong suit of those days. In fact, the whole Wanda going crazy was a rehashing of a plot point that had already been explored and resolved years before the FW's era and the Crossing (see John Byrne's WCA: Vision Quest and Darker Than Scarlet in which Wanda finds out that her children are not real, goes nuts over this, and reconciles with her losses, never forgetting that her children had existed).
While I'm surprised to know that Avengers's sales went up during the Crossing, it must have gone down at some point, to justify handing the book over to Liefield's studios. Sales however, DID go up with Heroes Return, with Busiek and Perez. As I recall, the numbers were quite high during those days.

Peace

[Shadowcat]

Re: the Crossing. I like the concept, but the execution was trash. I lay a lot of that blame on Terry Kavanaugh. It began when he started co-writing Avengers with Bob Harras. Say what you will about Harras, and his handling of the X-line, but as the Avengers writer, he had a very solid run. Kavanaugh chased off Kaminski & Morgan from Iron Man, the quality on Avengers dipped significantly when he came aboard, his handling of Tony during, and the Teen Tony thing was just abysmal.

[ARkadelphia]

Re: the Crossing. I like the concept, but the execution was trash. I lay a lot of that blame on Terry Kavanaugh. It began when he started co-writing Avengers with Bob Harras. Say what you will about Harras, and his handling of the X-line, but as the Avengers writer, he had a very solid run. Kavanaugh chased off Kaminski & Morgan from Iron Man, the quality on Avengers dipped significantly when he came aboard, his handling of Tony during, and the Teen Tony thing was just abysmal.

Generally agree. Here are some of my thoughts on this notorious storyline…

spoilers:

1) Overall I find it to be an entertaining read. Bought every issue as it came out back in the day and it may have been the first omnibus I ever bought when I saw it used for like $35. No regrets. 2) But the storyline absolutely had to be retconned away. I just wish Editorial gave Mr. Kurt Busiek the ability to do it the right way rather than having it done in a backup story of an Iron Man annual of some such if I recall correctly. 3) Really and truly started out strong I thought but quickly dissolved into quite a bit of a mess 4) Art was generally atrocious but a couple of the artists did improve to become bigger names at Marvel. 5) Teen Tony was a bad idea and just wasn’t (and didn’t) last long in 616 continuity. 6) I did, however, think that bug wasp had potential and I would like to have seen it explored in a better way. I do recall George Perez writing/drawing a Marvel Team-Up or some such story shortly afterward that depicted her feelings about her transformation in a way that seemed true to the character. 7) I naively thought the Avengers who were killed off early in the storyline were going to be important to the plot, but no, they were included for shock value. 8) I liked some of the minions that were created like Tuc (was that Tuc the Caveboy from Captain America Vol 1#1?!?!??) as well as Tobias and Malachowski who were hinted to be Wanda’s twin boys Billy and Tommy all grown up. This would have been well before the Young Avengers characters were created and I love them dearly so ultimately things worked out as they should have there. 9) I loved the concept of the alien War Machine armor that was introduced in Rhodey’s solo a little before this storyline, but lord was it atrocious looking. 10) I thought the Moonraker character introduced in the storyline was interesting and had potential. He was was introduced in much the same way that the Voyager character from the Avengers: No Surrender storyline was many years later (THAT is a truly great and underrated storyline in my opinion by the by). 11) I thought the Suzi Endo/Cybermancer character had a lot of potential. Somebody eventually used her in a Silver Surfer storyline years later to great effect, totally transforming this obscure character who was quickly forgotten again. 12) I liked the the alt time-line villains Wonder Man and Ultron whose concepts were basically flipped on end. They were introduced in the last issue/epilogue of Force Works. 13) There wax going to be a SEQUEL to this storyline at one point and I’d loved to have seen how that played out. There’s a very specific character who broke bad who and was mostly behind the scenes in this storyline. Some letters page or some such indicated that it would be revealed why this happened.

end of spoilers

So there you go. Possibly more critical evaluation of the storyline that has ever been done on this storyline. And probably more a more positive one at that as well.

The storyline absolutely had to retconned away, but if you read it withe the mindset that nothing was permanent , or as a mega What If? If you will, you *may* be entertained.m (no promises). But you gotta be tolerant of poor ‘90’s art and you gotta be able to pick it up cheap.

[Kaijudo]

Just caught up on the most recent issue and, yeah, I'm really hoping 3D-Man is a mole for Tony in Orchis. The death of Crusader was an unfortunate and unnecessary mistake, of course, but considering that at least half of the current line-up has come back from doing things potentially even worse than that (Wanda, Vision, and Tony have all been party to some fairly nefarious things) and that rosters since Triathlon's membership have included Wolverine, Ares, the Winter Soldier, Red Hulk, and fricking Deadpool, turning their back on him rings more than a little hypocritical.

[LAWtoyoto 432]

AVEN2023016_cov-scaled.jpg
BLOOD HUNT TIE-IN - BARON BLOOD STRIKES!

• Captain America must battle a vampire-overrun Hydra!

• Will Cap’s ragtag group of heroes be able to handle Baron Blood’s army of vampires? And what about rescuing the hordes of civilian prisoners?

• PLUS: What’s next for the Avengers Emergency Response team?

MAYBE A SECOND AVENGERS BOOK POSSIBLE?

[Digifiend]

It would be nice if the AER got their own book. After all, Steve's the only one who has a solo book, so the others need it.

[Nomads1]

AVEN2023016_cov-scaled.jpg
BLOOD HUNT TIE-IN - BARON BLOOD STRIKES!

Herc is kind of "Giant-Man huge" in this picture.

Peace

[Frontier]

AVEN2023016_cov-scaled.jpg
BLOOD HUNT TIE-IN - BARON BLOOD STRIKES!

• Captain America must battle a vampire-overrun Hydra!

• Will Cap’s ragtag group of heroes be able to handle Baron Blood’s army of vampires? And what about rescuing the hordes of civilian prisoners?

• PLUS: What’s next for the Avengers Emergency Response team?

MAYBE A SECOND AVENGERS BOOK POSSIBLE?

Seems like they're setting up that this group could possibly continue on...or they might not.

[ARkadelphia]

Seems like they're setting up that this group could possibly continue on...or they might not.

I would support that book

[Water Spire]

Read #13. It's good.

[Tony Stark]

Read #13. It's good.

Is Tony in it?

[Hypestyle]

has there been a story where Tony has to go up against all mystical/magic foes?