Essential Avengers Volume II

Essential Avengers Volume 2, The Avengers #25-46 & Annual #1, Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Don Heck & John Buscema, Marvel Comics


Growing up I was pretty much always a DC comics guy. The Marvel universe had characters I was aware of but I preferred the action in DC. Not too long ago I read a Captain America anthology and it was okay so I thought I would take a run at the Avengers.

The earliest issues have the Avengers consisting of Hawkeye, Captain America, The Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver. Outside of Captain America, these were hardly the stars of the Marvel Universe. That was reserved for the X-Men, Spiderman, Iron Man, etc. Hawkeye and Quicksilver I had never even heard of. The Scarlet Witch was but a minor player. The stars of the Avengers...Thor, Iron Man...they were "retired" and the comics therefore tried to get by with a lesser cast. Soon they added two other minor characters, the Wasp and Goliath (formally Giant-Man)

At first it was pretty cool the way they would team up to use their rather pedestrian powers to overcome tremendous odds. Captain America would devise some awesome plan to take down over-powered villain, often helped by the writers getting themselves out of spots with ridiculous Hand of God type devices.

Later they are joined by Hercules but his arrival makes Goliath more or less superfluous so he begins developing other powers.

Overall, the stories are quite repetitive. Any given story arc goes something like this: villain comes up with super weapon. Captures most or all of the Avengers when they fight as individuals, is going to kill them, but first decides to humiliate them, they escape through some implausible artifice and then fight as a team to take down the villain(s).

I think reading them in short term like that powerfully illustrates why comics are monthly or bimonthly. Otherwise the stories are predictable, repetitive, and the plot holes too much to overcome. Still, they have their moments.