Explain me the Avengers.

"Revengers."

I just slammed my desk into my head.

I noticed that Marvel has finally collected Roger Stern's whole Avengers run, and I've been reading this stuff for the first time since I was a kid, and it's quite good. I mean, Stern isn't the sort of person who does mind-blowing mystical/cosmic tales or anything, but his plotting and especially his characterization is very solid: each character has a voice of his/her own, and there's a good balance between thrills and more quiet personal moments.

I've been trying to read some older Avengers stuff too, like Thomas and Englehart, but I'm always distracted by the casual sexism and the uneven plotting. Like, Englehart's celebrated "Celestial Madonna" arc is all about making a strong, independent female character accept the fact that her whole life has been manipulated so she could give to birth to a cosmic Messiah, or something (it's never really explained what the child is supposed to be). So basically she's reduced to a baby machine, and this is presented as a happy ending! And what should be the climax of the story involves two issues which mostly consist of a talking stick doing a monologue that retcons some earlier Avengers stories. I can't for the life of me understand why this considered a classic arc?

I also read Thomas' "Kree-Skrull War", another acclaimed arc, and while it was somewhat better than Celestial Madonna, it was really disappointing that even though the eponymous war is mentioned several times, we actually get to see very little of it, mostly in the final issue, and instead we're dealt with boring stuff like the Avengers devolving into cavemen. Plus the whole solution to the story was a total deus ex machina! I guess it at least had kinda interesting metafictional angle to it, but it still felt like a cop-out, especially since (as far I know) nothing was done with the massive revelation about Rick Jones until Kurt Busiek brought that subplot back in "Avengers Forever", 25 years later!

So yeah, I was wondering, are there are some Avengers stories from the 70s that would be both thrilling and would not be blatantly sexist? I'd love to read some more pre-Stern stuff, but the stories I've tried so far are just too much "of their era", which the Stern stories aren't.

I've been picking up a lot of the early Stern issues at the comic shop. They're pretty great: love Starfox and Captain Marvel/Monica Rambeau. As Tuomas pointed out, Stern doesn't really go for psychedelic/cosmic broke but he's fantastic with characterization, and he's good at building up event storylines organically from Marvel continuity...