Explain me the Avengers.

So, yeah - way to make a point about women's lib by portraying super-powered ladies as weak-willed sycophants willing to run around yelling "DIE, MALE CHAUVANIST PIG!"

It's a shame they couldn't keep the art teams consistent - switching from Alan Davis to Keiron Dwyer is a rough patch to smooth over, but then throw on a few fill-in folks, and it gets very dodgy very quickly. Not so sold on the long-running Triune Understanding / Triathalon thing (and I don't think the writers that follow/ed are or will be, either), but so be it.

http://www.plexico.net/avengers/covers/avg083.jpg

I have no clue why Bendis is using the Sentry, which is interesting -- in other respects, the chemistry of the team is what makes it work so well. Jessica Drew, Luke Cage, and Spidey just work well in the same book -- at least the way Bendis writes them.

On the plus side, the Sentry had next to no real personality in his miniseries, so Bendis is free to portray him in all sorts of ways. I think the Sentry arc starts in #7 or so -- if nothing else, then, the first six are worth getting.

In retrospect, it was a weird choice AND gratuitous and if you're going for gratuitous fan service, why single out the macro/microphiles? Bring on Hydro Man, show some love for the watersports.

If you go back far enough into the pre-Bendis age, though, Busiek's run had some good moments. Earlier than that, and you're pretty much reaching WAY back to Roger Stern and the Siege on the Mansion era.

And the whole point of the X-Men is to be a metaphor for hatred and bigotry. Replace "mutants" for "blacks" or "homosexuals" and the concept behind the X-Men makes a little more sense. Anyway, it's an idea that's become a little stale lately and I believe what Morrison tried to do with his run is address that problem, saying that there's no point in the X-Men being "hated and feared by humanity" because it's been going for so fucking long. So, he tried to take them to the next step in credibility and to make them do something proactive to try to change that situacion. Too bad everyone in Marvel ignored most of this and are trying (once again) to go back to Claremont.

Maybe he meant that it proved it to the general populace?

**Whole** Army?

I just watched 7 episodes of the new Avengers animated series on Netflix last night... dude doing Tony Stark/Iron Man is straight-up impersonating RDJ from the movies, it's kind of hilarious.

The series itself is pretty good, although I think Wasp is a lot more annoying than I ever remember her being in the comics. It's also kind of funny seeing the power disparity between her and EVERYONE else.

"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...