I’m tempted to conflate my love of the Avengers with the same affection for powerful madmen that drew me to the X-Men, Guardians of the Galaxy, and even the A-Team. But their group dynamic doesn’t quite match the tropes of exceptional outsiders and found families — at least in the comics. The roster of Avengers has become so large and varied that some characters naturally fall into the category of deadly and persecuted eccentrics. But their group dynamics are not determined by persecution or anything else. Instead, they are the best of the best, anchored by a god, a one percent, and a resurrected icon. They are Earth’s mightiest heroes, brought together not by desperation, but by the fact that someone has to get the job done.
I couldn’t remember the actual story of that first comic that lured me to the world of the Avengers, so I looked it up. Indeed, in issue #236, Spider-Man tries to join the Avengers – and he does it because he discovers that the Avengers make $1,000 a week. If the Fantastic Four represent a fantasy of a real family, and the X-Men a fantasy of a found family, perhaps the Avengers represent a fantasy of adult life and, well, work. The storylines they follow offer comic fans a different kind of twist and a different kind of team. After their early adversary Space Phantom is relegated to limbo, after successfully defeating this villain, the expectation is that all of our heroes will shake hands, decline battle, and perhaps start eating shawarma. Instead, just one issue after our Avengers gather, the Hulk is done with this crew.
The Hulk knows he doesn’t fit into this specific corporate culture. His terrifying, heavy-damage ways are more suited to a solo artist – or a team of outsiders with a knack for handling chaos. He’ll be back, of course, but Ant-Man (in his many different incarnations) and the Wasp won’t last much longer. This establishes a pattern we’ll see over and over again with the Avengers of new hires working and not working.
Surprisingly, some of the Avengers with the most stamina are villains who often maintain a sense of ambivalence about the role they should play in this particular organization. At every moment and during every run, the Avengers are constantly recalibrating their moral compasses, with the continued participation of each hero, villain or anti-hero in a mission dependent on an individual’s sense of right and wrong. So while the sheer strength and conviction of Cap, Thor, and Tony Stark create a sort of overwhelming stability, it’s repeatedly and thrillingly subverted by the people they invite onto the team. Dating people they shouldn’t be dating. They team up, split up, join rivals, leave in an apocalyptic huff, and return to the herd. The atmosphere among the Avengers is less a group of heroes bound by honor than the most hostile work environment on Earth: an ever-changing, conflict-generating story machine.
Spidey may have been the bait, but what kept me coming back to the Avengers was the sense that everything could be turned upside down through the power of a single personality and its influence over the group. Powers can be lost and regained. Universes can unravel. Like most children, I dreamed of being exceptional and escaping the ordinary world. But who I wanted to be changed moment by moment: sorceress, assassin, warrior, queen, hero, villain. With the Avengers there was always an opening, an opportunity to apply. They revealed a thousand doors to the Marvel Universe and gave me the staggering belief that not only anything could happen, but I could be a part of it for a short time, in whatever guise.
