Brian Bendis still ships Steve/Tony more than half the membership of cap_ironman

[thuviaptarth]

Bendis Looks Back at His Term as "Avengers" Assemblyman: Part Two:

[Avengers Prime] is a personal favorite project of mine. There are many, many things I'm proud of in my Avengers run, but there are going to be certain things that are personally successful to me where I don't even care if anybody else like it or not.

It's possible that he just means he loved working with Alan Davis on the project, because he talks about at great length before getting back to the content of the book:

[It] seemed like this was exactly the kind of story for Cap and Iron Man to really remember why they like each other," Bendis said. "I joked at the time that it was kind of like a super hero couples' retreat. They really just needed to get away from it all and sit around a campfire with Thor, who loves them both and was there to kind of referee and quietly nudge them towards each other. The hope was that by the end of the adventure, all will be forgiven."

Also, he is big on Thor as a yenta. Who knew?

Meanwhile, I think I am going to have to stop reading scans_daily, because I seem to love everything they hate. This may be because I have a grave, grave weakness for Tony Stark as a supervillain. (I'll admit my affection is as nothing to Jonathan Hickman's love for the moral ambiguity or outright evil of Reed Richards. That is some passion, man.) In retrospect, the opening of Avengers #1 is now incredibly creepy.

Comments

[kate_nepveu]

Amazing.

[jeviltwin]

Mmm. The more I read about Bendis, the more I like him.

A question: have you read all of Bendis' Avengers run, and would you recommend it? (By it, I think I actually mean, buying the trades.) Still feeling my way through the interconnected* Marvel web, and don't actually have any more money than usual, but it's always nice to put things on my Wish List, you know? I don't have much of the Avengers outright at this point. (Also, maybe some of the books will turn up gently used at Great Escape. A girl can hope.)

* This sounds more polite than 'mind-bogglingly frustratingly they-went-out-of-their-way-to-make-thing-confusing-ly tangled'.

[thuviaptarth]

This has been delayed partly because I tried to find diagramming software so I could draw the relationships between Bendis' various Avengers series. I have given up and so this will all be ASCII line art there will be no helpful diagrams.

I have read all the Bendis Avengers run, and I would recommend buying some of the trades, maybe? I have to admit I got the vast majority of mine used at the Strand, for around $5/volume. They were worth it for that, but I would not argue for cover price.

I find Bendis' version of the Avengers heartwarming and fun (with occasional heartbreak). I don't think it is anywhere near his best work (that is still Alias, at least of what I've read), but it is just a hell of a lot of fun. Towards the end the storylines got kind of repetitive, and I think he should have wrapped it up earlier. I am still looking forward to the upcoming Age of Ultron AU/time-loop, because who doesn't love a tattered resistance fighting our new robot overlord in a desolate post-apocalyptic future?

This is roughly how the Bendis series go:

Avengers Disassembled - The Scarlet Witch goes crazy and takes the Avengers apart, killing several of them in the process. [One day I may even make a vid about the massive issues Marvel has with how being too powerful just makes women go crazy.] The Avengers feel shattered and also Tony Stark is now kind of broke (for billionaire values of "broke") and can't fund them anymore.

House of M - The AU created by the Scarlet Witch where mutants rule the world and humans are an oppressed and increasingly endangered majority. She changes her mind and restores the regular world with most mutant powers destroyed instead. [Marvel's massive issues with powerful women, I am telling you, ugh.]

New Avengers - Steve and Tony re-form the Avengers after there's a massive breakout of supervillains. I would recommend starting here.

Civil War (miniseries by Mark Millar) - The government decides all superheroes need to have their identities registered in a federal database. Tony Stark sides with the government and Steve Rogers leads a war against it. (Because when you are a beloved and well-respected war hero, the first thing you do when presented with legislation you believe to be immoral and unconstitutional is commit an armed insurrection against the state, instead of, say, calling the ACLU.)

You may feel compelled to read the main series by Mark Millar to get the story. Under no circumstances pay money for it.

You can avoid the main series and get most of the significant beats from Civil War: Iron Man and The Death of Captain America. Civil War: Iron Man contains the Bendis issue where Tony delivers a long monologue to Steve's corpse and then breaks down sobbing.

Civil War ends with Tony Stark winning, Steve Rogers dead, and a smaller but still active resistance movement of superheroes who refuse to register. This is where New Avengers splits into Mighty Avengers (the government-sanctioned Tony Stark team) and New Avengers (the underground resistance, now led by Luke Cage). Tony is running SHIELD during this period.

Secret Invasion (miniseries by Bendis) - The Skrulls have long since infiltrated major Earth institutions, including SHIELD, and now they invade. They are defeated by Norman Osborne aka the Green Goblin aka allegedly reformed supervillain. Everyone blames Tony Stark for being a terrible defender of the Earth and loves Norman Osborne for killing the Skrull Empress, so Norman Osborne ends up in charge of SHIELD and Tony Stark ends up a fugitive from justice.

SHIELD is renamed HAMMER, because no one has ever accused superhero comics of subtlety.

There is also a related miniseries about here, New Avengers: Illuminati, in which Tony Stark, Reed Richards, Charles Xavier, Namor, Stephen Strange, and Black Bolt form a secret society to handle threats they don't trust their colleagues or other institutions to handle. This does not end well. Arguably they piss off the Skrulls so badly they cause the Secret Invasion, and also they shoot the Hulk off into outer space as a preventative measure, so he comes back with an alien army and takes over the world. (This happened in some non-Bendis mini-series I didn't read because I do not actually care about the Hulk. Though the new series by Mark Waid is pretty interesting so far.)

The Mighty Avengers series ends here. Most of its members disappear into their own series. New Avengers continues, its members still on the run, just now hiding from Norman Osborne instead of Tony Stark.

Bendis also launches Dark Avengers, a limited series in which Norman Osborne sets up supervillains as his own versions of major Avengers, under his strict control and doing only his legal dirty work, while appearing to the public as heroes. I actually read this last of all of Bendis' Avengers series, because I didn't think it would interest me -- it didn't have any of the characters I cared about, and I generally find Marvel villains boring. But it is actually fantastic, and I do recommend it. But only after you have read some regular heroic Avengers to compare it to.

Siege (miniseries by Bendis) - Norman Osborne loses his shit and invades Asgard. A reunited Thor, Tony Stark, and Steve Rogers (now resurrected) lead the reunited Avengers against him, he's deprived of his position, and Steve Rogers is made head of SHIELD.

Avengers Prime (miniseries by Bendis) - Thor takes Steve and Tony on a couples' counseling retreat. (I actually find this series hugely frustrating because sure, they all end up literally hugging, but they don't actually resolve any of the philosophical and political issues that made them go to war against each other in the first place.)

Bendis restarts The Avengers (the big guns book with Thor, Iron Man, Steve Rogers [not currently Captain America], and most of the other recognizable names) and The New Avengers, with most of Bendis' semi-obscure favorites. I think the idea is that there are too many threats for one Avengers team to handle -- there really isn't a clear rationale for why there are two books, except Bendis wanted to, so why not? I think this is also where Marvel launches Secret Avengers, initially by Ed Brubaker, about the Avengers covert ops teams that take care of things the Avengers can't do in public. It is pretty boring.

This is the point where a lot of the storylines start to feel repetitive to me, although Avengers makes me happy by having Steve Rogers find out about the Illuminati and get into a big marital fight with Tony Stark. (The children are very uncomfortable.)

There are two or three more big events during these Avengers and New Avengers runs, but they tend to be written by committee and are all pretty bad.