As is natural for a superhero group that's been in various media since 1963, there have been a lot of Avengers...

As is natural for a superhero group that's been in various media since 1963, there have been a lot of Avengers. In fact there's been shitloads of Avengers, some serving for decades and some appearing only in one story. This thread isn't about all those famous guys and girls that end up in movies and that everyone thinks form the "core" of the team. This is about all those other ones.

I know it sounds strange considering all the questionable characters that became Avengers in the last 10-15 years, but Sersi always stood out to me as one of the strangest. Her personality in the Kirby Eternals was really nothing like a heroic character. She was extremely self-centered, haughty and dismissive of humans, and really only got involved because Ikaris dragged her into it. Then, much later, they made her an Avenger. It seems like such a weird, arbitrary choice when there were so many better Eternal characters to choose from, and I think most writers since then have also realized how unfit Sersi is for Avengers duties since she's barely ever referenced as having been a member or dragged back into it.

So who's your favorite or least favorite obscure Avenger? Anyone counts as long as they haven't been a major member over several runs or adaptions.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Dare
twitter.com/AnonBabble

So almost the entire team?

I miss those jackets.

Didn't Sersi join the team just because she wanted to have sex with Captain America?

Then she settled for Black Knight.

Fuck yes Avengers jackets!

Are you saying you WOULDN'T join the Avengers to try and have sex with Captain America?

T H I C C
H
I
C
C

Did the X-Men and the Avengers buy their team leather jackets from the same store?

Best versions of:

Black Widow
Crystal
Black Knight
Sersi

Prove me wrong you can't

Can we also do obscure versions of characters? I dig Clint as Giant man and it was so weird going into that run and thinking it was Hank at first.

What about if he was Giant Man but still remained an archer hero? So a Giant Hawkeye?

Had a concept like that awhile ago, a superhero who combined your superhuman bruiser with the archer archetype. So instead of trick arrows he mostly just used a special bow designed for him, then with his strength the javelin-like arrows could pierce a tank (also flew around on a high-tech 'flying platform').

I like Hawkeye a lot as Hawkeye, though. Just not the boring movie-inspired version they have now.

To be fair I never saw why he didn't just combine both kind of give him this larger than life version of the character who can still be humble. Basically I would write it like Hawkeye is a badass normal with a supermode.

Worst Avengers of all time:
- Deathcry
- Silverclaw
- Ex Nihilo and Abyss, Smasher, Captain Universe from Hickman's run
- Mantis
- Jack of Hearts
- Living Lightning
- Century
- Crystal

Did I miss anyone?

eh I like some of them I even think a bunch of them have good stories. If I was going to say worst Avengers it would probably be Deathcry or the heroes reborn version of the Avengers.

Triathlon

I actually really like Silverclaw and Living Lightning, and the fact that you included them while leaving out fucking Triathlon is offensive to me

Anyway, as an Avenger, this guy is pretty obscure. Seriously, how many people these days even remember that he reformed in the first place, let alone that he was made a provisional member of the team?

Couldn't even remember Triathlon existed. I mostly just remember him as 3-D Man from the atrocity that was Secret Invasion. But yeah he belongs on there.

>the heroes reborn version of the Avengers.

AU versions are cheating.

>Crystal
>Worst

user what are you doing?


-Triathlon
-Marrina
-Gilgamash
-Sam, Miles and Kamala

Also anyone added to Young Avengers after the initial volume.

>- Century

Was that guy even an Avenger?

How about these guys?

How would rank them as Avengers?

>Reform in the early 1980s.
>Fight against your old allies.
>Get blackmailed into taking part in Sinister Six reunions.
>Join the Avengers for a short time.
>Work for Silver Sable, appear in her book for 3 years.
>Continue to appear as a hero in Spider-Man books through the 1990s.
>John Byrne makes you a villain again because he never liked you reforming.
>Readers hate it.
>Everyone else working at Marvel secretly agreed with Byrne and no-one ever undoes it.
>Almost 20 years later, Sandman is still a villain.
>Modern readers don't even know he was ever a hero.

Feels bad, man.

>user what are you doing?

Crystal was TERRIBLE during her period with the team. she kept toying with Pietro's feelings while also trying to get at Black Knight's dick and raising her daughter. I've never liked her character in anything that featured her.

>-Triathlon
>-Sam, Miles and Kamala
>Also anyone added to Young Avengers after the initial volume.

I'll give you these. Young Avengers was always lame, though, even the original team.

>Was that guy even an Avenger?

He was in Force Works. Close enough.

>Crystal was TERRIBLE during her period with the team. she kept toying with Pietro's feelings while also trying to get at Black Knight's dick and raising her daughter. I've never liked her character in anything that featured her.

Huh, though this was just going to be another "X-Men fan hating Inhumans" thing.

anyone who actually likes Crystal is a damn casual waifushitter

Ditto.

Mantis was actually pretty good, if in nothing else but the Celestial Madonna arc. I don't agree with everything Engleheart did with her, but she was cool in that arc.
Jack Of Hearts was a bit out of place, but not terrible. He's a somewhat unique and interesting character, and has potential that tends to go unfulfilled most of the time.
Hickman's OC Squad was basically there to fulfill their plot-designated purposes. They weren't terrible, but were far from outstanding, and will be forgotten as "Avengers" sooner than even Deathcry.
And, Crystal? Better in FF scenarios by far, but still not the worst of the Avengers I've ever seen.

I miss heroic Sandman. I miss his friendship with the Thing. He's one of the things that made me see the shittiness/pettiness that John Byrne exists on. Between that and his treatment of the Fourth World at DC, anyway.

Gilgamesh was only cool in that one issue that I want to say was immediately after either Fall Of The Mutants or Inferno where no other Avengers were around. This is the only thing I've read with him that actually gave him any sense of interest.
Marrina was only good in Alpha Flight, and even then, she was more of a tragic monster sort of character. Am I remembering correctly that Simonson killed her off?

>settled for Black Knight

Dane is my favorite Avenger, but it's gotta be rough being Black Knight. He's a great leader, but that doesn't mean shit with Captain America around. He's a brilliant scientist and inventor, but the team is pestilent with geniuses. He's got deep connections to the world of magic, but he's not actually a magician himself.

Well, he's arguably the best swordsman in the Marvel universe. So that's something at least.

And the Ebony Blade is hax.

Shitty as Byrne was for doing it, the white design is Vision's best look by far.

Byrne's aesthetic sense is as refined as the rest of his personality is twisted.

>Am I remembering correctly that Simonson killed her off?

He did. He had her go full Plodex and then Namor stabbed her in the head with the Black Knight's soul-sucking sword. Which, mind you, should be pretty fucking final since the Ebony Blade keeps your soul imprisoned.

But no. Of course they found a way to bring her back so she could be in that awful, AWFUL Van Lente Alpha Flight series where Marrinna was a snarky, quippy "bad girl".

>Mantis was actually pretty good, if in nothing else but the Celestial Madonna arc. I don't agree with everything Engleheart did with her, but she was cool in that arc.

I'm guessing you're referring to the fact he could not let her go at all after he finished that arc? Yeah. I mean okay, I can understand him bringing her back in one run or the other. Most writers are guilty of this, like Nick Spencer brought back the female Beetle from Superior Foes to also be in his Ant-Man (and yes I know Spencer didn't actually create her). But most writers also know when to back off and not shoehorn their waifu/OC into everything they do. I feel that when Englehart and Claremont started to lose their grip they just fell into this trap of bringing back everything they liked from their famous runs and then bashing that against the wall until it broke. Englehart kept bringing Mantis back until the 00s when he lost her to DnA's cosmic.

For what it's worth, I actually liked Dane's original run (Roy Thomas is classic) and his Bob Harrass run. I think it was interesting having him and Sersi be in a relationship, and since Cap was mostly absent from that run Dane got to come into his own a bit more.

True story.
The dude is a hell of an artist, bettered by the input of a good inker (Terry Austin and Joe Sinnott did him a lot of justice). I just don't like a lot of things he's written unless something somehow reigns him in. He's the prime example of someone writing something just to say they created a staple of the character/team/whatever's mythos, often times for the worse.

I like Jack of Hearts and Living LIghtning...

>someday some wolverine fanboy writer will make a point of having him slice the ebony blade in half

Man of Steel was alright. I loved it when I was a kid, but every re-reading makes it seem less well-constructed and more like a shambles. Maybe as I get older I just come to respect the work of older Superman creators more.

Didn't some black panther... fanboy... make a point of contriving circumstances to put the sword in BP's hands... JUST because it has 'ebony' in the name?

Pretty much the same reason he jammed Storm on BP's dick?

Reggie Hudlin and it was later revealed that it was "an" ebony blade, but not the original

Literally Who/10

Isn't that why everyone joins the Avengers?

>Smasher
You're going to trigger thiccfags but yeah, none of Hickman's Avengers were good. I can't even get invested in Sam getting married to her and having a kid because the entire thing plays out in a very short (real world) time period. She didn't really have much of a character and basically is just Cannonball's PAWG baby mama.

I'd like to think that Hickman's plans for Smasher were severely disrupted by the cease and desist about making her Dan Dare's granddaughter. Like, maybe he had all this backstory thought out about how she would discover her granddad's great legacy and go fight the Mekon or something and it all went down the drain because he hadn't checked if Dan Dare was public domain.

But the cynical side of me says that it wouldn't have mattered. She was only introduced to be another small cog in the giant, overwrought, lumbering monster that was Hickman's Avengers. Probably as you say, only created so Sam could get a hot chick to fuck and have a babby with.

>it's gotta be rough being Black Knight.

>He had her go full Plodex and then Namor stabbed her in the head with the Black Knight's soul-sucking sword. Which, mind you, should be pretty fucking final since the Ebony Blade keeps your soul imprisoned.

And then the cursed sword turned Dane to stone, not Namor.

It is rough being Black Knight.

It could be worse. His first ever solo could be written by Frank Tieri.

Oh wait

>I miss heroic Sandman. I miss his friendship with the Thing. He's one of the things that made me see the shittiness/pettiness that John Byrne exists on. Between that and his treatment of the Fourth World at DC, anyway.

Byrne's treatment of Sandman, and before that, of Scarlet Witch & Vision, is all the worse because both times, instead of it being something the people who follow after him can't undo fast enough, it's like everyone at Marvel reacted like "finally someone stood up and said it", and no-one ever fixes it.

Same user. Atleast he had a last hurrah in the marvel zombies mini.


Another question, why doesn't marvel use Ikaris more? Royalty to the Kirby estate reasons?

Its the only motive that makes sense.

Cease and desist?

Basically Smasher was going to be the granddaughter of this guy:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Dare

Then somebody noticed that Dan Dare is NOT in the public domain, and thus it would be a potential lawsuit if Hickman used him. Or Marvel having to pay royalties. So in the 11th hour, much to Hickman's chagrin, he had to change all references to Dan Dare to a golden age Marvel hero (who was NOT a spaceman, so it made NO sense). Which made Smasher's origin pretty fucking nonsensical.

There was a Tigra thread a few months back where some user made a convincing argument for why she was the worst Marvel heroine.

Thats such a big fuck up on Hickman's part. Marvel should have chosen a better hero replacement. I mean just make him marvel boy ffs. He is a space hero.

"convincing" That guy had the weirdest hateboner for a fictional woman.

Making her an Avenger was probably Mark Gruenwald's idea. He seemed to be into the idea of integrating the Eternals into the Marvel Universe.

Crystal also seemed like an odd fit with the Avengers. She just showed up with Lockjaw in the first issue of Bob Harras's run and made some excuse about why she didn't go to the FF as usual. Then she stayed on for most of his run.

It's been said that someone at Marvel refused to allow writers to break up Quicksilver and Crystal (a marriage most of them hated), so maybe that was Harras.

Also while she's more associated with the team, Black Widow's stint as Avengers leader was so out of step with her established character that most writers since then have never mentioned (or maybe even know) she used to lead the Avengers.

The funny thing is with all the cast problems and jackets I kind of like Harras's run.

some join to fuck Thor

what was the argument?

>tfw your favorite characters are also the favorites of the worst writers

I got hit twice with Austen and Nightcrawler and Tieri and Black Knight.

That was bizarre. I mean, there are plenty of characters I don't like, but yeesh.

Gruenwald had his finger in a lot of things on the Avengers side of Marvel at the time. Say what you want about his bad traits, but the man had a sheer love for the Marvel characters and an enthusiasm that was hard to match. he really REALLY wanted the Marvel Universe to be a cool place, and he did some great work to build Cap and Quasar up from where they were.

So yeah, I can believe that the idea of having one Eternal and one Inhuman on the Avengers may have come from Gru. Having done so much work for the Marvel handbooks he was probably used to seeing a holistic view of the MU by that point.

Quicksilver and Crystal were already broken up long before Harras' run. It happened in the Vision and the Scarlet Witch maxi-series which I believe was written by Englehart? So it was old history at the point jacketvengers happened, that's why Crystal and Pietro being on a team together was very awkward.

Also I like Widow's graduation into a leader position and deeply lament that they backpedaled her character to "edgy loner who nobody trusts" following Rucka's series.

>a holistic view of the MU

This seems like something that's really missing from contemporary Marvel. Even with all the crossovers everything feels like it's fragmenting into its component parts.

Not especially relevant but I don't think it's worth making a new thread to ask, but what are the most recommended Avengers runs? I recently finished Dark Reign, Siege, Avengers Initiative, and Thunderbolts

Hickman's run was pretty weird desu. Like Supergiant and Black Dwarf were alive for like 12 pages in the entirety of the book but they're already getting the big screen treatment and showing up in the games and shit. Also pretty weird to consider the illuminati Avengers instead of just making the name of the book "Illuminati"

The FF wore them too around that era.

It helped that Gru was the spearhead for the Marvel Handbooks. The early pioneers in the Marvel titles were explorers, not cataloguers, but by the time Gruenwald and his peers were getting into comics the MU had grown so much and was so sprawling that for the first time there was a generation of fans coming in who were landing smack dab in a universe established 20 years ago and growing exponentially by the year. The Handbooks were their attempt to make a cohesive structure of the setting and to introduce new readers (and old fans) to characters and series they weren't familiar with. In a way it was like a sampler mixed with a tour book, albeit rather dry reading. Anyway, I think looking at all these hundreds of backissues and trying to make sense of them cemented gruenwald's view of comics and effected how he would write from then on.

For good and bad. But I think having an Eternal on the Avengers is a pretty cool idea. It was a way to have a Thor-tier character without grabbing another Asgardian or Olympian, and I do love the Kirby Eternals series a lot so I don't really mind.

They did tone sersi down a lot for avengers, though.

>Hickman's run was pretty weird desu.

In my view he attempted too much and reached too far, and quickly lost sight of what he was doing.

I never liked the Avengers comics. I never cared about any of the characters. This is a good thread for moviefags to see.

The Avengers, in all their long history, was rarely the big three.
Hulk was never an Avenger except for, like, two or three issues at the very beginning.

The Roy Thomas era was the only time the team had a solid lineup and every other time the roster was full of the most un interesting morts ever. Even characters that were ok on other teams, like the New Warriors became lame once they got onto Avengers.

And then there's this fuck-head."Rage"
Basically Black Shazam. No one liked this character and he would NOT go away.

Avengers, by and large, was a filler book full of characters that were only being used because of whatever weird preference that writer had but no one cared to read about.

>I miss heroic Sandman. I miss his friendship with the Thing. He's one of the things that made me see the shittiness/pettiness that John Byrne exists on.
I don't think Byrne can solely be blamed. Given how much the people in charge of Marvel want Spider-Man to be 1960s Lee era Spider-Man I'd be willing to believe that editorial "suggested" to Byrne that Sandman be a villain again if not outright demanded it. Though the execution, of course, is all on Byrne. At the very least if anyone at Marvel cared they could've just retconned away the slide back to villainy as easy as they explained away him not even being sympathetic under Byrne but they've made no attempt to do that which leads me to believe they never liked heroic Sandman. Which sucks really, Sandman was a heroic character for so long and has always been a sympathetic guy to the point where any attempts at him being a villain ring hollow.

He really does need to be a hero and a guy who fills the role they try to give Hawkeye of reformed criminal (which, for Hawkeye, is never believable because he his villain appearances can be counted on one hand).

Point taken.

>what are the most recommended Avengers runs?
Stern, Englehart, Perez, Thomas, Busiek

> That pompous eggheaded alien
Was this originally supposed to be Johnny's dialogue?

X-Men reader detected.
I agree with you on all of this btw

Good recommendations but Lee/Kirby should be in there too, even if it's a very short run.

This lame-ass right here. The Avengers were accused of being an ALL-WHITIE club and not being DIVERSE enough (despite having mutants, gods, aliens, etc. in their ranks over the past several decades) and were forced to put him in for diversity purposes, not just for being BLACK, but for being a member of a Scientology-type cult.

Triathlon would be right at home in today's Marvel.

>today's Marvel.

He's still around as 3d-man. He was one of the avengers AXIS doom assembled.

>It's been said that someone at Marvel refused to allow writers to break up Quicksilver and Crystal (a marriage most of them hated), so maybe that was Harras.
I'd say it's surprising how many writers, editors and the luck hate cape marriages and do everything they can to destroy them but it's not. Relationship drama is an easymode crutch for writers and many of them believe that marrying a character ends any potential drama and thus robs them of an easy storytelling device.

That was kind of well done though. iirc they went round trying to recruit black superheroes who all turned them down because they didn't want to be the token black.

>all drama ends when you get married

...if only...

Byrne is cancer. But is he worse than Bendis ?

I wonder how much crossover there is and if the compartmentalization of modern Marvel is partly something that evolved from reader fragmentation. I'll try to read Avengers stuff and it can be good in certain areas but rarely does it grab me the way the X-Men and Spider-Man do. Likewise I just can't care at all about Hulk or the Fantastic Four.

The Avengers is weird really in that I like individual characters a lot. I love Gru's Cap for example and even some of the minor characters (Rita DeMara for instance) but I find often times the Avengers as a title is less than the sum of its parts.

Why is Sersi so hot?

The Avengers did seem to be like this weird little corner of the Marvel universe.

When Sersi was an Avenger, the writer of Avengers was also the editor of the X-books (because the editors had a racket of hiring each other to write scripts), and yet the Avengers almost never crossed over with the X-Men. When the Avengers and X-Men both went to Genosha in 1993 it was considered a huge deal and that was only for a short two-month crossover.

Busiek's Avengers run was popular but again, the Avengers hardly ever appeared in the X-Men books and it was tough even to allow Beast, a longtime Avenger, to make a guest appearance in one issue.

Of course when we finally got the X-Men and Avengers crossing over in a big way we got House of M, mostly notable for a) fucking over the X-Men until the end of time b) fucking over Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, the Avengers unlucky enough to also be X-Men characters.

>Crystal also seemed like an odd fit with the Avengers. She just showed up with Lockjaw in the first issue of Bob Harras's run and made some excuse about why she didn't go to the FF as usual. Then she stayed on for most of his run.

The last time Crystal had been in the FF book, it was when Englehart had her trying to wreck Johnny's marriage to Alicia. This was only a few years earlier, so it would be understandable why she wouldn't go back there, and she had family ties to the Avengers.

When Englehart broke up Quicksilver and Crystal, he really tried to break Pietro forever, but it was Crystal he did more lasting damage to.

The retcon that Maximus was controlling them both only stuck for Pietro.

>It's been said that someone at Marvel refused to allow writers to break up Quicksilver and Crystal (a marriage most of them hated), so maybe that was Harras.

Harras seemed to genuinely like both of them, and want to give them a second chance with each other. Nobody afterwards ever seemed to agree.

Today, Crystal has been given a Carl Manvers inspired makeover, and Marvel has an editor-in-chief who was excited about how "punchable" Quicksilver looked in the Secret Wars House of M miniseries.

Avengers is a title that was made basically for characters who never made it big or to show off failed characters and give them spotlight. While it started with big characters it eventually took them off because it could focus on characters who didn't have books, keep in mind in the beginning Cap did not get his solo back for a good while. This way it could have the soap opera stuff that was becoming Marvel's bread and butter without taking away from other books in the line, why focus on Thor when Thor has his old title. Because it focused on failed character they sometimes got resolutions and got more development. This also had the added benefit of exploring the Marvel universe as a setting and making it more cohesive.

TL:DR
The focus on b-listers made sure the Avengers could stand alone and gave some depth to the setting of Marvel

>When you're an X-Men reader and everything else that's not X-Men is "a weird little corner of the Marvel Universe".

Outside of event stories like Secret Wars 1 & 2, the Infinity Trilogy and Onslaught, the different corners of the Marvel Universe didn't cross over that often, and that's why it was a big deal when it did happen.

The Spider-Man books, the FF, or the cosmic books, having some crossover with the Avengers or the X-Men would have been equally rare and as much of a big deal for them all at the time.

>The last time Crystal had been in the FF book, it was when Englehart had her trying to wreck Johnny's marriage to Alicia.

Englehart was extremely unkind to Crystal. He seemed to consider her purely a flightly, vapid bimbo, as if he had only read her Kirby appearances very loosely. Even back then it was clear she had more brains than that, even if she was smitten by Johnny Storm when she first saw him. I think in Englehart's mind it made sense, though. He was spending 12 issues of a axi-series building up one marriage, so why not spend some of it tearing one down? I think he wanted an "unhappy" marriage to contrast Wanda and Vision's. If only he'd known that less than 3 years after Vision & the Scarlet Witch ended John Byrne would terminate the Wanda and Vizh relationship in such a final way that it would last even up until today.

Crystal really hasn't had a lot of good material since the 60s, honestly.

This. Avengers is supposed to be a showcase for characters who can't always hold up a solo book. Bendis fucked it all up when he decided they needed to be the Justice League.

My favorite is Hank Pym. Nobody really knows him, and his last solo feature was in Marvel Feature so he can be said to be obscure.

Herc is probably my favorite of who you'd call obscure. and Wonder Man.

>Crystal really hasn't had a lot of good material since the 60s, honestly.

The Harras Avengers was probably the best she got, but her storyline was that she was trying to atone for everything Englehart did to her, only to find herself falling in love with Dane, and torn between acting on those feelings, and trying to save her marriage to Quicksilver, in the long run, it only helped fuel the "Crystal is a slut" memes.

A lot of people really liked what DnA did with her in the cosmic books, her arranged marriage to Ronan the Accuser, but it requires you to ignore Ronan's decades of evil and warmongering, and pretend he never even appeared before Annihilation.

Crystal and Dane works, for me. It's the fact that she spent most of the Harras run going "I STILL HAVE FEELINGS FOR PIETRO YET WHEN I SEE DANE MY GIRLBONER GOES BOIOIOIOIOING WHAT DO I DOOOO" which got a little bit tired. And the resolution was that Black Knight and Sersi vanished into a spacewarp, which wasn't really a resolution at all.

The worst part is that those three characters have not had a second of screentime together since that one special where Black Knight and Sersi fought Exodus during the crusades. Like goddamn, not even Busiek could have tossed them a bone and at least acknowledged the whole Gann Josin deal?

>And the resolution was that Black Knight and Sersi vanished into a spacewarp, which wasn't really a resolution at all.

It's a resolution in Dane walking away from the woman he loves but can't have, to be with the woman who needs him, but who he may never love as much.

It's supposed to be noble and tragic, and him doing the right thing by removing himself from the picture to allow Pietro and Crystal a chance to save their marriage.

> The worst part is that those three characters have not had a second of screentime together since that one special where Black Knight and Sersi fought Exodus during the crusades. Like goddamn, not even Busiek could have tossed them a bone and at least acknowledged the whole Gann Josin deal?

The 1997-1998 Heroes for Hire and Quicksilver series followed up on Crystal, Dane and Sersi in the worst way.

>After Dane and Sersi left, Pietro and Crystal start to reconcile, with no interference.
>Crystal sacrifices her life in the final battle with Onslaught.
>Heroes Reborn does it's own version of the Crystal/Johnny romance.
>Heroes Reborn ends, Crystal returns to Pietro.
>Dane and Sersi return to the present.
>Dane learns the heroes 'killed' during Onslaught have returned, Crystal is alive.
>Dane drops Sersi and runs to Crystal.
>Dane and Pietro fight over Crystal.
>Crystal loves them both and can't decide, and also has the Heroes Reborn memories fresh in her mind, further confusing her, and Dane and Pietro are both acting like children so she goes back to Attilan alone.
>Pietro's book gets cancelled with out advancing past this status quo, so they just remain apart.
>Dane never has any interaction with Sersi or Crystal again.

>The 1997-1998 Heroes for Hire and Quicksilver series followed up on Crystal, Dane and Sersi in the worst way.

I feel weaker for knowing this. And wasn't that series by Ostrander? Dammit.

I've never understood the appeal of turning the Black Knight into a techno-knight wielding a light saber and flying around on an Atomic Steed.

The character is so much more interesting being a modern-era human, with scientific training, finding himself thrust into a magical realm and wielding mystical artifacts.

IMO, his Heroes For Hire weaponry, transportation, and costume were all the pinnacle for the character. I'm sorry, but wearing chain mail armor and a bomber's jacket over it just looked retarded, even for the 90s.

Didn't Dane end up in the fucking Ultraverse?

Wasn't he purely technological when he was introduced? Like, I seem to recall the Ebony Blade not appearing until later.

Yes, he originally just had his uncle's lance weapon.

> what was the argument?

It was mostly about how she kept losing and being submissive to villains, and was the only Avenger to ever quit because she wasn't good enough. But it went on for so long, it was about 4 or 5 posts, covering her entire history. It's not that he was wrong about her, it's just how much time and effort he put in.

Fans can be as obsessive about the characters they hate as the ones they love. It was funny at the time, but weird as well.

Bendis is basically the fucking worst if your a fan of b-list characters. Like I know not every character deserves the same protection as Spider-man but what he does to Hawkeye, the Vision, and Scarlet Witch gives me nightmares, I don't mind drama, but he heaps so much shit on them for no reason. Look at poor D-man and how even his ironic fans try to forget about Bendis.

>>Dane never has any interaction with Sersi or Crystal again.

It's not like Sersi has been in any comics since then other than Gaiman's Eternals.

Heroes For Hire was a really good premise for a series but a huge amount of it was taken up with following up stories that absolutely nobody cared about. You could tell Ostrander had these plot points dumped on his desk by some editor and had to work them in.

This was a problem for a lot of Marvel in the late '90s. Busiek's Avengers just barely managed to make decent stories out of retconning The Crossing or the good-guy version of Madame Masque who turned up right after The Crossing. But for a lot of books it summed up everything people came to hate about tight continuity, characters always looking back and explaining what had gone before, instead of doing new things.

well yeah look this was also the time of trying to get books to a more classic status quo. Look at the Spider-man books at the time and how they were so trying to be like classic Spider-man. Remember when Spider-man chapter one was somehow canon even though it changed massive details.

I don't mind those sorts of stories at all, especially not when Busiek writes them. Best goddamn Avengers run of all time.

>Busiek's Avengers just barely managed to make decent stories out of retconning The Crossing or the good-guy version of Madame Masque who turned up right after The Crossing.

Not convinced those even were 'decent stories', or even 'fixed' things that couldn't have mostly been ignored. His dealing with anything from the Harras Avengers, or from Force Works, always felt like petty, vindictive retcons and character deaths. The kind of thing people would complain at Byrne for doing, but this was allowed because no-one cared about the original stories. But it didn't make for a good reading experience.

Well, there is one advantage to spending so much time retconning bad '90s stories: it keeps a run from just referring to the most famous stories. An Avengers run that was basing new stories on The Crossing and the early-'90s appearances of Ultron is probably better than revisiting Demon in a Bottle and Kraven's Last Hunt for the umpteenth time.

All the best parts were better the first time around, when Shooter and Michelinie were writing them.

To be fair Harras was editor-in-chief at the time so if he'd minded he'd probably have said something. But then Avengers Forever didn't exactly shit on the whole run (except for trying to say that Tony's actions in Operation Galactic Storm were partly Immortus's fault), just The Crossing, which the whole team seemed to consider kind of a mess.