Marvel Masterworks, Volume 004: The Avengers Volume 1 [#1-10]

In 1961 Stan Lee was directed by his boss to create a superhero team to compete with DC's Justice League of America. While the JLA were simply a bunch of solo heroes thrown together into an all-star format, Lee took a less obvious route and created the slightly disfunctional and all too human Fantastic Four.

Two years down the track and it seemed Lee still had a JLA bug in his system and he created Marvel's answer to the JLA: The Avengers.

As an all-star lineup, The Avengers were hard to beat. Thor, Iron Man, The Hulk (whose own mag had crashed and burned a few months earlier after only 6 issues), Ant Man and The Wasp. Therein lay the problem.

With Lee's insistence that the Marvel Universe be consistent across all titles, that continuity show more be maintained and that the non-hero aspects of the characters lives be depicted, The Avengers presented Lee with challenges. Their personal lives were already being developed in their own adventures and since The Avengers didn't reveal their true identities to each other the relationships between the members never rose above business-like formality. And how could Lee explain, for example, Thor's presence in an Avengers tale when at the same time in his own mag he was off having a different adventure in Asgard? Ultimately these problems would be solved with the dissolution of the all-star lineup a bit later.

For now what we have are pretty standard JLA type adventures. Jack Kirby's art is never less than superb and Lee's witty writing is typical for the era but as originally conceived The Avengers were a concept without much future.

But important groundwork is laid. The Hulk, the very epitome of "not a team player" cuts out at the end of the second issue, teaming up with Marvel's other great anti-hero The Sub-Mariner in issue 3 to fight his former partners. The Avengers' quest to seek out The Hulk and help him reintegrate with humanity would be a vital plotline in The Hulk's development and would cross over into other Marvel titles such as The Fantastic Four and even Spider-Man.

Needing another star to replace The Hulk, issue 4 sees the return of legendary comic hero Captain America. This would be Marvel's greatest ever revival story and Cap would return to his own series only a few months later in addition to remaining a longtime Avenger (causing more continuity grief for Lee).

On top of all that Ant Man becomes Giant Man in issue 2 and these first 10 issues show Iron Man in 3 different suits.

Finally, in issue 10 Don Heck takes over the art duties from Jack Kirby, the first toward the big changes that would come the following year. show less

Everything starts somewhere, and this is the beginning for what would eventually be an entertainment Goliath, overtaking the movie world for most of the 2010s. But to go back to the beginning is to read some pretty rough work. Stan Lee may have been responsible for creating these characters, but you would be hard pressed to view these stories as anything more than journeyman. Lee, later, would come up with some better plots in Spider-Man and other comics, and only gets close here in providing something different in the issue where Baron Zemo creates Wonder Man, who has a change of heart even though he knows by doing so he is killing himself.

The artwork is also fairly rough. I never cared for Jack Kirby, although I recognize that he was show more a giant in the field. I always felt his characters blocky and stiff, posed rather than actually fluid, although his costume and background designs were interesting.

So, recommended? Not really, unless you want to see where it all began. show less

A collection of the first 10 issues of the Avengers comic book from 1963. As I'm not well-versed in the American comic book universe (I grew up mainly with Franco-Belgian comics), I picked this one up to get to see what the origins looked like. The collection is quite entertaining and I liked that we get a nice balance of character traits in the team (compared to their individual comic books). I am amused/irritated that The Wasp cannot see a man without commenting on his attractiveness and I'm also nonplussed as to why they all believe the baddies when they claim that the others in the team is betraying them; shouldn't they trust each other over a villain, no matter what? Highly recommended if you like Golden Era comics, but perhaps a show more little too dated for others. show less

This reprints the first ten issues of Marvel's "The Avengers" comic book, which was never one of my favorites. The art was fine, but the storylines and character interactions were even more ridiculous than the X-men books of the time. Still, they were good reading for a ten-year old who was beginning to find Superman comics a little stale.

Some of Lee and Kirby's very best work.