Columns 

Reboot Nation #3 – Avengers (1996) vs Avengers (1998)

By | December 2nd, 2011
Posted in Columns | % Comments


With all of the success surrounding DC’s epic relaunch of their entire line this past September, many have wondered if Marvel (especially in light of their disastrous loss of market share as a result of said DC relaunch) could decide to go in a similar direction in the coming years. What many of those speculators may or may not know is that way back in 1996, something very similar (though markedly different) occurred for Marvel’s core titles. In the wake of the Earth-Shattering Onslaught Epic, many of the Marvel U’s primary heroes were believed to be dead (AKA most of The Avengers and The Fantastic Four) but instead were transported to a Franklin Richards-created pocket universe with no memory of their past or any of the exploits leading up to their transdimensional shift. This made them free for rebooting at the hand’s of former Marvel employees Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld, following their success as independent comic creators. Under these two guiding hands, our heroes began their fight against evil anew in what can now be defined as a “stunningly 90s” sort of way. While in retrospect, the story Marvel tells is that this change was only meant to exist for the year it ran for, however I’m willing to bet that if this approach had worked they would have stuck with it.

But it didn’t. It really, really didn’t.

And one year after the heroes were reborn, they returned to the Marvel Universe proper. However I am not the first person to notice that they also returned to some of their most iconic forms seen in quite some time as well as to a more conventional storytelling approach, none more so than Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, The Avengers. However, looking at both debuts from this time period, it creates a very interesting juxtaposition that says just as much about the era the initial reboot sought to emulate and the one that spawned from the first’s demise.

Click on down to find out how.

Firstly, I have to admit that neither of these comics came out during my time as a reader or collector of comics that did not star Sonic the Hedgehog (or for that matter Knuckles the Echidna, because we all know who the superior character there was), so this is the first Reboot Nation where I do not have first hand experience with the time period of at least one of the books. But, I know the 90s and I especially know 90s comics, so I feel okay talking about them with some certainty.

It’s with that fact in mind that I can pinpoint 1996’s Avengers (and indeed the entire Heroes Reborn initiative) as the turning point when the 90s style stopped being financially viable within mainstream comics. It was the last chance the industry would ever put all their chips in on Rob Liefeld and his style that has come to define an entire decade of comic books. You know what I mean: the gaping mouths, the gritted teeth, the often times comically disproportionate anatomy, the hatred of feet. To his credit, I don’t think anyone that has read comics over the last two decades can reasonably say they haven’t heard of Liefeld or own some of his work. Just five years prior to this Avengers relaunch in 1991, on pretty much the strength of Liefeld alone, X-Force #1 sold four million copies. Four. Million. In terms of sheer universal spread, Rob Liefeld is probably one of the most bought comic book artists of the last thirty years, which is probably why he is still getting work today.

Why he is not, I’d imagine, getting work today is the strength of his art at being anything but Rob Liefeld art and thus permanently stuck at sub-par. In a sense, Rob Liefeld may be the Britney Spears of comic books: consistently bad, but around for so long that they’ve established their own standards for their own work that somehow achieve equilibrium and keep coming out. There is no good Rob Liefeld art and no bad Rob Liefeld art, there is simply Rob Liefeld art. You can make of it what you will from there.

Continued below

That having been said, there IS such thing as a bad Rob Liefeld story, and Avengers #1 is one of them. Plotted by Liefeld with a script by Image founder Jim Valentino, the story brings the Avengers into their brand new status with a subtle build. After finding himself in the pocket universe most of the Marvel heroes now called home, Loki is used as a vehicle to introduce the new status quo of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes as an invisible fly on the wall. Surprisingly, reading this story makes it very easy to draw comparisons to story Mark Millar would go on to tell in The Ultimates and would then ultimately end up the basis for next summer’s Avengers movie. In this universe, The Avengers (Captain America, Scarlet Witch, Vision, Hellcat, Swordsman, Hawkeye and their scientific support team Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne) are brought together by Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D as a paramilitary organization of some sort. (For those wondering, Iron Man’s absense can probably be explained by the fact that Jim Lee’s Wildstorm Studios was the one that held the rights to him, NOT Liefeld’s Extreme Studios.)

As they were introduced, it was obviously time for the characters to be introduced in their snazzy, Liefeld designed 90s outfits. While Captain America and The Vision remain largely identical to the way they looked prior to the relaunch and the Scarlet Witch wore a costume largely similar to the costume she wore in her debut way back in X-Men #4, Hellcat (I still can’t figure out if this is supposed to be Patsy Walker or Greer Nelson) appears to be nose-less in many of the panels she appears in and Hawkeye…oh, poor poor Hawkeye. You’re like a combination of Age of Apocalypse Sabretooth, Wolverine and Stingray, except the worst parts of all of those characters’ looks. When people think of the worst designed characters of the 90s, Heroes Reborn Hawkeye needs to be on that list.

Following this, the team receives a call from a few S.H.I.E.L.D. scientists in Norway who have discovered Thor, who for this story is playing the roll of “character frozen for a while and then woken up by the Avengers”. Captain America, playing the role of “badass leader”, devises a way to break Thor out of his stunningly-not-yellow-or-even-orangeish “amber” prison using each character’s power (teamwork!), Thor wakes up, gets confused by Loki, fights the Avengers for a bit, finds mjolnir and somehow remembers who his brother is, turns on him, gets asked to join the Avengers and, based on a good feeling, joins them, and the story ends with a celebratory splash page and a mystery cliche cliffhanger involving baby mama drama.

What’s that? You haven’t read this comic and yet you can envision it perfectly? Yes, dear reader, there is a reason for that. I think one of the reasons the 90s are not looked back upon as a beloved time for comics is because at some point, storytelling became one big closed circuit. Obviously Thor would wake up, fight and then three panels later join the team because that is what happens in comics. By and large, comics in the mid-90s in general and the Heroes Reborn comics in particular had regressed to the point that they did not tell stories, but rather they told COMIC BOOK stories, where the same tropes were always stuck to and the same conclusions were reached. Despite their shiney new coat of paint, there was no innovation to be seen in these Avengers, and by issue’s end anyone with half a brain could see that.

In slight contrast comes 1998 Avengers #1 by the now legendary team-up of Kurt Busiek and George Perez. While 1996’s goal was to redefine The Avengers to fit more with the stylistic choices of the times, 1998’s goal was to (in so many words) do the exact polar opposite. Not only would the Avengers be appearing in some of their most classic forms and iterations, but in this first issue they would ALL be appearing. And I do mean all. Every single character in the Marvel Universe that had ever called themselves an Avenger made an appearance for at least a panel in this issue (with D-Man, of all characters, being provided with an unlikely amount of focus). Following the Black Widow disbanding the team in the wake of the core members’ apparent deaths at the hands of Onslaught, the reboot of the title’s numbering wasn’t the only restart taking place this issue as, indeed, the team began rebuilding itself in a manner most fitting an Avengers team; in response to a catastrophe no one hero could withstand on their own.

Continued below

Given all that, you’d think there would be very little in common between these two debuts, but a year (give or take a year and a half) is actually not that long of a time at all and certainly not long enough for storytelling tropes to redefine themselves. Sure, 1996 was preoccupied with completely recreating the franchise and 1998 was intent on bringing it back to a form more familiar to long time readers, I was stunned to find that when read side by side, 1998 does a considerable amount of going through the motions as well. While much more subtle about it, 1998 also followed a traditional debut story structure of “inciting incident + team gathers + motivational speech + team breaks up and walks into trap + trap is sprung + cliffhanger”. A different, slightly more thought intensive progression than 1996, and one with significantly better art and a well depicted Hawkeye, but an archetype nonetheless.

However, I think 1998’s complete and total throwback to a distinctly Silver Age approach to the team sent a very clear and apparently message about the undeniably 90s approach to 1996: Marvel was tired of the gritted teeth. After spending years in the fast paced, high flash low substance storytelling world, it was time to return to a time when story and artistic precision was valued higher than vapid action and violence. The sentiment could not be more apparent and I do believe it was for the best as the Busiek and Perez one went on to become one of the most iconic and beloved Avengers runs in recent memory while the Liefeld/Valentino run is mostly forgotten at best, and actively avoided at worst.

So now the all powerful Reboot Nation exclusive question remains: which story is the stronger debut? Admittedly, this one was not as clear cut as I expected to be going into the article. While I personally am more inclined towards 1998 because George Perez drew it, realizing the two books were equally archetypal gave me pause. When worked down to bare bones, both stories are quite similar in that they read like endless iterations of comic book debuts that came before them. However, with that in mind, 1998 treated me like less of a bumbling idiot that likes explosions and big boobs. Therefore…

Final Showdown: The Avengers #1 (1996) < The Avengers #1 (1998)


//TAGS | Reboot Nation

Joshua Mocle

Joshua Mocle is an educator, writer, audio spelunker and general enthusiast of things loud and fast. He is also a devout Canadian. He can often be found thinking about comics too much, pretending to know things about baseball and trying to convince the masses that pop-punk is still a legitimate genre. Stalk him out on twitter and thought grenade.

EMAIL | ARTICLES


  • Columns
    Reboot Nation: Blue Beetle #1 (2006) vs (2011)

    By | Nov 27, 2012 | Columns

    The next round of New 52 cancellations includes the eight volume of “Blue Beetle,” so it seems like a perfect time to compare the two titles which have starred Jamie Reyes as the azure arthropod.Blue Beetle #1 (2006)Written by Kieth Giffen & John Rogers / Illustrated by Cully HamnerFrom the pages of “Infinite Crisis” the […]

    MORE »
    Columns
    Reboot Nation: X-Force 1991 vs 2004 vs 2008

    By | Nov 13, 2012 | Columns

    By request! Which of these three first issues is the best, and are any of them good enough to warrant further reading?Before we get to the actual evaluation, I should probably start with a little editorializing. I’m not an X-Fan. Prior to reading the three issues in this column, I can safely say I’ve only […]

    MORE »

    -->