Bring Back the Kooky Quartet!

While I enjoy manga and various indie graphic novels, I also like the more mainstream Marvel and DC, mostly because it’s two giant ongoing soap operas.

But I’m starting to loose it. The big problem is that every Marvel Comics title seems to be an Avengers or X-Men book. Okay, we get it. Sales are good. The movies did great.

But sheer logistics are a problem. Heroes are traditionally supposed to be the underdog, right? Fighting against the odds and all that. But if there are about six different Avengers teams, almost as many X-teams. Worse, the days when you had heroes like Doctor Strange, Spider Man or Daredevil flying strictly solo are gone: all of them are Avengers too, along with a bunch of X-men. With literally a hundred or so heroes organized into only two team affiliations, they aren’t teams anymore – they are armies or legions.

What that means is that any meaningful villain has to be either a cosmic alien invasion of some sort, or a civil war/schism/battle royal death duel between heroes. 

There is some sign that Marvel is starting to realize what a mess this is. The X-men teams had been broken up with some going villainy (but then they spoiled it by importing the old team from the past - as if we didn’t have enough X-men, now we’ve got some in  duplicate copies!) The latest hero vs. hero “battle royal” involves younger x-men and kiddy avengers killing each other, which is more hero vs. hero but hopefully it will prune away some of the deadwood. And a recent Avengers title suggested they “go bigger.” Well, they don’t really need more members, but given the cosmic threat, maybe they will follow in the footsteps of another company’s legion of superheroes and start patrolling the galaxy or something. There’s certainly too many of them to fit on Earth these days…

Did you know that in the 1960s, the Avengers once had only five members? Captain America, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, Swordsman, and Quicksilver. Now that was a period – Cap’s Kooky Quartet – when being an Avenger meant fighting against the odds. Heck, 60% of the team didn’t even have any powers!

Maybe someone will watch the Avengers movie again and realize that it wouldn’t have been much of a movie if they had  to juggle a cast of 50 or so heroes. I hope so.

Remember, Marvel: heroes fight against the odds.

l