Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes Ultimate Collection


By Joe Casey, Scott Kolins, Will Rosado, Tom Palmer & various (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-5937-7

One of the most momentous events in Marvel Comics history occurred in 1963 when a disparate array of individual heroes banded together to stop the Incredible Hulk. The Avengers combined most of the company’s fledgling superhero line in one bright, shiny and highly commercial package. Over the decades the roster has continually changed until now almost every character in their universe has at some time numbered amongst the team’s colourful ranks…

During Marvel’s rebirth in the early 1960’s Stan Lee & Jack Kirby took their lead from a small but growing band of costumed characters debuting or being revived and reimagined at the Distinguished Competition. Julie Schwartz’ retooling of DC Comics’ Golden Age mystery-men had paid big dividends for the industry leader as the decade turned, and Managing Editor Lee’s boss (uncle and publisher Martin Goodman) insisted that his company should get in on the act too.

Although National/DC had achieved incredible success with revised and updated versions of the company’s old stable, the natural gambit of trying the same revivification process on characters that had dominated Timely/Atlas in those halcyon days didn’t go quite so well.

The Justice League of America-inspired Fantastic Four featured a new Human Torch but his subsequent solo series began to founder almost as soon as Kirby stopped drawing it. Sub-Mariner was back too, but as a villain, as yet incapable of carrying his own title…

So a procession of new costumed heroes began, with Lee, Kirby and Steve Ditko churning out numerous inventive and inspired “super-characters”.

Not all caught on: The Hulk folded after six issues and even Spider-Man would have failed if writer/editor Lee hadn’t really, really pushed his uncle Martin…

Even so, after nearly 18 months during which the fledgling House of Ideas had churned out a small stable of leading men (but only a sidekick woman), Lee & Kirby finally had enough players to stock an “all-star” ensemble – the format which had made the JLA a commercial winner – and thus assembled a handful of them into a force for justice and even higher sales…

Cover-dated September 1963, The Avengers #1 launched as part of an expansion programme which also included Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos and The X-Men and, despite a few rocky patches, the series grew into one of the company’s perennial top sellers.

Those early Avengers yarns became a cornerstone of the company’s crucially interlinked continuity and as decades passed they were frequently revisited and re-examined. In 2005 however Joe Casey and artist Scott Kolins (with colourists Morry Hollowell & Will Quintana) took the occasional exercises in creativity a little further, offering an 8-issue modernising miniseries which added devious back-writing to the original stories – with a spot of post-modern in-filling – which exposed secrets and revealed how the team actually came to hold its prominent and predominant position in the Marvel Universe…

Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes #1-8 ran fortnightly from January to April 2005 and was successful enough to warrant a second season – Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes II #1-8 which repeated the trick from January to May 2007, and both epics are re-presented here in a splendid, no-nonsense softcover compilation.

The drama begins (chronologically set between Avengers #1 and 2 ) as industrialist Tony Stark reviews media coverage of the coalition of mystery men currently residing in his family’s townhouse and ponders how best to keep such diverse and headstrong personalities as Ant Man, The Wasp, Thor and the Hulk together.

Across town in a seedy dive, a young troublemaker and pool-shark named Clint Barton can’t understand why folks are so nervous about the masked freaks…

Two weeks later the team has fallen apart and the Avengers are actually hunting their gamma-fuelled former colleague. In the course of events they unexpectedly recover a legendary form from a coffin of ice…

The gradually assimilation of partially amnesiac WWII legend Captain America into a terrifying new time is not without problems and the iconic and grimly experienced warrior is keenly aware of the seething tensions that beset the team he has joined.

Iron Man is still fervently pursuing an exalted Federal status for the Avengers but the army are baulking: clearly set on putting the wilfully independent powerhouses under military jurisdiction.

After a ferocious clash with Lava Men from the earth’s deep interior the word finally comes. The powers that be have created an all-encompassing “Avengers Priority Security Status” – but only for as long as the fickle public’s new darling and National Treasure Captain America stays with the team…

Self-made scientific genius Hank Pym created the roles of Ant Man and the Wasp – AKA girlfriend Janet Van Dyne – but his inherent mental instability has caused him to push further and harder ever since he joined the ranks of a squad that includes a patriotic legend, an infallible metal juggernaut and a god.

Now as Giant Man he is letting his feelings of inadequacy drive a wedge between him and his lover even as the Army ups the pressure to take over the team, and reborn Steve Rogers increasingly sinks into survivor’s guilt over the comrades he failed to save in the war.

His torment kicks into overdrive when Nazi war criminal and arch foe Baron Zemo comes out of hiding to attack the Avenger with his Masters of Evil…

When an invader out of time strikes, the Avengers finally and very publicly prove their worth to the government, and with Kang the Conqueror sent packing the team at last secure their favoured-but-fully-independent security clearance. Meanwhile in the streets a wanted vigilante dubbed Hawkeye saves Avengers butler Edwin Jarvis and they strike up a most irregular friendship…

The cases come thick and fast but the internal tensions never seem to dissipate. In far distant Balkan Transia fugitive mutants Wanda and Pietro desperately search for a place where they can feel safe whilst in America Cap is becoming increasingly obsessed with tracking down Zemo.

After a battle with Count Nefaria leaves the Wasp near death from a gunshot wound, Giant Man also edges closer to a complete breakdown. As a surgeon battles to save her life, Pym swears that he’s going to quit and take her away from all the madness but before that can happen Zemo returns to abduct the Sentinel of Liberty’s teenaged friend Rick Jones…

The team acrimoniously divides with Cap trailing the monomaniac to Bolivia whilst the rest of the Avengers remain for a final battle against the Masters of Evil. Below stairs Jarvis and Clint are concocting a scheme of their own…

As the death-duel in Bolivia concludes, in Germany two restless young mutants orchestrate their return to America and – with a little collusion from Jarvis – Hawkeye “auditions” for Earth’s Mightiest Heroes…

As Cap and Rick wearily make their way back to civilisation, Iron Man deals with the Government fallout when they hear the news that their Red, White and Blue poster boy is missing. Soon news leaks out that the rest of the original team have decided to quit and Stark has lined up a wanted vigilante and two outlaw mutants to replace them…

The initial secret history lesson concludes with the astounded Captain America’s re-emergence and reluctant succession to leadership of a team of obnoxious and arrogant young felons he is expected to mould into true heroes…

The rest is history…

The second bite of the cherry (by Casey, Will Rosado, Tom Palmer & Quintana) focuses on a time when the Avengers were in resurgent form. The Founders had all returned at a time when Pym (now calling himself Goliath), Wasp and Hawkeye had been joined by enigmatic African monarch Black Panther and the action commences immediately following the expanded team’s attack by an android called The Vision – whom they promptly signed up (Avengers #58 if you’re keeping count)…

The density-shifting “synthezoid” was created by robotic nemesis Ultron (a murderous AI created by Pym whilst suffering one of his many psychotic breaks) before switching allegiances, and the first issue opens as the highly-suspect new Avenger is impounded by SHIELD for investigation and clearance. The ostensible reason is that another autonomous murder mechanism – the Super-Adaptoid – has escaped from custody and humanity can’t be too careful…

In the Philippines, the real cause of all the anti technology tension and overweening suspicion are busy. Science terrorists Advanced Idea Mechanics have secretly stolen the Adaptoid and begun seeing how they can improve an already ultimate killing machine…

At a hidden SHIELD base interrogator Jasper Sitwell has met his match in The Vision but still perseveres in trying to dig out dirt on the android and its “master” Ultron.

The Panther meanwhile has foregone his status as a VIP dignitary to teach at an inner city school under the alias of Luke Charles. What he finds there is a true education…

Hawkeye too is under pressure as his lover Black Widow reveals she’s going back into the spy-game. With Pym close to apoplexy at the government’s quasi-legal rendition of the Vision, nobody is in a particularly good mood when SHIELD supremo Nick Fury demands the team head to the Philippines to investigate AIM’s latest enterprise.

With Fury’s carrot-&-stick pep talk ringing in their ears the heroes – rejoined by the just released Vision – jet off, unaware that in Manhattan an assassination plot against King T’Challa/Mr. Charles has brought one of Panther’s greatest enemies to America…

The heroes are challenged over the Pacific skies by a massed-produced army of Super-Adaptoids and are soon engaged in the fight of their lives…

Overwhelmed, the party is in danger of being swamped and Goliath valiantly turns himself into as colossal human rampart to stem the tide and save the endangered island population whilst his comrades are despatched to take out the AIM superbase…

Left all alone Pym fights in a maddened frenzy and becomes increasingly obsessed with how human the things he is incessantly slaughtering seem to be. By the time the triumphant team get Goliath home he is a deeply traumatised shell of a man…

Luke Charles returns to school in time to get deeply embroiled in a bullying case that will inevitably end in gunplay and tragedy. And then the apparently recuperating Hank Pym goes missing…

Soon after a new and excessively brutal hero named Yellowjacket is making news even as Agent Sitwell again targets the Vision for further debriefing after Pym’s “massacre” of mechanical lifeforms on AIM Island. This time he has brought in SHIELD’s top psychologist Agent Carver to try and get under the newcomer’s artificial skin…

The spies are in heated argument with Hawkeye when Yellowjacket breaks in, claiming to have murdered the Man of Many Sizes and demanding to take Goliath’s place on the team…

Nobody is fooled. Everyone has recognised the abrasive stranger as Pym gone far off the deep end, but Carver prevents them from saying anything. She advises that he is clearly inches from being utterly incurable and devises a treatment to cure him which basically comprises “play along and don’t do anything to upset the crazy man”…

That even includes allowing Yellowjacket to kidnap the Wasp and agreeing to let him marry his hostage…

The wedding is held at Avengers Mansion and includes a Who’s Who of heroes along for the ride, but the scheme spirals out of control when the Circus of Crime (not privy to the details of the service) use the gathering as the perfect opportunity to kill all America’s costumed champions in one go…

That deadly dilemma is apparently enough to shock Pym back to his right senses but in the aftermath a number of SHIELD agents are brutally slaughtered as Wakandan assassin Death Tiger gets ever closer to fulfilling his own mission of murder…

And to cap off all the chaos the still at large Super-Adaptoid also attacks, determined to expunge the race-traitor Vision who has perpetrated the ultimate betrayal by siding with inferior humanity and denying the innate superiority and inevitable ascension of mechanical and artificial lifeforms…

Politically savvy, wryly cynical and compellingly action-packed, this extremely impressive Fights ‘n’ Tights chronicle is a superb addition to the annals of the Avengers and would serve as perfect comics vehicle for those movie blockbuster fans in search of a print-fix for their costumed crusader cravings…
© 2005, 2007, 2012 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved.