As the 1980s crossed over into the 1990s, a lot of things of note were going on in Marvel Comics. Over in Uncanny X-Men, Betsy Braddock was busy turning into Psylocke, Gambit was coming aboard, and the Claremont age was coming to a close. Ann Nocenti and John Romita, Jr. were putting Daredevil through literal Hell, as the Man Without Fear battled Mephisto. Spider-Man was picking up a third ongoing series, there was a new Ghost Rider, and both The New Warriors and Guardians of the Galaxy had begun their own series. It was an era of rebirth and redefinition.
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Very little, however, was going on in the pages of The Avengers.
Marvel Comics
Sure, things were happening; there are attacks by Lava Men, Avengers mansion (for whatever reason sent out to sea on a man-made island) sinks. There are trips with the Eternals to the Negative Zone, and with Spider-Man to space.
In the big scheme of things, none of this exactly matters. The book was not, by any means, the backbone of the Marvel Universe that it would later become – one didn’t look to The Avengers to follow the major happenings from event to event, as one did a decade later. It often felt like The Avengers was where characters hung out when they weren’t leading their own ongoing series.
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Some of this might be blamed on an inconsistency of talent; Walt Simonson and Sal Buscema’s run on the book had ended, and the vacuum had been filled with a rotating cast of talented, well-meaning fill-in creators, none of whom seemed ready to take the book’s rudder and sail it into steadier, more purposeful waters.
What results is a series of so-so stories, competent but directionless. Larger, more impactful stories were occurring all around the book, but it never quite manages to touch them. Just outside these pages, Wanda Maximoff is regrettably going crazy over in Avengers West Coast (uncollected here); Magneto is locking Red Skull in a hole to starve to death (uncollected here). All the key characters are having exciting, important adventures. . . somewhere else.
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The titular event, an odd ‘crossover’ in which the heroes of the Marvel Universe are set against villains outside their usual stable, was itself a bit rudderless: Loki tricks a lot of Very Bad Guys into teaming up, but that narrative is split across so many issues that it’s impossible to follow in a single title. Even the titular story of Avengers Epic Collection: Acts of Vengeance is without form here.
None of this is to say that these issues are inherently bad. The talent is there, and the adventures being had are fun. It’s just that none of it feels big enough to be worthy of the Avengers, and that no single character is being utilized here better than they are being utilized somewhere else. This is a book divorced from the paradigm shift of the Marvel Universe taking place around it.
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