★★★☆☆ A bundle of heroes

The Avengers (Penguin Classics Marvel Collection)

Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Roy Thomas, Don Heck, John Buscema, Sal Buscema, Ben Saunders (Series Editor), Leigh Bardugo (Foreword), José Alaniz (Introduction)

By this time, book 5 of the Penguin Classics Marvel Collection, it has become obvious that author Stan Lee was a master of marketing, and King Jack Kirby, the artist he worked most with, was himself no slouch in that area. When I say that Lee was good at marketing, I am NOT saying he wasn't also a creative writer. After all, the first of the 4 P's of marketing is "Product", and Lee and Kirby's product was comic books -- if they hadn't produced good stories, the market wouldn't have been there.

That said, Lee was not above a little (or even a lot) of crude manipulation of his customers. Bundling is one of the oldest tricks in marketing -- you offer your customers something they want only as part of a bundle with a bunch of other stuff they aren't really interested in, and make them pay for the whole bundle. (Think Adobe Creative Suite, or cable entertainment packages.) That's essentially what The Avengers was: a bundle of superheroes.

In her Foreword, Leigh Bardugo describes explicitly how she succumbed to the allure of bundling. She was a regular Spider-Man reader, and one day at her regular newsstand she saw a cover showing Spider-Man surrounded by a bunch of unknown heroes

My willingness to pick up that first Avengers comic was sparked by three vital factors: the familiarity of my beloved web slinger, the promise of a bargain (a veritable buffet of heroes for one low price), and the intrigue of the two women at the bottom of that cover, ...

The problem with the Avengers is that they were a marketing ploy with no coherent artistic or plot rationale. This lack of coherence shows up in the incoherence of the team, which is never the same from one issue to the next. In Issue 1 the team consists of Ironman, Thor, Antman and the Wasp, and the Hulk. (Kirby's first Ironman concept has to be seen to be believed -- he's a yellow can with bulbous legs, arms, and head protruding from it. Fortunately, he gets a makeover in Ish 3.) In Ish 2 the Hulk leaves the team. In Ish 4 we have the famous Captain American retcon -- World War II hero Captain American is revealed to have been frozen for 20 years and is revived by the Avengers. Cap joins the team, and is soon the leader, and an obnoxious martinet he is, too.

And so it goes through the years. Heroes drift in and out of the team with very little attempt at coherent reasons. Eventually Lee and Kirby hand the series off to younger and more creative artists, with an immediate uptick in the quality of the stories and the art.

In this volume the final two issues are #74: "Pursue the Panther" and #83: "Come On In... The Revolution's Fine". Ish 74 is a serious attempt to deal with racism in America, and it is, in my opinion, fairly well done for 1970. Ish 83 is an attempt to deal with Women's Liberation, as feminism was generally known in 1970, which it does mostly by making fun of it -- so, Not Great.

The Avengers is definitely not one of the best of the Penguin Classics Marvel Collection. They're too transparently a marketing ploy.

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