BC: AVENGERS #150

AVENGERS #150 was another book that was in the collection of my friend David Steckel, and which I borrowed from him to read at some point or another. It was a noteworthy issue for a couple of reasons, most of them not great. First off, it was one of if not the first comic book to make the point that a fiftieth issue was just as noteworthy and worth commemorating as a centennial issue. This was no doubt due to the fact that by this point, it had been proved that centennial anniversary issues tended to sell better than the ones around them, and wanting to hit that sort of jackpot without waiting every eight years or so. But the bigger point AVENGERS #150 is remembered for is the fact that half of the issue was an unannounced and unscheduled reprint, which completely undercut the planned celebration entirely. And in fact, a blurb on the cover promising the debut of a new Avengers line-up had to be removed at the last minute, though the question mark theme to the visuals couldn’t be so easily excised.

So what happened? Over on his blog, reader Alan Stewart attempted to gingerly answer that question in his own review of this issue and the next recently:

Avengers #150 (August, 1976)

Alan tries to be even-handed and fair minded to all parties, not wanting to paint any of them as the bad guy in these events. But from what I’ve seen and what I know about how a company like Marvel operates, the person who fell down on things was writer Steve Englehart. He was late getting his material in, and when new EIC Gerry Conway informed him that a fill-in plot would have to be used instead, Steve decided to withhold his dialoguing of the back half of the issue, deciding that he’d force the company to go reprint on the issue as an act of revenge. This represented the end of Englehart’s time at Marvel in the 1970s, though he’d return a few years later in the 1980s and again later. It was an ignominious conclusion to what had been a stellar run of creativity and work, but Marvel was changing in ways that Englehart just wasn’t comfortable with.

Anyway, the plot for this issue is exactly what it was supposed to say on the cover: having wrapped up a series of interlocking adventures that had taken up most of the preceding year, the Avengers were gathering together to determine their new line-up moving forward. This hadn’t happened all that often, typically individual members might come and go, but having an entire story dedicated to selecting the new team was something of a novelty–though it had precedent in the very story that was partly reprinted to fill out the page count. Right away as the discussions begin, Thor steps down as Avengers leader and goes on a leave-of-absence, passing the gavel to Iron Man as the new chairman of the group.

But the issue wasn’t simply a conversation about the new line-up, it was also set up as an “album issue” that would recount the storied history of the organization through extended flashbacks narrated by news broadcaster Sam Reuther. Album Issues were another concept that Marvel had pioneered, and they helped to get across the idea that each individual story and comic book was only one small piece of a larger and more important tapestry: the Marvel Universe. As a relatively new Marvel fan, I loved an Album Issue for what it would tell me about older comics that I hadn’t yet had a chance to read. Here, it also gave relative newcomer George Perez the opportunity to re-create classic moments from throughout Avengers history, something he seemed to relish. In the short time he’d been working on the book, George had already made a big splash, and he was already considered one of the best artists ever to take on the series.

Unfortunately, even before the middle of the book, the story abruptly goes reprint, as a flashback to the very first Avengers line-up overhaul segues into an actual reprinting of the story in question. If I’m honest, as a young reader this didn’t really bother me (though, remember, I had borrowed this comic book rather than having dropped a quarter on it, so that may factor into my take here.) I was already a huge fan of Marvel’s 1960s output, and this story was one that I hadn’t yet experienced, so it made little difference to me that we were suddenly back at the point where Thor, Iron Man, Giant-Man and the Wasp gave way to Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, with Captain America remaining the only touch-point between the two incarnations of the team. I honestly kind of enjoyed experiencing it first hand. (Decades later, I reprinted this entire two-parter in the pages of AVENGERS (Volume 3)#27, which means that, yes, I reprinted a reprint.)

It’s also worth taking a moment to reflect on just what a brutal and unexpected move it was completely overhauling the Avengers series with this new cast of characters. Editor and scripter Stan Lee had been building the nascent Marvel Universe without entirely meaning to–he saw it primarily as a good way to promote all of the assorted titles in the company’s line. But as plotlines stretched out, often for months at a time, Lee began to receive a lot of mail from fans who questioned how, say, Iron Man could be in jeopardy in his own series yet perfectly fine in the pages of AVENGERS. Additionally, Stan had come to believe that the thing that was attracting a broader and older audience to his output was the soap opera interactions and personality conflicts between his assorted cast members. AVENGERS had relatively little of that, the group being made up of the stars of other solo series. So he instituted a sweeping change: dispatching Thor and Iron Man back to their own solo series and Giant-Man and the Wasp to temporary limbo (their initial strip had run its course after a lot of struggling to make it popular) and replacing them with a trio of characters who, while introduced as villains, had been played sympathetically: Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. Captain America’s solo series at the time was telling tales of his adventures in World War II, so there was no conflict there. And this new team of Avengers could bicker and adapt and grow and change more in the manner of the popular Fantastic Four, which was the sauce Lee was looking for.

It’s likely incorrect to say that Lee saved AVENGERS with this change; the series had been popular when it featured Marvel’s assorted solo super-stars–so much so that later writers Roy Thomas and Steve Englehart worked tirelessly to bring those characters back into the mix on a regular basis. But it did serve to both steep the book more in the flavor of what Stan and his cohorts were doing that was making an impact, while also firmly establishing the idea that the roster of the group could wildly fluctuate as necessary. So this reprinted tale set the stage for the new story that Englehart and Perez and friends were telling in the present–a tale whose conclusion I wouldn’t get to read for several years, as David Steckel didn’t own the second part to this adventure.