Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities The All Avengers Thread

Originally posted by profh0011:
Ann Nocenti's track record made me drop the book (on top of everything else). Her issues of SPIDER-WOMAN somehow made Mike Fleisher look like he knew what he was doing. I've heard a LOT of good comments about her work after that-- but the stuff of hers I did read was so bad, I just avoided her as if she was the next Tom DeFalco.

Originally posted by Reboot:
Long post from elsewhere on the Harris run that I think is worth linking: http://www.comicboards.com/avengers/view.php?rpl=070401081253

Originally posted by profh0011:
"Re: Daredevil (I guess belongs in another thread)."

One of the things I've enjoyed so much about this thread is, since it deals with The Avengers, it's rather far-reaching and encompasses a lot of things not in actual AVENGERS comics. Plus, too many of the side-bars involve comics that over the years have gone bad so badly they turn my stomach, and I find it more fun to focus on just certain points worth discussing.

GK: How daunting of a task was it writing The Avengers for five years?

RS: The hardest part was keeping ahead of shifting deadlines, and hanging onto my cast. At one point, I was almost as ahead of schedule with Avengers as I’d been with Amazing Spider-Man, but then the West Coast Avengers debacle set me back several months.

GK: Was the hardest part working with an ensemble or trying to conjure an interesting villain for them?

RS: Neither, actually. I’d already been working with ensemble casts in all of my other assignments. The difference with the Avengers was that the entire cast was made up of super-heroes. Villains could be a challenge, as the Avengers really had only – what? – Kang and Ultron to call their own. But I could assemble small armies to give them a hard time.

The trick was in figuring out which Avengers I could use. Three of them – Cap, Iron Man, and Thor – had their own books and would be unavailable for long stretches of time. Others would be pulled away for months at a time into miniseries. Keeping the right mix of characters was the biggest challenge, but after a while I managed to develop a pretty good working repertory company of heroes.

GK: For the most part you worked with Milgrom and John Buscema on Avengers; what were they like to work with?

RS: It was fun and frustrating in both cases. Al was always a great idea man, but he was often drawing another book, as well as pulling down a day job as an editor. Because of time constraints, we never got to really collaborate as much as I would have liked. When John Buscema came back to The Avengers, he turned in full pencils for the first issue, and they were magnificent. The only problem in working with John, is that his heart was never really in drawing super-heroes. Try as I might, I could never get him as interested in The Avengers as he was in Conan.

GK: You also wrote the original West Coast Avengers miniseries; was this based on a pitch?

RS: No, I came up with WCA at a weekend convention in Rome, Georgia, that I attended with Mark Gruenwald. Gruenie wanted me to come up with a miniseries, and I wanted to nail down some of the non-active Avengers. There were a couple dozen Avengers or former Avengers at the time, and I had tried to limit the number of active members in any given issue, just to avoid writing crowd-scene comics. I had plans for most of the characters who didn’t have their own books, but every time I turned around, another writer was glomming onto one or more of them for a miniseries, often for someone other than The Avengers editor.

The West Coast Avengers was my solution to that. The original plan was to establish a second branch of the team in California. And once the miniseries was over, I’d have the members of both branches to draw on for stories. I could assemble teams of select Avengers for whatever wild challenge I could concoct. It was never supposed to spin off into its own monthly title. But, it sold very well, and the next thing I knew...

GK: Why didn't you write it when it earned a series?

RS: I was never given a choice in the matter. Steve Englehart had been lured back to Marvel, and there was obviously some interest in having him write a series that would recapture what he’d done with The Avengers in the ’70s. The first I heard about the West Coast Avengers series, it was already a done deal. So, I went from having all of these characters lined up to completely losing control of half of them. I had to scrap plans for at least a year’s worth of stories. It took me months to get caught back up.

I remember, when John (Byrne) later wound up writing both series, he told me that he intended to mix and match Avengers as the need arose. I couldn’t believe it. I said, "That was my plan, but they wouldn’t let me do it!"

Originally posted by He Who Wanders:
It's an odd feeling. In some ways, the Avengers to me have to include at least some combination of the following characters: Thor, Iron Man, Cap, Vision, and Wanda (particularly Thor, who has always been a favorite), yet I also want something new and exciting. But when writers give me too much of what I expect, it leads to a sense of living in the past, like going back to high school again and pretending nothing's changed. This was certainly true of Busiek's run, and thank you, Stealth, for pointing this out. I now understand why I was so disappointed in his work.