I’m still not really capable of any kind of qualitative analysis of AVENGERS: DISASSEMBLED. Too much nostalgia, and all that. But one bit of dialogue in #501 did jump out at me.
In a sequence that reads eerily like a Usenet thread, the team is speculating about the day’s excessively unpleasant events. Hawkeye offers the following:
“This ain’t going to be the most popular thing I ever say, but, yeah, we had it coming. We’re all about the short-term. We’re all about whatever is in front of us that second. And then we’re on to the next thing.”
Well, that’s certainly true about the Avengers. But it’s not exclusively true about the Avengers. It’s a genre convention, like secret identities and kid sidekicks and dead girlfriends. (And the conversation is derailed by two other genre conventions: “squabbling heroes” and “powerful beings with feet of clay.”)
Given the body of Brian Michael Bendis’s work in the super-hero genre, it’s not a leap (for me) to interpret Hawkeye’s remarks as follows: “We’re genre characters playing by genre rules, and it was bound to bite us at some point.” I’m not really sure how sound it is to punish a specific group of characters for so widespread a trend, if that’s actually what’s happening.
Of course, I can’t think of many titles that have embraced that particular genre point as enthusiastically as the Avengers. The bulk of their time has traditionally been spent defending themselves from antagonists who act as they do because they simply don’t like the Avengers, individually or as a group.
Whether it’s for reasons of revenge, the challenge of it, the perception of the group as an obstacle, or whatever, the Avengers spend a whole lot of time reacting to threats to their own safety. I mean, sure, Ultron may want to extinguish the human race, but mixed up in the matrix is always his origin as an Avenger’s creation. Kang keeps threatening the Earth because the Avengers keep foiling him; he’d have moved on ages ago if his ego wasn’t so fragile. Grim Reaper? Masters of Evil? Red Skull? The Kree? The Gatherers? Loki? The grudge list goes on and on.
Approaching a story like this, where you specifically challenge a long-standing genre convention or take it to its logical conclusion, depends a lot for its effectiveness on what you do after it’s done. And maybe Bendis has an entirely new paradigm for the team in mind that stretches beyond “people who hate the Avengers attack them.”
Bear in mind, though, that Kurt Busiek tried much the same thing towards the end of his run on the book. It was triggered, in fact, by a similar snit from Captain America, and it seemed like the team was going to take reasonable steps to be more thorough, prevent disaster if possible, and capture at-large villains before they – I don’t know – erected a deadly force field around Manhattan, or something. (They even installed a big globe with super-villain Colorforms on it!)
So what happened? Well, Kang launched a massive attack, desperate to finally defeat the Avengers. Busiek left the book after that arc, and subsequent writers didn’t really follow up on the status quo he had created.
I can’t pretend I really enjoy what’s going on in the book now, and I’m not particularly enthusiastic about what’s coming. But, if Bendis really does have a functional, long-term response to Hawkeye’s argument, then it could be interesting.