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The Shameful Demise of Avengers: United They Stand

Some events provide some much-needed perspective on the purported and sometimes legendary arrogance or aloofness of comics creators. In short, the behavior of a subset of comics consumers invites the impression that comics fans live in a world of absent or misassigned priorities; that they become abusive unto the point of psychosis over transgressions against standards that only they (or, perhaps, not even they themselves) understand. Rubbed the wrong way by something that appears on the printed page, they may even resort to the kind of behavior represented by those rabid souls who threatened the physical well-being of Ron Marz and his family over their distaste for what he wrote in his run on Green Lantern.

Some events evoke shame, even vicariously. While normally immune to self-reproach based on someone else's misbehavior, I nonetheless felt somewhat ashamed of the turn of events that brought about the end of this title. For, in a number of ways, comics readers had behaved extremely poorly, turning to scapegoats (Templeton and Aucoin particularly) as targets of pressure over the issue of a cartoon show they didn't like, and often didn't like sight unseen. Indeed, anger at the creators of the Avengers: United They Stand cartoon took very little time before becoming verbal attacks via chat rooms and message boards on the folks who attempted to take an unremarkable animated show and transform it into a readable comic book. Why, I sometimes wondered during this unfortunate period of fandom on the Web, couldn't anyone look at this piece on its own merits rather than attacking it and its creators over the content of a television show?

Thus, acting out of character, but genuinely shamed by other online comics consumers, I found myself attempting to apologize vicariously for the petulance and short-sightedness of Fans Dedicated to the Destruction of Avengers:UTS, however they chose to identify themselves. So, some months and years down the road, it struck me that now, although far too late, I might try again to make the case for a book that deserved better treatment than it received either from its publisher or from the superhero comics market.

The Core Concept

If asked to summarize the Avengers: United They Stand concept with some degree of brevity, I might label it as an optimistic interpretation of Marvel's Avengers franchise, done in a tasty semi-animated style, and connected to a cartoon series through a series of visual redesigns of characters and an unnecessary, though harmless, addition of battle armor to a number of characters.

The writing worked well, thanks to Ty Templeton's sincere, though underappreciated efforts, and the art, generally by the tasty team of Derek Aucoin as penciler and Walden Wong as inker, made for a handsome and dynamic page that refused to use the conceptually-required animated style as an excuse for slacking on the art.

The book explored, in a sometimes reinterpreted or simplified manner, the long and complicated history of the Avengers, involving certain key events surrounding Wonder Man and the Vision, though also dabbling in the personnel flow typical of four decades of Avengers books (which, soon, will become five) so that a limited membership can still expose less common members like Tigra or the Black Knight.

For readers who liked the Avengers but withered under the dark interpretation of the early 1990s, or who didn't necessarily enjoy the entirety of Busiek's exploration of various superheroes' growing need for counseling (I read both with some degree of pleasure, so do not consider these characterizations hostile), Avengers: United They Stand could have provided a much-needed breath of fresh air for a comics concept sometimes suffering from length of tooth.

The book, as recent memory will confirm, suffered resistance even before it appeared on the shelves of stores; but, nonetheless, its model of benign interpretation could serve as an editorial standard for the variety of animation-themed superhero books still in print. Despite its vastly over-criticized flaws, the piece worked, and its variant take on inherited history provided one of its most refreshing features.

Benign Reinterpretation

Retcons can become annoying, particularly because they place a burden on the reader to remember the new version (and possibly the old as well) instead of one set of details of the history of a hero or group of heroes.

However, occasionally minor tweaking can change a story from the one that "happened" (and the events in comics, we all understand, generally did not ever "happen") to one that should have happened.

Reordering of events and violations of sequence do not damage a premise if, in general, they leave characterization and interrelationships intact without requiring mad feats of logic to rationalize them away.

The Straws that Broke the Camel's Back

Good storytelling and tasty reinterpretation of key elements and ingredients of a central franchise within the Marvel Comics edifice should count for something. But consider the following details working against the piece:

• The onus of action figures weighed heavily on the brows of many critics of the book. The anti-readers - meaning the self-designated enemies of Avengers: UTS who organized against the book before and without seeing either it or the ill-fated cartoon series on which it intended to piggyback - saw something sinister in selling plastic dolls to children, should the principles of design of such toys come back to lay an imprint on comics. Since the important things about the Avengers lay in personalities, interrelationships, and history, one can see this argument as a kind of red herring; however, it sufficed to place certain comics fans in a position where they seemed to live only to destroy anything connected with a cartoon that annoyed them for reasons to trivial to admit.
• Militant cartoon-haters also played a role here. Whereas most of us can simply turn off a television show about which we care little or nothing, for some, ego-attachment made the loose interpretation of Marvel's second superhero team a personal affront, and its destruction - with any connected creations, including a comics line - a matter of honor. Exhortations to boycott the book until a better cartoon came out appeared on the (Ab)Usenet and comics message boards; and, some might recall, for a while the sport of baiting Ty Templeton came into vogue. The latter sport embarrassed me - a fairly shameless human being, generally - into vicariously apologizing to Templeton via email over such behavior.
• Some readers care too much about costumes. The Avengers did have a few very ugly costumes in this series - for instance, I found the Ant-Man armor somewhere between dreadful and insufferable - but, if you think about it, costumes matter very little. Robinson's Starman showed how peripheral to the concept of heroism we should consider trappings like colored tights; this truth applies both when comics abandon conventional costumes for realism and when they abandon them to adopt a new style for a concept.
• The power of the mullahs of continuity can bring a great deal of trouble to a publisher, and, although Avengers: UTS showed great respect to the traditions surrounding the Avengers from their original inception to their resurrected Perez/Busiek form, it did, occasionally, play light with established canon, not so much to overturn it as to streamline it. For at least one significant category of superhero comics consumers, this imperfect inherited history must have seemed like a betrayal.
• Marvel Comics, in the year or so prior to Joe Quesada assuming the mantle of Editor-in-Chief, would cancel books before they had an opportunity to impact the market. For example, Fantastic Five got the axe when Marvel saw the figures for #3 - the book, it seems, had a full three issues to take the market by storm. Avengers: United They Stand began under similar burdens, with little support from Marvel and ultimately, a pre-emptive cancellation.

In a shaky comics market, one of those things could bring a house crashing down. Together, they all seemed like a focused jihad against nothing more than a comic book. If we consider Dr. F. Wertham a ludicrous figure for having argued about the damaging effects of comics unto the point that it seemed to provoke a nationwide scare, we support our position with the concept that it takes a small mind to get so upset over something like comic books. Would that such logic would prevail in other situations where angry comics fans often cross the line into behaviors that can help make everyone who dabbles in the hobby seem mentally ill; when comics fans threatened to harm Ron Marz and his family over the undoing of Hal Jordan, we saw the ugly end of such behavior. The line of propriety, however, seems to sit on the near side of minor controversies such as the Avengers: UTS boycott and all-purpose debacle.

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Column 272. Completed 03-SEP-2001.