Tom Spurgeon linked to Diversions of the Groovy Kind‘s series of George Pérez Avengers splash pages (part 2, part 1), amongst which was the one shown above, for Avengers #167. The reason that one stood out for me was because that was the first ever George Pérez artwork I’d ever seen, the first Avengers comic I’d ever read and darn nearly the first superhero comic I’d ever read. For those without an encyclopedic knowledge of seventies Avengers stories, that issue started Jim Shooter’s Korvac Saga and even then Pérez must’ve been known for his willingness to draw huge crowd scenes, for apart from a dozen or so Avengers, it also starts the Guardians of the Galaxy, whose immense time traveling spaceship threatens to lodge the then SHIELD space station out of its orbit. Cue the Avengers, the inevitable misunderstanding/fight between superheroes as Beast is taken for a space monkey by two of the Guardians and the as inevitable flashbacks/shoutouts to earlier adventures as both sets of heroes tell each other what they know about them.
It is the quintessential Bronze Age superhero comic, published at a time and place when the Marvel Universe was still relatively young and not so difficult to comprehend that a few pages of recap couldn’t put readers straight. Continuity between titles had already grown almost as complex as any given titles own continuity, but was still manageable and gave a coherent feel to the Marvel Universe, something that’s summed up in a sequence in the next issue, as Starhawk goes after Korvac and their fight is felt by several of Marvel’s more psi-sensitive characters: Captain Marvel feels something through his cosmic awareness, the Surfer too, while Dr Strange’s meditiation is interrupted and Spider-Man’s spider sense is tingling. It’s only one page with no real impact on the story other than putting it in the context of a wider, shared universe.
That’s the sort of comic I grew up with and this was the comic that planted the seed for me to become a superhero fan. It also made me a Pérez fan, still to me the definitive superhero cartoonist.
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