Essential Essential Avengers Vol. 2
Stan Lee, Don Heck, Roy Thomas and friends
Reprints: Avengers #25-46, Special #1 (February 1966 – November 1967)
Get this for: Avengers hitting their stride — four stars
Essential Avengers Vol. 2 starts where the first volume ended, with Lee and Heck getting into their stride and the Avengers themselves reduced to Captain America and his three juvenile deliquents: Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. This combination worked much better than the original Avengers, who all had their own titles and didn’t mesh together that well. Of the New Avengers on the other hand only Cap had his own title, which meant there was room in The Avengers for some character development. It took a while for Lee to get a handle on the new team, but in this volume he has managed it.
The “kooky quartet” did not stay a quartet for long however; in the second issue collected here Giantman and the Wasp join the team, Giantman rechristening himself as Goliath. They’re not the only additions to the team: both the Black Widow (last seen in Iron Man) and Hercules (from Thor) drop by later in the volume and keep hanging around. In the King-Size Special things go even further, as a long running Avengers tradition was established as every Avenger but the Hulk and the Black Widow teamed up to defeat the Mandarin.
This volume is wall to wall action, with few issue to issue subplots, apart from the Black Widow’s problems with her old masters back behind the Iron Curtain. Lee doesn’t try to do anything difficult here with the Avengers, but just keeps throwing villains at them, from Attuma to Doctor Doom to the Living Laser to the Sons of the Serpents. It’s all very entertaining if a bit slight. things do pick up a bit as Roy Thomas takes over scripting duties, but here he’s not doing that much different from Lee.
The only time Lee does add some depth to The Avengers is with the Sons of the Serpents story, in which the Avengers take on a KKK standin and reveal it to be led by … a foreign communist leader. This also has the first appearances of Bill Foster, one of the first Black supporting characters in a Marvel comic. Yes, he is largely used solely for a clumsy parable about the state of race relations in America, but at least Lee means well…
Don Heck handles most of the artwork in this volume and his sleek style started to win me over. In the previous volume he wasn’t at his peak quite yet, here he has a good handle on all the characters and especially seems to have fun to draw the ladies. It’s less flashy and more restrained than a Kirby’s or a Ditko, but it suits the less powerful Avengers team.
This is still not the classic Avengers, but it’s getting there.