China Miéville has a modest proposal for a new superhero series:

An extraordinary figure in bizarre makeshift power armour the colours of rust and hazard-warning yellow has appeared, fighting burglars, thieves, drug-dealers, graffiti-taggers. Flashback: he’s Dan, an ex-worker in one of the high-tech heavy defence plants, horrified at the social breakdown, going through the many scrapheaps of the town and cobbling together his suit from industrial junk, trying to save his home.

Dan smashes up a crack house, but while most of those within run, one stays and jeers at him, calls him a bully. Dan knows her: Louise was the union rep at his factory. He’s ashamed: he always liked her. They get talking. ‘You really want to do right by Flinton?’ Louise says eventually. ‘By all the other Flintons? Then quit messing with symptoms. It’s time to take down the real villain.’

[…]

The crew take their places at the controls. Dan puts on the battered welding helmet that disguises his identity and, in a burst of rust, launches into the sky for New York, to face down the sociopathic authoritarian fascist arms-dealing corporate billionaire responsible for so many countless deaths, in the US and around the world: Tony fucking Stark.

Want!

Old school Marvel fan moose n squirrel dissects Bendis’ Avengers over in the comments section of one of Tim O’Neil’s posts:

It has Spider-man and Wolverine in it, and its method of storytelling was less “let’s tell a story” than “let’s run out the clock between a series of strung-together crossover events, which by their very nature must be Important.” Since comic book readers have been trained to only care about the top-selling characters, and in particular to only care about them in high-profile crossover events, the decision to market the Avengers books as a vehicle for promoting a string of hastily-churned-out publishing events was a bit of crassly cynical genius. That it managed to sell as well as it did while attached to Brian Bendis, one of the single worst writers in the history of the medium, testifies to how grotesque and debased the industry and its readership has become. New Avengers has given us a glimpse of the ideal form of Late Stage Corporate Supercomics: fifty monthly comics featuring Wolverine and Spider-man and Captain America and Deadpool all stumbling in circles and mumbling gibberish, while random explosions, splash pages and supporting character deaths assure us that what we are witnessing is Important.

Remember that three part Fantastic Four story back in 1991 or so where the Fantastic Four had supposedly been murdered and Spider-Man, Wolverine, the then grey Hulk and still hot Ghostrider formed the “New Fantastic Four”? That was meant as a parody, but Bendis’ Avengers is what you get if you took that idea seriously and you just shoehorn in popular characters regardless of how well they fit. If Spider-Man had been meant to be in the Avengers, he would’ve been in issue one, volume one.