samedi 7 septembre 2013

Are there too many Avengers books?

Uncanny Avengers: an Avengers team mixing Avengers and mutants to adress storylines from Remender's Uncanny X-Force.
Avengers: The usual Avengers team
Avengers Assemble: An Avengers team for moviegoers with a strong feminine presence
New Avengers: Not an Avengers team, but the Illuminati.
Young Avengers: Not an Avengers team
Secret Avengers: Not an Avengers team, a SHIELD series with some Avengers as operatives
Avengers Arena: Not Avengers, not even a team

Avengers AI: An Avengers team with an artificial intelligence theme. Well, that's stupid, why would an Avengers team limit itself to a specific kind of problem? It's sort of trying to replicate Uncanny Avengers that hasn't been that good because of its narrow focus on mutant affairs. In other words Uncanny Avengers took what was wrong with the X-Men family of titles for the last decades and applied that formula to Avengers. (When Claremont built the X-Men, he did the reverse, he had them as globetrotters handling world crises and saving the universe, exactly like the FF and Avengers). Avengers AI took a similar concept "let's treat artificial intelligence like mutants" thus compounding a bad idea.

Mighty Avengers: We don't know yet but it sounds like a street-level community type team except they assemble to stop an alien invasion (which might save them from a miscasting).

Past writers like Roy Thomas and Steve Englehart have expanded the range of Avengers stories so that we can have sword and fantasy (Arkon), space opera, time travel, etc.

I think there is room for different series, especially with different characters. Hickman is going to tell one story and Avengers fans need more than that one story. But don't put them in a conceptual ghetto.