I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world. Mastodon Verification Link	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, was a late adopter of Twitter and left when it turned fascist, and always declined to adopt Facebook. He was a fairly early adventurer into the Fediverse. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance. He hates cell-phones.

Zeitgiest: 21 January 2026

We've had a few random thoughts, short runs, and one-offs, and now it's time to get serious. This is the title that started me on collecting and that I continued to collect for over a hundred issues - around ten years.

This is the first comic title I remember collecting, although I started in the mid-170s, sometime in 1978 or so. When something which has been ongoing grabs me, I have a habit of working backwards to fill in the gaps and get some backstory and background. This is why when Whitesnake broke into the US with the 'Slide It In' album, I started looking for earlier albums, and eventually ended up with the whole back catalog which I actually prefer to the later stuff. But I digress. In this case, it was unlikely that I was going to be able to afford to collect fifteen years of Avengers back-issues, even if I could find them for sale. (Avengers #1 is going for multiple thousands of dollars at the minute, and although it would have been less back then, I was in elementary school ...) There are, however, natural break-points in any long running series, and in the late 170s, one long running storyline wrapped up. I spent some effort to get caught up, in reverse, on as much of the material leading up to it as I could. Add to that some opportunistic sniping of stock available to me when I worked at Mile High, and I ended up with a patchy selection of Avengers going back a few years, but complete from 154 on. (Including two copies of #155 for some reason.)

Reading them again is interesting on a lot of levels. Reading them straight through is very much not how they were intended to be read, and, in fact, might even cause some problems. Allow me to explain. 'The Avengers' was very much part of the mainstream Marvel universe, and often many of the characters had their own titles, and events in those titles would be referenced in this one, and vice-versa. ('You may be wondering why Your Favourite Avenger is missing, true believer! See Some Other Title for details!') Sometimes stories would be continued in different titles completely. ('For the thrilling conclusion see issue mumblety-bleh of Thor/Iron Man/whatever.') This meant that if you were collecting a lot different titles in a given month, you had to be careful to read them in the correct order to avoid spoilers.

It's also interesting to try to remember what it was like to read them for the first time. Now, the characters are familiar, and even some of the plots come back after a few pages, but on first reading, what did I make of it? With a team book in particular, there are so many characters! 'Avengers' #138 has Thor, Iron Man, Yellowjacket, Moondragon, and the Beast as the main focus, with the Wasp, Scarlet Witch, and the Vision having smaller cameo roles. Every few pages is a footnote of some sort - usually explanatory or making a cross-reference, but sometimes just an editorial comment or humorous aside. I wonder if this is part of where my love of footnotes developed? ¹ It really makes you appreciate the job of the editorial team, and what in film/tv is called continuity. Keeping track of all the characters and their ins and outs across the while line must have been tricky. (And remember this is the 1970s, personal computers are just appearing on the horizon.) I suppose it might be made somewhat simpler if the same writer handled some of the individual titles as well as the team title, but even so - kudos!

Writing the book also present challenges. Getting the balance of information and exposition right so that new readers, readers who aren't collecting all the individual titles, and those who are all get enough information to stay engaged without being overwhelmed. To do it, they use all the literary devices common in other media - flashbacks (easy enough to do in comics), expository dialogue (made simpler since, with a rotating cast, there's almost always some new character who also needs bringing up to speed), the afore-mentioned footnotes, and so on. It can be quite sophisticated, actually, and, if well done, unobtrusive and natural - one you've accepted the necessary speculative fiction premise(s), of course.

And these issues are handled pretty well.

I started collecting at the tail end of what I call the 'Michael' storyline which came to a resolution in #177, and as I say, started working backwards. I don't recall exactly why I picked up that issue. It had a lot of characters in it, though, and I know I found some of them interesting - particularly Wonder Man. That may explain why I started with the issues in the 150s that I did. I was enough of a fan that when I found a tv show on PBS called 'The Avengers,' I was excited! Then I watched it and it was about a couple of English spy-types, and I was disappointed. Then I realised how great it was and I was excited again, even though it was just Steed and Peel and not superheroes at all. (Except for that one episode, 'The Winged Avenger' - but I'm digressing again.).

Anyway, in the 150s, there are a lot of episodic bits, but also some longer running story arcs. This idea was later picked up by TV shows like 'The X Files,' which had a general 'monster of the week' strategy but with a multi-season overarching plot. Or two. The recurring story elements in these issues concern a tension between Wonder Man/Simon Williams and The Vision. (Spoilers ahead, for those who might be worrying.)

The setup is that Wonder Man was given superpowers to fight the Avengers back when the issues were in single digits, but turned coat on the evil scientists who gave him the powers and was killed. His brain patterns were used to create the brain, or personality at least, of The Vision. Then in the 150s, Wonder Man is returned to life. (For some values of life - his death may not have been real death. But that's not important right now.) So now you've got Wonder Man and The Vision who both have the same brain patterns. This causes them both anxiety, as they speculate about the nature of individuality and which of them is 'real' or are they both 'real?' Cue also some ruminations about the nature of humanity and so on, since The Vision is an artificial construct ... Good stuff.

One of the other things which is striking about the series is that the marquee characters, the ones that have their own titles, are usually less interesting than the 'minor' characters. I quite like Wonder Man, and found his arc interesting both when I first read it and now. Yellowjacket and the Wasp are both Avengers at this point, and their relationship and stories are also appealing. Iron Man and Thor ... eh, not so much. Partly this is because they've got their own titles so they'll only appear in short bursts, with a few lines of dialogue to explain where they've been, often with a footnote referring back to their own title. In fact, this is used by the writers as a source of tension as the more 'full-time' Avengers find it frustrating to have these two powerhouses appear and disappear willy-nilly.

The Michael storyline, which ends in #177, really starts with a cryptic vignette in #167, where a model at Janet (The Wasp) Pym's fashion show mysteriously disappears, setting up a 10 issue arc taking most of a year to finish. (You could trace the storyline further back in other comics if you tried. There's a Guardians of the Galaxies tie in, from the future no less. Actually quite a bit of casual time travel in these episodes. For those only familiar with the movies, by the way, this is completely different set of Guardians of the Galaxy.) The Guardians have come back in time chasing Korvac, the Machine Man, and connect with the Avengers by way of their friendship with Thor. (After the usual mistaken identity punch-up.)

Over the next ten issues, there's a slow burn, with a few more hints and bits of foreshadowing, plus a couple of semi-random unrelated brouhahas. A few new characters are introduced, and then it all comes to a head in the climactic showdown where Michael (spoiler!) takes on all the Avengers, including a batch of ex-Avengers, single-handedly, and exterminates them all except a few of the most powerful, and then ... surrenders and yields up his life, restoring all the dead Avengers to life. In a coda, his beloved whose wavering faith in their cause was the reason for his surrender, 'powers up,' in order to force Thor's hand (or hammer) to kill her in turn.

The twist, if you want to call it that, was that although Michael was intending to take the universe in hand, it was not to dominate it, but to cultivate it. Moondragon - remember her? - was able to see with her psychic powers that he was hoping and planning to help all life in the universe, and that the Avengers dogged pursuit had run it off the rails. She tells Thor this and he questions their role, had the Avengers been in the wrong? Moondragon subtly alters the memories of the survivors so that they will think of it as another great victory, but she will remember, and walks away with tears in her eyes. This is, unironically, the stuff of tragedy - hubris, miscommunication, love gained, and then lost.

There are a few really nice moments in that final issue of the story. The penultimate full page image of Michael and Carina collapsed in the middle, hands nearly touching, surrounded by the sprawled and fallen heroes all around them, with only the lovers in colour, and all the heroes in shades of grey and black, except for Moondragon and Thor, small in the upper right corner, is striking. The use of colour as Moondragon walks away with Thor in his human form as Dr Blake tens the wounded is nice. As Thor's memory fades,so too does the the colour of he and his patients fade to a single reddish hue, leaving Moondragon the focus in the foreground and in colour. There is another excellent sequence where Captain America, just a human being with a shield, gives Michael a run for his money along with lines of defiance, 'This is no God hitting you, no super-man, just a man.' One of my favourite bits, though, features Wonder Man. They've been setting up his battle with his fear of (second) death since before this story started, and now it pays off. As he takes on Michael, he faces his fear, accepts his mortality, saying, 'if you're brought back from the death, there must be a reason ... This is my moment.' Despite his enormous power, I think there's something particularly human about Wonder Man. He was one of the characters I made a point of following from title to title.

So that's it, twenty-ish issues, covering (With gaps) 1975 to 1978, and a rise in the cover price from a quarter to 35 cents. I continued to collect the Avengers, so there will be more, but I'm stopping here for the moment. As I said, this was the series and story that got me started, and I leapt in with a vigour and enthusiasm that should surprise no one who knows me. From this beginning I collected for seventeen or eighteen years, ending up with somewhere between three and four thousand comics (at an estimate). The question now is whether these make the cut to be saved or whether they, too, go on the metaphorical chopping block. They have great sentimental value, for the reasons outlined above. I think for now, they go into the provisional box of to-be-kept.

Special Bonus Material

In any case, continuing with themes of character and relationship ... the story in this issue has very little in the way of 'action,' but quite a bit of Deathlok relating to his computer and to a person from his past - when he was still alive. It's pretty good, really. It came out in 1975, so I'm not sure how it ended up in my collection. Quite possibly a garage sale, which I haunted in hopes of finding something neat - and sometimes I did.

There's a second story in the book, a more or less straight up sci-fi story penned by Stan Lee himself, which had originally appeared as a back up story in 'Silver Surfer' #3. Called 'Tales of the The Watcher - Why Won't They Believe Me?' it's got a bit of a Twilight Zone twist ending feel to it, and it's kind of fun.

• Comic Read Through Part Four