AVENGERS BY BOB HARRAS, STEVE EPTING, & TOM PALMER

We spent the majority of this year (and going way back to mid-2021, in fact) in Marvel's 1970s, so I was thinking it's time to skip ahead a couple decades to an era I've surprisingly visited very rarely around here, considering it's when I did the majority of my formative comic book reading: the dreaded 1990s! And specifically, we're going to look at a run which is weirdly near and dear to me, though I've read precious little of it: The multi-year AVENGERS saga by writer Bob Harras, penciler Steve Epting, and mainstay inker Tom Palmer.

See, when I was a lad in middle school (around 13-15 years old), these were the Avengers: Black Knight wielding a lightsaber, Sersi dressed in red and black, Crystal in white and black, clean-shaven Hercules, and more -- and all wearing matching leather bomber jackets! I didn't read the AVENGERS series, but I saw this group in things like Jim Starlin's INFINITY trilogy, the X-Men's "Bloodties" crossover, and more. And my best friend back then did read the book, so I would peruse issues at his house -- and I liked what I saw! Not enough to start reading the title myself, but that was most likely simply due to the fact that my limited comic budget was tied up mostly with Spider-Man and the X-Men.

Still, I never forgot this run. (I even told Bob Harras how much I had enjoyed what I'd seen of it when I met him at the San Diego Comic-Con in 1999!) And back at the beginning of the year, I used a Christmas gift card to buy the AVENGERS: THE GATHERING Omnibus, which I had regretted passing on when it was first released in 2020. On top of that, I've also picked up digital editions of the Epic Collections covering this run in various Comixology/Amazon sales in recent years. So I'm pretty well armed at this point to delve into the Avengers of the nineties.