AVENGERS BY BUSIEK & PÉREZ - REMINISCENCES

This is a post I'd hoped to have up much earlier this year, to coincide with the release date of AVENGERS vol. 3 #1 back in February, but I just wasn't able to pull it together in time. Though at this point the post is already years in the making*, so being eight months late isn't too bad when you look at it that way.

Let's start at the beginning, a year or so prior to that late 1997 release date: It was in the aftermath of "Onslaught" that Marvel launched a slew of new #1 issues. You had DEADPOOL, HEROES FOR HIRE, KA-ZAR, MAN-THING, MAVERICK, MARVEL TEAM-UP, and more. Among this group was THUNDERBOLTS, written by Kurt Busiek and drawn by Mark Bagley. I'd never heard of Busiek at the time, but Bagley was familiar to me from his days on AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, and I generally liked his artwork. Nonetheless, I nearly didn't grab THUNDERBOLTS because: what's a Thunderbolt? I was a senior in high school at the time and I had a tight budget; why read some random series about a bunch of new characters I'd never heard of?

Thank goodness for internet spoilers, then! I learned the twist ending to THUNDERBOLTS #1 via an America Online message board within a few days of its release, and promptly went straight out to pick it up. It quickly became one of my most eagerly awaited titles every month. And, eventually, when I learned that its writer would be picking up AVENGERS and IRON MAN when those two returned to the mainstream Marvel Universe after the year-long "Heroes Reborn" event wrapped up, I made sure to put those on my monthly reading list as well.**

AVENGERS BY KURT BUSIEK & GEORGE PÉREZ OMNIBUS VOLUME 1

Some months back, I railed against Marvel's decision to include the 12-issue AVENGERS FOREVER mini-series in their then upcoming AVENGERS BY KURT BUSIEK & GEORGE PÉREZ OMNIBUS, but I went ahead and pre-ordered it anyway, selling off my old AVENGERS ASSEMBLE hardcovers to subsidize the purchase. And, as it turns out, I'm quite happy I did.

This AVENGERS run, by writer Busiek and artist Pérez, was really my first time reading the series -- or at least the mainstream Marvel Universe version of it -- on a regular monthly basis. I knew of the Avengers; I'd seen them plenty of times in guest-spots in other series I read. I had even read a handful of issues from the period when Bob Harras was the series' regular writer. But it was actually Busiek's THUNDERBOLTS, which launched around the time the Avengers were rebooted via "Heroes Reborn", that got me to pick this series up. I loved that first year of THUNDERBOLTS, and when I learned that its writer would be handling AVENGERS and IRON MAN when they returned to the mainstream universe, I made plans to follow those titles as well.