You're quite welcome, Mr. Bowman. It's a pleasure to discover that folks out there are reading my old posts. This one came together for me quite well and I'm glad you found it fun and informative---the two things I strive for in writing this column.
Another newbie stopping by. Great write-up, Commander! I got the entire run of the Kooky Quartet era in the Marvel Tripple Action reprints. It was very much a different dynamic from the classic post-Hulk line-up, where Stan seemed to strain to find reasons for the team to bicker -- ohhhh, Iron Man missed a meeting, well, we'll have to punish him by suspending his membership for a few days, never mind that he may have had a valid reason and that we might actually need him. Mostly, Wasp ogled Thor; Cap, Giant-Man and Thor marveled at the genius of Tony Stark and pondered getting him to join (while Tony guffawed to himself on the other side of his iron mask); and Iron Man, Thor, and Giant-Man woo wooed about Cap's skill and bravery and leadership skills. I think Stan must have been getting bored and what better way to really shake things up than replacing the old guard with some brash, young former villains. Issues 15 & 16 were landmarks -- first genuinely killing off Baron Zemo, who had been their primary foe over the previous year, and then making a significant change to the line-up. It certainly made for a greater story-telling engine, in that now Cap really could show he could lead under the most challenging circumstances with skilled but fairly raw recruits who didn't regard him with utter awe. As it played out, not only was Cap training Hawkeye, Pietro & Wanda to work as a team, but he was also having to learn himself to be a better leader, even when he'd rather have quit and gone to work for SHIELD or the CIA or become a boxer. Yeah, that couldn't have lasted long.
Welcome, Mr. Hill. I'm glad you enjoyed the write-up.
You're spot on, I believe, in your estimation that Stan Lee wanted to shift the Avengers membership to introduce stronger character dynamics. Lee never liked to take a concept and do it the same way DC did. The Silver-Age Justice League of America never had internal dissention, rarely showed any individual personalities, and virtually every issue ended with the Leaguers seated around the secret-sanctuary council table, smiling smugly at their latest triumph.
Now, I don't have a problem with that approach. JLA was my favourite DC title and I enjoyed it more than I did The Avengers. But Stan Lee certainly did. As you pointed out, he had a difficult time inserting the kind of character conflict he preferred in the classic Avenger line-up of Thor, Iron Man, Cap, Giant-Man, and the Wasp.
In changing the core membership of the Assemblers, what Lee did was alter the basic nature of the Avengers' existence as a team. You see, you have two basic kinds of super-hero teams.
The first is a team composed of individual heroes who band together when the need arises. That means the team itself isn't the principal reason its members serve as super-heroes. They all became super-heroes with the idea of acting independently, and membership on the team is simply a collateral duty---something they do in addition to being super-heroes and fighting their own rogues' gallery of foes and living their own private, civilian lives and careers.
A real-life analogue to this would be having a membership in the Elks or the Masons. You live your own life, raise your family, pursue your career, and you join up with the other Elks or Masons once a month or whatever.
The Justice League and Justice Society followed this template.
The other kind of super-team is the one where its members exist to be a part of the team. That's the primary reason they are super-heroes. Oh, sure, they might give some lip service to a civilian identity and have an occasional personal foe, but principally, their purpose is to be a member of the team. Being a member of the team is a primary duty.
In real life, it would be like being a member of the military or a police force or a fire department. Yes, one has a personal life, but it's largely subsumed by his duties as being a member of the team.
The classic Avengers---the immediate post-Hulk line-up---was the first style of super-team. When Stan Lee changed the line-up, it became the second style: Cap and Hawkeye and Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch were primarily Avengers. Only Captain America had a real existence outside the team; the others were virtually Avengers twenty-four hours a day. At the end of an Avengers meeting, Hawkeye and Wanda and Pietro didn't leave the mansion and return to their own base of operations and fight crime as individuals until the next meeting.
No, they lived at the mansion, trained as a team, interacted with each other on a daily basis.
And that kind of involvement creates a greater personal dynamic than exists between folks who just see each other once a month.
Yeah, Stan Lee knew what he was doing.
And Cap felt his existance outside of the Avengers wasn't very interesting, so he joined SHIELD to have something to do when he wasn't an Avenger.
Part of Cap's problem was previously, as per the retcon of 1964, he had only ever been a soldier or a superhero. It wasn't until the post-Kirby returns era of the late '70s/early '80s that anyone tried figuring out what was Steve Rogers doing before he became Cap in 1941. Even in his own Tales of Suspence strip, unlike most of Marvel's other heroes, Cap was almost all action all the time, and the times he took off his mask and interacted with people who weren't part of his life as Captain America were pretty much non-existent.
Comment
No flame wars. No trolls. But a lot of really smart people.The Captain Comics Round Table tries to be the friendliest and most accurate comics website on the Internet.
SOME ESSENTIALS:
FOLLOW US:
OUR COLUMNISTS:
You need to be a member of Captain Comics to add comments!
Join Captain Comics