A morbid introduction to the Avengers

As an introduction to the world's mightiest heroes, you really couldn't really pick a worse comic that Avengers #177 by Jim Shooter and David Wenzel, but that's where I came in and that's why I always think of the Avengers as a bunch of glorious losers.

It's the end of the Korvac saga, where after months and months of drawn out adventures, the Avengers and the old-school Guardians of the Galaxy have finally tracked down the cosmically-powered Korvac to a suburban household. And they go in, all guns blazing, and get the shit killed out of them. 

It's an absolute slaughter. Characters who had faced incredible odds for years are brutally killed with the wave of a hand, and only the very powerful and very lucky are still standing at the end. They're all conveniently returned to life again before the issue is over, but they still die there, right on the page.

There is a part of me that thinks all Avengers comics should be like this. I read it sometime in the early eighties, when I had access to a lot of late seventies Marvel. 

I was more of an X-Men kid - there are vivid memories of loving Uncanny #138, the one after Phoenix dies, because it's an insanely moody recap of the entire series so far. That's the X-Men, and I was slowly drawn into that spiraling soap opera, but after getting my socks blown off by this issue, the Avengers was the series where everybody fails and dies.

Even though I know the Avengers have triumphed again and again, it's the period where they're losing that always feels most true to me - from the slow decay of the team after the Masters of Evil kicked the shit out of their mansion to the never-ending Dark Avengers bollocks of the Bendis era, there's not a hell of great triumphs in there.

No wonder I fell for the first Infinity Gauntlet series when it appeared in the 1990s, because the Marvel heroes are losing from the start - half of them wiped out before anybody does anything. When they're later all slaughtered at Thanos' discretion, it's a suicide mission from the start.

There are things too big to defeat, have to be clever, or just hope that someone can find some empathy in their transcendence, because Captain America's shield can't bash that.

But that's also why I like the Avengers so much, because they know they're going to get the shit kicked out of them, but they do it anyway. The Justice league will always prevail, but the Avengers are the last ones standing when all else is lost. They'll probably still lose, but they'll always go down fighting.