The Avengers have been featured in some of the best story arcs and events in all of comic
history.
While the team has had many memorable moments on the pages of Marvel comics, they aren’t
always perfect; there has also been plenty of times where writers have gone a bit, let’s
say, astray, and the quality of Earth’s greatest heroes stories become questionable.
So today, we’re taking a closer look at some of the more groan worthy, comical and
straight up strange narratives that have appeared in their past with our list of the top 10
dumbest Avengers storylines.
10 Thor’s Clone In the original Civil War story event, in
issue 3 of the series, some weird crap went down.
Iron Man, who was pitted against Captain America and the heroes who sided with him over the
Superhero Registration Act, found himself in need of boosting his own forces.
So what did he do?
He took cells from Thor, cloned them, and then created a weird doppleganger of the Asgardian
god named Ragnarok.
So yeah, apparently Tony Stark can clone literal gods.
And what happened next was even weirder.
In battle, Ragnarok straight up murdered bill Foster’s Goliath by impaling him through
the chest.
9 DC Versus Marvel DC versus Marvel was a 1996 crossover limited
series published by DC and Marvel.
And it’s not really good.
The concept behind it?
Two cosmic brothers who personify the Marvel and DC universes become aware of each other’s
existence and decide to pit their respective universe’s superheroes against one another
as part of a challenge, with the losing universe ceasing to exist.
Which, obviously, wasn’t really at stake, so as you can imagine, it wasn’t super engaging.
What’s worse is that out of the eleven main battles to occur in the series, five of the
outcomes were determined by votes from fans.
By the end of it, the two Brothers see these match ups as pointless and withdraw from the
challenge.
So it was all for nothing after all, surprise surprise.
The only positive that came from this was that it introduced the Amalgam universe; a
12 issue series in which characters from the DC and Marvel universes were amalgamated together.
8 Civil War 2 Now don’t get me wrong; some people really
dig Civil War 2.
But, at the end of the day, you can’t deny – Civil War 2 was created as a cross promotion
for the MCU film Captain America Civil War, which told the tale of the original Civil
War story arc.
Civil War 2 wasn’t nearly as good as its predecessor.
Many people also felt that Civil War 2 was a necessary filler story arc to help prepare
for two other story events – Captain America Steve Rogers and Secret Empire that followed.
Regardless of where you stand on it, it did get mixed reviews and as the story progressed,
its sales declined.
This time around, it’s Iron Man versus Captain Marvel, free will versus determinism, surrounding
the discovery of an Inhuman who has the power to predict the future.
The conflict is over whether or not to use his abilities to stop crimes and disasters
from occurring.
7 Copyright Debacle Fans of the MCU are no stranger to the fact
that the cinematic universe owned by Disney has had to beat around the bush when it comes
to one particular word – and topic – that for a long time was off limits.
Mutants.
Now that the merger with Fox has occurred, mutants are back on the table for the MCU.
But this legal woe didn’t only affect what we saw up on the big screen.
In Uncanny Avengers issue 4, there was a whole retcon that had fans groaning like there was
no tomorrow.
Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver were revealed to not actually be mutants after all.
The villain the Hugh Evolutionary tells them that Magneto was never actually Wanda and
Pietro’s father, and that they don’t carry the mutant gene.
Instead, the High Evolutionary is responsible for giving them their powers, all part of
a scheme of his to find genetic perfection.
They were experimented on as children, similar to what we see in MCU film Avengers Age of
Ultron.
So why did the retcon happen?
Around that time, relations between Marvel and Fox weren’t so hot, and many speculated
that this was a move to help give Marvel the upper hand concerning the twins.
6 Heroes Reborn Heroes Reborn is often seen as one of the
low points in the history of Avengers story arcs.
It’s a cross over from 1996 and 1997.
In the aftermath of the Onslaught story event, a bunch of heroes, including the Avengers,
were killed off, only to be reborn in a pocket universe created by Franklin Richards, the
near omnipotent son of Fantastic Four members, Reed Richards and Sue Storm.
This allowed for the revision of a slew of Marvel heroes’ origins.
As you can imagine, many of these changes were controversial and didn’t bode well
with a lot of fans.
It was also notorious for some pretty bad artwork, with female characters being drawn
wildly out of proportion and other characters, like Captain America, looking like this.
It’s like his chest is a literal shelf, you guys.
He could balance a tv on that sh*t.
Like c’mon Rob Liefeld.
5 Avengers issue 178 Moving away from story arcs to one story in
particular, in at this number we have a filler story that appeared in Avengers issue 178
from 1978 called The Martyr Perplex.
In it, Beast is having a night on the town picking up women at a nightclub.
Actually.
He gets assaulted by some random dude then storms out of the club, where he’s attacked
by a strange apparition of a man who claims to be hurt by any spiritual harm that Hank
McCoy is inflicted with.
He’s never really brought up again.
The following week he goes out clubbing again (ugh) and turns out that this is all part
of the Manipulator’s plan to get Beast to under his control; a ploy he plans on rein
acting with all of the Avengers.
Beast is under his mental control until Agent Marsden shows up, pays off the Manipulator
and Beast eventually comes back to his senses.
So all in all, kind of a waste of a story.
4 Captain America Steve Rogers One of the biggest crossover events over at
Marvel in 2017 was Secret Empire.
While there’s a lot to say about that story event, it didn’t make our list.
Rather, the story arc that led up to it does, featuring one of the most prominent members
of the Avengers – 2016’s Captain America Steve Rogers.
This storyline was highly controversial, coming out briefly after the election of US president
Donald Trump.
Many critics made a correlation between the two – comics have a history of being highly
impacted by the political and social context of what’s going on in the real world, dating
back to the Golden Age, so it was a far assumption, despite the fact that the creative team behind
it at Marvel denied there was any inspiration from US politics.
Anywho, the story followed the tale of how Captain America had been replaced by an evil
version of himself who was a member of HYDRA and a straight up fascist.
He was acting as a sleeper agent who was covertly preparing to establish HYDRA as the main world
power.
Secret Empire would address the aftermath of this, making Cap good again, but at the
time, people were really pissed off that a character like Steve Rogers, who stood for
patriotism and the good of the USA, could be altered so easily into the exact opposite
of that.
No comment on the Trump similarities there, friends, although I’m sure if you google
it you could find a whole lot of think pieces about the ordeal.
3 The Rape of Ms Marvel This one is so painfully cringe worthy.
Captain Marvel, aka Carol Danvers, went through quite the sh*t storm back in her Ms Marvel
days.
Girl has dealt with some serious trauma.
And part of that trauma is from this strange story arc, which began in The Avengers issue
200 from 1980.
In a story written by Bob Layton, David Michelinie, George Perez and Jim Shooter, Carol is kidnapped
by someone named Marcus, the son of Immortus, a long time Avengers foe.
She’s taken to an alternate dimension, brainwashed, raped and then impregnated.
When she returns to earth, she gives birth to the child who turns out to be Marcus, who
grows rapidly into an adult, and then takes Ms Marvel back to his dimension.
This is all without any protest from other Avengers members – something that received
a whole lot of outrage.
Comic historian Carol A Strickland wrote a famous essay on the story arc called the rape
of ms marvel in which she cited a line from Marcus as evidence that his actions were in
fact rape.
He said, I quote, “finally, after relative weeks of such efforts and admittedly with
a subtle boost from Immortus’ machines, you became mine.”
Chris Claremont, who would take over the story in Avengers Annual #10 in 1981 actively went
about trying to fix the mess that story made, having stated he too felt it was inappropriate.
Carol would return to the Avengers and give them hell for not doing anything to try to
help her when she was clearly in need.
She would leave the team, joining the X-Men, eventually taking on the Binary persona.
2 Ultimatum Ultimatum, which took place in the Ultimate
universe, is often considered to be crude and excessive.
It’s a story arc that took a lot of heat from critics and fans alike.
The 2009 storyline stretched the span of five issues and follows the events of Magneto’s
attempt to destroy the world after the deaths of his children, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver.
It also acted as a means of closing up the Ultimate universe, which pissed off a lot
of fans, too.
The planet suffers a doomsday of sorts, with natural disasters wrecking havoc across various
different parts of the globe.
Magneto is responsible.
During that and in the aftermath, a TON of heroes die horrible deaths.
Blob literally eats the Wasp’s body, noting that she tastes like chicken, to which Hank
Pym loses his sh*t, grows giant in size and then bites the Blob’s head off as retribution,
all while a horrified Hawkeye watches on.
It’s pretty nasty.
Magneto kills Wolverine by ripping the adamantium from his skeleton and affecting his cells
so that he can’t regenerate.
Eventually Magneto is defeated, with Cyclops disintegrating his head with an optic blast,
only to later be assassinated himself – by Quicksilver, who turned out to be alive after
all.
1 Avengers: The Crossing The Crossing is often thought to be one of
Marvel’s worst cross overs ever.
Long story short, Tony Stark became bad, got killed, was replaced by a younger version
of himself, but actually, not really.
If that didn’t make much sense to you, don’t worry, the full blown story wouldn’t either.
So when it begins, Tony has got a secret and he’s going around killing women for some
reason in order to keep that secret.
Hank Pym, aka Yellowjacket at that time, tries to stop him from killing an inhuman named
Marilla, but Tony ends up murdering him on the front steps of the Avengers mansion.
He kills Marilla as well.
This prompts the Avengers and the Force Works, a team that was composed of old West coast
Avengers that Iron Man had led for a while, to time travel.
They go back in time, recruit a younger Tony Stark to help defeat the older modern day
Stark.
Teenage Stark was supposed to replace regular Stark in the marvel universe but due to reader
backlash, writers revealed that Kang the Conquerer, who present day Stark was supposed to be in
cahoots with, was actually IMMORTUS ALL ALONG!
And teenage Stark and present day Stark merged and it was all a big mess.
There’s also a ton of plot holes in the story, and a bunch of nonsensical characters
inserted into the fray that don’t really add anything to the narrative.
There we have it friends!
What other Avengers storylines in the comics do you think are dumb?
Are there storylines in the MCU you think should fall into this category as well?
Give us a shout in those comments below and let us know all of your thoughts!
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