The road to success is paved with enormous screw-ups, and Earth's Mightiest Heroes have
had their share of bad luck.
How bad, you may well ask?
Well, let's take a gander.
Beware: possible spoilers ahead, if Marvel Studios ever decides to draw on seriously
the dumbest stories in its history.
"Holy mackerel."
Even with the clunky Captain America costume and the shoehorned Cap/Thor/Iron Man fight
scene, 2012's Avengers is still better than the nightmare that was Avengers #1.
Brought together by the chicanery of Loki, the original Avengers consisted of Iron Man,
Thor, Ant-Man, and the Wasp banding together to take down the Hulk.
Tony's armor looked like a gold-plated iron lung on legs.
Thor, still waffling between his personas as the God of Thunder and surgeon Donald Blake,
keeps his identity a secret by loudly announcing what he's doing every time he transforms into
the Asgardian deity.
The Hulk runs from battle at one point and, pretty immediately, disguises himself as a
super-strong juggling clown robot in a traveling circus.
Then there's Ant-Man and the Wasp.
Ant-Man berates Wasp for being a woman.
When he and Janet arrive at their first Avengers meeting, they stand on a projector to make
themselves big enough to talk to instead of just growing to person size.
They try to capture Hulk by having ants dig a hole under him, and are defeated when Hulk
blows a fireplace bellows at them.
Captain America didn't join the Avengers until four issues into their adventures.
How did Steve Rogers get to the party?
It was a little problematic.
Thor, Ant-Man, Wasp, and Iron Man were pitted against Golden Age staple Namor the Submariner.
Namor escapes the tussle and makes his way to the North Sea, where he finds a group of
"uncomprehending Eskimos" worshiping a petrified figure as "mighty lord of the frozen ice."
Namor, having been gifted with the strength of a typhoon and intense crabbiness, breaks
apart the ice and sends the frozen figure floating into warmer waters, where his frigid
shell melts around him.
"You've been asleep, Cap.
For almost 70 years."
The frozen figure?
Captain America.
The Avengers pass in their submarine, and they make Captain America prove that he's
Captain America by having an all-out brawl with him while still inside the submarine.
Ignoring the fact that they're in a pressurized tube surrounded by tons of water, they punch,
dive, and Mjolnir their way to clarity until Wasp shuts the whole thing down by standing
in front of Cap and basically daring him to hit a girl.
The year was 1988, and frankly, it was time for superheroes to do something about rock
and roll.
The West Coast Avengers, within spitting distance of having their book cancelled, found themselves
drawn into the path of the Defiler, a suburban dad's idea of a threatening rock star.
While he may have appeared to be an innocent skull-adorned behemoth of glam rock fronting
a band called "Corruption of Innocence," he was secretly up to no good.
Defiler was an interdimensional demon using the seductive power of loud music to draw
in America's youth, throwing them into portals and draining them of their "good vibrations."
Luckily for all of those easily manipulated kids, the only thing more powerful than the
nebulously described powers of a heavily tasseled devil bad guy is Ant-Man.
He saves the day using a giant chainsaw, a giant skateboard, a giant catcher's mitt,
and a giant amount of faith in the idea that readers would be into this.
Defiler gets knocked into one of his own portals, and that's the last we ever heard from him.
Thanos is a big jerk, but darned if that didn't stop the Avengers from recruiting the Mad
Titan's brother, Eros, to the team.
Better known by his superhero moniker, Starfox, he was a late-in-the-game addition to Earth's
Mightiest Heroes.
Having the more well-meaning sibling of an unbeatable space god on your side seems like
a good idea on paper.
Can you imagine the sheer power he probably brought to the fight?
But Starfox, in addition to the usual powers of super strength, flight, and so on, possesses
the ability to super-womanize.
He stimulates the pleasure centers in other beings' brains, making them susceptible to
Starfoxery.
He was even put on trial for assault in the mid-2000s.
In the 1990s, comic book companies were in hot water.
DC had burst the collectors' market with the "Death of Superman" and Marvel was on the
verge of bankruptcy.
So they teamed up and DC vs. Marvel was born.
It was a 4-issue series of books in which the two companies, represented by two cosmic
gods, sent their respective champions into battle against one another.
The ensuing melees saw members of the Avengers getting slapped around something fierce by
their DC opponents.
Hulk took a beatdown from Superman.
Captain America, like all who face Gotham's Dark Knight, got hit with a Batarang and fell
down.
Thor did all right, managing to stop Shazam, then still called Captain Marvel, by preventing
his magic lightning from transforming him into his super self, but it was a victory
that was dampened slightly by the fact that it was 1996, and we were still 23 years away
from Zachary Levi making most people care who Shazam was.
In the aftermath of DC vs Marvel Comics, the two gods representing the companies got together
and created an all new comic book universe, the Amalgam Universe.
All of the two companies' best-selling characters saw themselves merged into half Marvel/half
DC hybrid versions of themselves.
The results were hit and miss, and generally more than a little slanted in one character's
direction.
There was Super Soldier, the Captain America/Superman hybrid that answered the question, "What if
Superman had all of his powers and also a shield?"
There was Dark Claw, a Batman/Wolverine combo that combined Wolverine's powers with Batman's
costume.
Doctor Strange and Doctor Fate became Doctor Strangefate.
He was a magic guy.
In essence, the two biggest comic book publishers in the world did what Sid from Toy Story did
to his dolls.
In 2000, Marvel launched its Ultimate line, a modern rebooting of all of its classic characters
in a parallel universe.
At its best, we got Ultimate Spider-Man, a series with solid writing and exciting reimaginings
of the heroes and villains that fans had loved for decades.
At its worst, there was Ultimatum.
Ultimatum was a crossover event branching from Mark Millar's perpetually gritty reboot
of the Avengers, The Ultimates.
It was written by Jeph Loeb, the mind behind classics like Batman: The Long Halloween and
Superman For All Seasons.
The series went off the rails.
The Wasp's intestines get eaten out of her torso, on-panel, by the Blob.
Hank Pym bites the head off of the offending eater.
Pym later explodes, Doctor Strange's head blows up, and Thor martyrs himself.
Also, Manhattan drowns.
It's grim.
The mid '90s were a tough time for Marvel.
Sales were plummeting and storylines had become too convoluted for casual readers to keep
pace.
The publisher needed to shake things up.
They needed something fresh.
Instead of doing that, Marvel handed its comics to Rob Liefeld and hoped it fixed everything.
In late 1996, Marvel launched Heroes Reborn.
Spearheaded by Liefeld and Jim Lee, it took the Avengers, along with a few other Marvel
A-listers, and put them in a slightly different universe with slightly different origin stories.
The event also included some redesigns of the characters that sidestepped typical human
anatomy.
Nobody walked away unscathed, but poor Captain America got the worst of it.
His redesign left readers with an illustration of machismo-fueled body horror destined for
memehood.
Given his charismatic movie persona, it's possible you've forgotten that Tony Stark
has had some rough moments.
For one, the dude's wardrobe was a mess.
Take the Mark 1.
Immortalized in 2008's Iron Man as sort of a Ned Kelly mech suit, the outfit first appeared
in comics in Tales of Suspense #39 back in 1963.
It wasn't great.
It got the job done, protecting Tony and keeping his heart going, but some of its other features
were objectively less super.
For example, it had suction cups on the hands so Tony could attach to the ceiling.
"Not bad."
Luckily, by the Mark 2, Stark had improved on his original design significantly by, uh,
painting it gold.
It was slow going at first.
Tony's suits seemed to follow the Adam West utility belt tradition of doing whatever specific,
ridiculous thing needed doing.
He spent a good time getting around on roller skates, for one.
He built a scuba suit that shot ink like a squid, and of course, there was the cartoonishly
proportioned YT1 armor.
Imagine you've been invited to hang out at a professional level with a super soldier,
a god, a billionaire, and a hulk.
You?
Can talk to ants.
And shrink.
This, friends, is the burden on Ant-Man.
Hank Pym has a long and sordid history of decidedly unheroic behavior.
Back in Mark Millar's Ultimates run, an argument ended with Hank hitting his wife, dousing
her in bug spray, and setting his ants on her.
Before that, there was Avengers #213, where Pym, now calling himself Yellowjacket, backhanded
The Wasp when she pointed out that he was acting crazy.
He eventually quit the Avengers over it, and now Scott Lang cosplays as him.
"I lost your mother.
I didn't mean to lose you, too."
Scarlet Witch has had a doozy of a time trying to start a family.
Her most well publicized misadventure into domesticity came with 2005's House of M event,
in which she tried to create her own kids wholecloth by reconstructing the fabric of
reality.
Weirdly, that wasn't the most surreal example.
In the '80s, Wanda Maximoff tried to create a pair of kids with magic, with her as the
mother and Vision as the father.
What she got ended up being an unholy and overly complex manifestation of shards of
a demon soul.
Then the supervillain Master Pandemonium got his hands on them.
Or rather, they got on his hands.
Long story short, Master Pandemonium is a demonic antagonist with the power to turn
his arms into demons.
The minute he got within reach of Wanda's kids, he grafted them onto the ends of his
elbows, and he had baby arms.
Yes, one of the Avengers' foes once fought the team with babies for arms.
Incidentally, versions of Wanda's kids eventually went on to join the Young Avengers.
With the meteoric rise of the MCU over the last decade, the casual viewer might ask themselves,
"Why didn't anyone try to make Marvel movies sooner?"
A few filmmakers did, and they were awful.
Captain America had some serials in the 1940s, and those have sort of a nostalgic charm.
After that, it's tough to find an Avenger with a worthwhile movie outing.
There was the 1977 Spider-Man, starring a man in pajamas and enormous web shooters desperately
scurrying up buildings.
Thor appears in 1988's The Incredible Hulk Returns, the TV movie continuation of the
Incredible Hulk TV series, with a Thor adorned in fur.
There's also the movie-length pilot for a Doctor Strange series starring a young Jessica
Walter, a.k.a. Lucille Bluth, as Morgan le Fay and Peter Hooten as the good Doctor.
And who could forget that David Hasselhoff played Nick Fury a mere ten years before Sam
Jackson took on the role?
A lot of people, probably.
"I always heard living well's the best revenge."
It's not just every single Marvel character that's searching for redemption; it's Marvel
itself.
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