Who’s my favorite Avenger?

Keeping busy during a socially isolating pandemic means finding things to do other than watching TV. While I have been doing a lot of that, I’ve been trying to spend some time doing other things that occupy my mind and keep me entertained. I’ve always been a list-maker, so I turned to my blog several months ago and posted about my favorite X-Men. i decided to keep going, alternating between comics and music when I followed up with My Top 50 Fleetwood Mac songs. Hey, it also gave me an opportunity to go back and listen to all their songs again! I will be continuing this pattern for as long as I am entertained, and I’m back now with my list of favorite Avengers.

Ever since I shortly after I started buying comics, the Avengers have been my favorite super-team. from the very early 1970’s until Brian Michael Bendis came on as writer with 2004’s notorious (to me) Avengers Disassembled arc. With the exception of one dark year in Marvel Comics (the Heroes Reborn year from 1996 – 1997) I read the Avengers and all its spin-offs until Bendis just ruined them for me. And while I’ve dabbled here and there after his lengthy, eight-year run (2004 – 2012), writers like Jonathan Hickman and Donny Cates have done nothing to really bring me back. Fortunately, I have nearly 35 years of beloved Avengers that I can go back and enjoy whenever I want. And (largely) from that lengthy timespan, I have created my list of favorite Avengers.

There are a handful of exceptions, though, starting with Susan Storm Richard, The Invisible Woman. Anyone reading this probably knows that Susan is my all-time favorite comic book character. Did you also know that she is an Avenger? (Once an Avengers, Always an Avenger). For four short months in 1989, Reed Ricchards (Mr. Fantastic) and Susan were members of the Avengers. It was an embarrassingly short run for Marvel editorial reasons, and despite my love for the character, it seems silly to include her on this list with a high ranking because I love the character, or a low ranking due to her brief status on the team. So I’ve ignored her membership in creating this list all together. Similarly, Storm, my 7th favorite X-Man (and 25th favorite super-heroine) would be a prime candidate to do well on my list of favorite Avengers, but for similar reasons, her tenure which began in 2011, lasted less than year as Avengers vs. X-Men tore her away from the team. I’ve decided not to count her as an Avengers for the purposes of this list as well.

Then there’s Jessica Jones. Further illustrating my love/hate relationship with the writing talents of Mr. Bendis, while his work on the Avengers I find shoddy and deplorable, his work writing Alias, the comic that created Jessica Jones, is nothing short of exemplary. One of my favorite examples of the comic genre. Naturally, when Bendis took over the Avengers he eventually go around to having his creation join the team. From 2010 to roughly 2012, Jones was a member of the New Avengers alongside her husband, Luke Cage.Since this was during the time I was not reading the Avengers, I have no way to measure her success as part of the team, so while I rank her #29 on my list of all-time favorite super-heroines, I can’t evaluate her as a member of the Avengers team.

So, before I launch into my Top 25 Avengers, here are some who almost made the list. #’s 30 – 26 are listed below:

#30 – Spider-Woman (Julia Carpenter) (Joined Avengers West Coast #74, September 1991)
#29 – Stingray (Joined as reserve member Avengers #319, July 1990)
#28 – Captain Marvel (Carol Danver) (joined Avengers #183, May 1979)
#27 – Ant-Man (Scott Lang) (joined Avengers vol. 3 #57, October 2002)
#26 – Living Lightning (Joined Avengers West Coast #74, September 1991)

Spider Woman had a brief but respectable run in the west coast branch of the team and their follow-up, Force Works. Stingray is an oceanographer who creates the coolest looking diving suit that also gives him some pretty awesome abilities. Carol Danvers joined the team in 1979 as Ms. Marvel, got a pretty shoddy send-off in one of Marvel’s many misguided attempts at storytelling came back under Kurt Busiek’s triumphant return as Warbird, where she was treated not all that much better, although was at least written well, and currently appears as Captain Marvel as one of the team’s mainstays. Scott Lang, an ex-con turned superhero with the help of Hank Pym’s original identity of Ant-Man, joined the team for a relatively brief tenure, just in time for Bendis to arrive and have the Scarlet Witch allegedly kill him off in the prelude to Avengers Disassembled. And finally, Living Lightning is a gay, LatinX member of the Avengers West Coast team who has a nifty power set and would love to see featured and explored in a title with a good writer someday.