Marvel is in a place they haven’t been in a long time and that’s second place. 2025 was not the best year for the House of Ideas, with their distinguished competition finally overtaking them in the sales charts. For the first time in a long time, they aren’t on top and most of their most beloved franchises in the comics have hit some hard times, especially the Avengers. It’s felt like nothing that the company has been able to do in a decade with the team has really connected with fans. Earth’s Mightiest Heroes are still a favorite of readers, but there hasn’t felt like a reason to buy their book in a long time.
Videos by ComicBook.com
This isn’t a weird place for the team to be. The isn’t the first time the group has fallen from popularity, existing as a shadow of its former self. 21 years ago, the Avengers had been falling under the tide line for a while but the company was able to pull them out of the undertow with a legendary book: New Avengers. New Avengers has its problems, but it also made the team into what it needed to be: the biggest team in comics. This is the key to the success of the Avengers in 2026, and it looks like Marvel may know this.
New Avengers Reminded Readers of the Magic of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes
The Avengers are the team in the Marvel Universe. Back when they first assembled, they brought together the greatest solo heroes of the House of Ideas and the old stories always felt like the stars of the book were the stars of the superhero community. However, as the X-Men supplanted the heroes of the Avengers as the top heroes in Marvel, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes became less important as a book. It was no longer the epicenter of Marvel. New Avengers changed all of that.
It did this in the simplest way possible: it combined icons of Marvel like Captain America and Iron Man, characters important to the lore but not super popular when it came to sales, with the two most popular characters in the company: Wolverine and Spider-Man. On top of that, Luke Cage, who was cool again, was added to the team, with Spider-Woman and the Sentry as the wild cards that could be taken in interesting directions. The team felt important again, because it had the important characters. It felt like a snapshot of Marvel at the time, defining what the company was in the ’00s.
This became the formula for the team for years; take hot characters from around Marvel and put them in New Avengers or later Avengers books like Avengers, Secret Avengers, Dark Avengers, and the like. The team felt like a showcase for everything that Marvel was as a whole. At its core, the team is just the Justice League; a collection of the greatest heroes. However, for a while now, the team hadn’t collected the greatest heroes in Marvel, or at least not the ones that readers wanted. Once it started doing that again, it soared.
Since 2018, the Avengers have been MCU-friendly teams, and that’s not really worked for comic readers. Avengers hasn’t felt important in years because it never really felt connected to the rest of the Marvel Universe the way it did in the New Avengers days. It honestly just felt like a book that existed to make MCU fans buy comics, which has never been a thing. That connection helped make it a favorite of all Marvel fans, and it feels like Marvel may have realized that.
Armageddon May Be the Key to Fixing the Avengers
Armageddon is the next big Marvel event. The publisher has just started the build to it in Captain America and Wolverine: Weapons of Armageddon, and Avengers: Armageddon has been been announced with the above image. This image screams New Avengers to me; it has Spider-Man and Wolverine, the two most popular characters in Marvel. It has several Avengers lifers, like the New Avengers did, and there’s Invisible Woman, a character who has been getting a lot of attention and fan appreciation. This is a team that fans would love.
The Avengers have sat off by themselves for a while now, and it’s time to change that. New Avengers came at a time much like this one; the group hadn’t been popular for a spell, and needed a shot in the arm. That shot involved the most popular characters, the biggest icons, the coolest B-listers, and a connection to the events of the day that made the book a must-read. It seems like Marvel may understand this, and I hope they can replicate the success of the New Avengers to bring the team back to there they belong.
What do you think of the New Avengers? Leave a comment in the comment section below and join the conversation on the ComicBook Forums!
Most Viewed
-
Image Courtesy of Toei Animation -
Image Courtesy of Marvel Comics
