The Avengers have been giving readers some of the coolest superhero stories since 1963. The group brings together the best Marvel heroes out there and throws them at the biggest threats. Over the years, fans have known exactly what they were going to get from their awesome adventures. There will be some character building, some thrills, some chills, some spills, and the kind of climactic battles that will keep a fan glued to the book. Their stories have been worked on by the best creators out there, and have become some of the most important in Marvel history. However, some otherwise cool stories have been ruined by fan service.
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Fan service means a lot of things. At its core, it’s about giving fans what they want but it’s mostly about using sex to keep people reading. There are entire anime and manga that revolve around fan service. In superhero comics, it doesn’t have to be sex – it can be glazing a character that the most readers like, for example – but there have been times where an Avengers story has been otherwise great, but is suddenly derailed by some good old fashioned fan service. Sex sells, after all. These five great Avengers comics had too much fan service, damaging them in the eyes of the fandom.
5) The Ultimates/The Ultimates 2/The Ultimates 3
The Ultimates became co-flagship of the original Ultimate Universe (along with Ultimate Spider-Man) almost immediately and all three books starring the team have so much fan service. The first two series, from Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch, went pretty hard on the almost nudity, Hitch’s detailed, realistic style giving readers some beautiful, almost naked women all the time. The Wasp especially gets naked like crazy. Millar’s sex jokes have aged like milk and were always one of the weakest parts of the stories, though. The Ultimates 3, by Jeph Loeb and Joe Madureira has lots of fan service, with Madureira’s manga-inspired art giving readers lots and lots of T&A (anyone familiar with his career – including that Battle Chasers #1 variant – knows his predilections), especially from Scarlet Witch. No one has ever liked The Ultimates 3 because of its often gross sexuality, but the first two volumes have also aged poorly on that front as well.
4) New Avengers (Vol. 1) #14-15
New Avengers (Vol. 1) was a massive hit. It brought Spider-Man and Wolverine to the team and drove Luke Cage and Spider-Woman back to prominence. Brian Michael Bendis wrote the series and worked with some of the hottest artists of the ’00s, including Frank Cho. Cho got famous because of Liberty Meadows, a book that followed a beautiful, buxom woman named Brandy and her animal friends; guess what the focus of the book was (it’s not furry stuff, just garden variety T&A). Cho joined Bendis for issues #14-15, which dug into Jessica Drew’s past before joining the team. Cho is known for his cheesecake art and these two issues were full of it. We got the obligatory completely naked woman with strategically placed blocking and several splash pages that are just beautiful women in suggestive poses. The book was extremely important to the overall story of the book, but the fan service was definitely distracting. Marvel in the ’00s was honestly all about comics like this, so it wasn’t a surprise but reading it today really shows how inessential the fan service was to the narrative.
3) Avengers (Vol. 3) #71
Geoff Johns was DC’s ’00s heavyweight, but he had a short run on Avengers (Vol. 3). Much like his work at DC, his conception of the team was very much from Bronze Age comics, bringing a group that combined classic members with some newbies like Jack of Hearts to readers. Personally, I really enjoyed his run with the group (“Red Zone” is especially good), but there was one extremely questionable story and it came from issue #71. This book focused on Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne rekindling their romance in Las Vegas and has a sex scene that involves a shrunken, wet Hank after a round of love making crawling out of somewhere (think about that The Boys scene, but hetero). It isn’t overly suggestive or graphic but it sort of grinds the whole issue to a halt. It caused a minor controversy back in the day, to the extent that Marvel reprinted the issue without the scene included. It could have been a cool story about two people coming back together and it ended up something of a punch line.
2) Dark Avengers
“Dark Reign” was an amazing time for Marvel, with the post-Civil War superhero community under the control of Norman Osborn. The flagship for this era was Dark Avengers, a book from Brian Michael Bendis (with Matt Fraction writing the X-Men crossover issues), Mike Deodato Jr., and Mike Mayhew (Luke Ross drew the Fraction issues). Deodato entered the comic industry in the mid ’90s as part of the Bad Girl art craze, so fan service has always been a huge part of the DNA of his superhero art. In Dark Avengers, we got Moonstone as Ms. Marvel and she was the source of so much fan service. She was constantly bending over, there were a few times where she was nude or in some stage of undress, and she was much more promiscuous than she had been before. Deodato (and to a lesser extent Mayhew) tapped into those old muscles for her in this book and you can tell every time you read it.
1) “The Ultron Initiative”
Bendis and Cho are back for their most fan service-y story yet. Mighty Avengers came in the wake of Civil War, starring the Superhero Initiative-approved roster of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes: Iron Man, Carol Danvers as Ms. Marvel,, Wasp, Black Widow, Ares, the Sentry, and Wonder Man. This new team had their work cut out for them immediately, as they were attacked by an all-new Ultron form. This time, the homicidal robot used nanites to take control of Iron Man’s armor and remake it into a form that looked like a naked Janet Van Dyne. That’s right, this issue is basically Cho drawing a naked woman as the villain for multiple issues, using some strategically placed coloring to keep it from just being straight nudity. I remember reading this book back in the day and just sort of setting it down when it got to the fight against naked Janet-tron. It just breaks the whole story. This could have been a cool Ultron story and instead we got this fan service classic.
Which Avengers stories do you think are ruined by fan service? Leave a comment in the comment section below and join the conversation on the ComicBook Forums!
