The Avengers are Marvel’s heaviest hitters, and have been the biggest team in the Marvel Universe, even when they weren’t the most popular, for decades. Combining the greatest heroes on Earth to form a group that could face any threat, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes have had their share of ups and downs. There were times when the Avengers were the most popular team in Marvel Comics, even taking the top of the sales chart from the X-Men in the ’00s. The Marvel Cinematic Universe made the team a household name, driving loads of new fans to the comics to check out their favorite group.
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Great things have happened in the Avengers comics, but it hasn’t all been sunshine and rainbows. The team has had its share of tribulations beyond the villains they face, as Marvel has fumbled the group numerous times. These are the seven worst things that the publisher did to the Avengers, often torpedoing the team when they didn’t need it.
7) Jed MacKay’s Avengers
Jed MacKay is currently one of Marvel’s most beloved creators. Books like Moon Knight, Black Cat, Strange, and Doctor Strange made him popular, and he was announced as the writer of a new volume of Avengers after Jason Aaron’s run ended in 2022. MacKay set up an intriguing plot involving Kang and a group of mysterious villains in Timeless (2022) #1, wetting readers’ whistles. The book finally dropped and it was fine. MacKay is amazing on B and C-list characters, but he’s proven to be sort of lackluster with the big names. His Avengers has completely fallen off the map; no one talks about it, good, bad, or indifferent, and that’s extremely frustrating. It doesn’t help that his Kang story was meant for MCU synergy, and was dropped because Kang is no longer going to be a focus of the movies. MacKay’s Avengers is there, but no one cares.
6) The Leather Jacket Era
The ’90s are one of the worst decades of the Avengers. There are lots of reasons for this, and one of the biggest missteps was the Leather Jacket Era. This time in the team’s history began after “Operation: Galactic Storm”. A portion of the group killed the Supreme Intelligence after the war between the Kree and Shi’Ar, and most of the well-known Avengers left. This left behind a roster of B and C-listers. Avengers wasn’t terrible at the time (Steve Epting’s art was fantastic), but the book had no star power whatsoever. It really didn’t feel like an Avengers comic at all, in fact. It honestly seemed like Marvel was trying to copy DC’s Justice League International, trying to make a group of lower-level of heroes into stars, but it didn’t work.
5) All-New All-Different Avengers
All-New All-Different Avengers should have been amazing. It was written by Mark Waid, one of the best pure superhero writers ever, and had art by Adam Kubert and Mike Del Mundo, with covers from Alex Ross. That should have been a recipe for success. The team consisted of Iron Man, the Vision, Ms. Marvel III, Miles Morales Spider-Man, Jane Foster’s Thor, and Sam Alexander’s Nova. It had great talent and wonderful heroes, but can anyone name one story from it? The biggest problem with the book is that it came after the immaculate Jonathan Hickman Avengers run; there was basically nothing anyone could do to follow that. Marvel wanted to put their best foot forward with the team in time for Avengers: Age of Ultron, but All-New All-Different Avengers just didn’t have it, and was the beginning of a decade long fall from grace for the team, which is ironic, because the MCU made them more popular than ever.
4) Avengers #300
There have been some great Avengers rosters, and there have been some terrible ones. The one introduced in Avengers #300 is probably the worst. It was during that period when Captain America had lost faith in the United States, working as the Captain. He recruited Mister Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Thor, and Gilgamesh the Forgotten One. You’ve certainly never heard of this roster, because it was terrible. The group was powerful; Thor is a god, Gilgamesh is an Eternal, and Invisible Woman can smack around Celestials when she wants to. However, it wasn’t really an Avengers team. Fans had already started checking out of the Avengers for the mutant side of Marvel, and this issue chased loads of fans away.
3) “The Crossing”
The ’90s had a great Marvel stories, but there were a lot of bad ones, especially on the Avengers side of things. The worst of these was “The Crossing”. This story saw Kang go back in time, take control of Iron Man, and use him as a sleeper agent against the Avengers. The team was forced to also travel back in time and get a teen Tony Stark to help them beat the older version of himself, which doesn’t make any sense at all. The story also ’90s upped the team, making them more “extreme” and “cool”. The Avengers just didn’t fit this kind of Image Comics-inspired slop, and it’s gone down as one of the worst Avengers stories of all time. It’s not even a fun kind of bad, it’s just terrible.
2) Chuck Austen’s Run on Avengers
Chuck Austen is the worst writer possibly in the history of Marvel Comics, yet he somehow wrote several of the most popular comics of the early ’00s. He got those jobs because of his War Machine MAX series, but here’s the thing: he was put on books that sold no matter what at first. So, he wrote terrible Uncanny X-Men stories, but fans still bought them because it was the X-Men. This eventually led to him taking over Avengers when Geoff Johns left the book to write exclusively at DC. Austen’s run was abysmal from the start. He introduced a new Captain Britain that no one cared about and tried to tell a good Invaders story, but failed completely. His run was basically memory holed by Marvel with “Avengers Disassembled: Chaos” and is rightfully completely forgotten.
1) Avengers #200
We all knew it would end here. Avengers #200 is the worst Avengers comic of all time, and showed just how disrespectful the publisher could be to a female superhero. This is the infamous issue where the future Captain Marvel is raped, has a child, and then finds out that the child is her rapist, incarnated through the birth. That’s bad, okay, but it gets worse because then she falls in love with him and the Avengers let her go, acting like this wasn’t just normal, but awesome. This is a flabbergastingly bad comic, and we should never forget about it. It wasn’t even popular among Marvel creators, as Uncanny X-Men writer Chris Claremont would write Avengers Annual #10 to undo everything the book did to Carol, calling out the Avengers for their despicable actions, and brought her to the X-Men’s book, where she became more powerful than ever, setting her on the road that she’s on today.
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