Avengers Assemble

They have been Mighty. They have been Secret. They have been New. They have even been West Coast and Great Lakes. Most of all, they have been Avengers, Earth's Mightiest Heroes. Over the years, 102 characters have been a part of the team, with 23 honorary members and 46 having active comics of their own. The Justice League may have done the superhero team genre first, but for many, the Avengers did it best. Now, over 600 issues and 50 years later, the Avengers are more relevant than ever and poised to take over pop culture as we know it once more with their highly anticipated sequel, Avengers: Age of Ultron. Yet, before Joss Whedon led a group of unlikely heroes to over a billion dollars at the box office, before Marvel grossed over 5.6 billion dollars at the box office, before the Age of Ultron was upon us, the Avengers was a comic book, an experiment by Marvel Comics in order to goose their ailing sales figures, and an important turning point in the company's history.

The year was 1963 and Marvel Comics was in dire need of a hit. Two years earlier, the company had found success with Fantastic Four, a team-up comic designed to ape the Justice League. Its individual comics were doing well enough, and the Marvel editorial department was really beginning to carve out a name for itself. "Enough of that 'Dear Editor' jazz from now on!" read the letters column of Fantastic Four#10. "Jack Kirby and Stan Lee (that's us!) read every letter personally, and we like to feel that we know you and you know us." With that column, a cult of personality was born, and as the Marvel Universe grew in size, the dynamite duo at the heart of it all realized they needed to bring together some of their biggest on-page personalities. Their Distinguished Competition (a nickname for DC Comics) had found great success by uniting its heavy hitters in Justice League in October 1960, and now it was Marvel's time to do the same.

In early 1963, Marvel, with its ever-expanding lineup of books, adopted a new narrative marketing tactic: cross-promoting its books by creating crossover appearance in their catalog of titles. Yet, Spider-Man showing up in a two-page Fantastic Four sequence wasn't enough for the House of Ideas. In September 1963, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created two brand new titles: one introduces us to a cast of all-new characters, a group of misunderstood teenagers with mysterious powers that we would come to know as The X-Men. The other assembled together some of the best and the brightest heroes in the Marvel Universe to tremendous effect, uniting five superhero superstars against a common evil. They were the Earth's Mightiest Heroes. They were The Avengers.

This new configuration may have made for a spectacular team, but they began as individual heroes with very unique powers and personalities. The first Avengers issue found five heroes — the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, Ant-Man, and the Wasp — coming together to stop the villainous Asgardian god of mischief, Loki. The result was dazzling, and provided Jack Kirby a vast new canvas on which to show off his eye for action, cinematic fight choreography, and keen sense of character. For Stan Lee, the main writer of most of the Marvel Comics lineup at that time, this new alliance of heroes presented a different, though arguably exciting challenge. Lee had to really hone each character's voice in such a way that would retain the individuality of each team member without diminishing the all-important sense of team unity. In essence, Lee had to help unify them without making them appear uniform. What Lee and Kirby achieved in the creation of this new team of heroes cannot be overstated.

Four issues later, Captain America joined the team, and the rest is history. Over the years, the team has undergone many changes in creative teams, roster, and even name, but one thing has remained — their status as the premiere title and superhero group around which much of the Marvel Universe — and now the Marvel Cinematic Universe — revolves.

On July 14, 2000, Marvel Comics partnered with 20 Century Fox to unleash its most ambitious superheroic silver screen undertaking to date, X-Men. A box office sensation, the film grossed more than $296 million...