Avengers #1 (1963)
by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby
And then came a day, a day unlike any other, when a comic book company created a team of its most popular superheroes.
Come to think of it, there are lots of days like that.
We begin in a dimension where Loki has been imprisoned.
Loki’s previous appearance was in Journey Into Mystery #96, which shares the same cover date of Avengers #1.
But he wasn’t exiled by Odin in that story: he was just tied up by “Merlin” (long story). I’m guessing Odin took the opportunity to get rid of him for five minutes.
Brief tangent here: that’s the issue where “Merlin” (long story) refuses to believe that JFK is the President because he’s too young.
That issue had a plot by Stan Lee and a script by Robert Bernstein, writing under the pseudonym “R. Berns”, longtime writer of Superman and Aquaman.
Looking for a new pawn to use against Thor, Loki senses that the first Hulk series had been cancelled six months earlier.
I’m guessing that Loki knows Hulk enough to know that he’s not really the monster that the general population believes, because he creates an illusion to lure him into saving civilians.
This makes national news, and the only person who believes the Hulk is innocent is his sidekick Rick Jones.
He decides to ask the Fantastic Four to help with the help of his friends, the Teen Brigade.
That is probably the first and last time the Teen Brigade does anything notable.
They started out as ham radio enthusiasts, and remained as such for a long time in their very few appearances. By the time 2010 miniseries “Avengers: The Origin” retold the story, they were changed into computer hackers.
The Teen Brigade has so few appearances that I don’t know if this stuck.
However Loki doesn’t want the Fantastic Four to get involved, so he magically redirect the Teen Brigade’s signal to Thor’s secret identity.
But I’m guessing Loki isn’t used to del with science-based communications, so the signal is received by other heroes as well.
Including Ant-Man and Wasp, with the latter being a relatively recent character compared to the others: at the time she had only 6 months of appearances.
I wonder how powerful is that ant-pult.
The last to hear the signal is Iron Man, still in his second-ever armor.
Iron Man’s armor was environmentally friendly as far back as 1963.
Loki REALLY messed up his spell, because the Fantastic Four eventually DO get the warning.
Interesting to see the Fantastic Four dismiss the Hulk so easily. They had already met him in Fantastic Four #12, published before the Hulk’s first series ended.
Notably, this recruits nearly all of Marvel’s existing superheroes.
Considering the X-Men share the same cover date of the Avengers, the ONLY other superheroes who are not summoned are Doctor Strange and Spider-Man.
Which means that the 4 superheroes summoned represent 36% of ALL current superheroes and 57% of those who were not in a team yet.
Yeah Loki REALLY needs to work on his radio spells.
Loki lures Thor away from the others with an illusion, and it really says a lot of just how ubiquitous Loki was in early Thor stories that he IMMEDIATELY figures out he’s the one behind it.
Aaaaand Thor immediately ditches the team to return to Asgard at the first occasion.
I’m sure that won’t be a constant in his membership.
But where IS the Hulk right now?
Posing as a super-strong clown robot.
Sounds legit.
Take a moment to appreciate the absurdity of a circuit not even questioning the idea of a robot showing up to join their act.
In the original, the disguise is 100% the Hulk’s idea.
In “Avengers: The Origin”, he’s discovered by the circus performers and THEY come up with it.
Ant-Man’s ants are absurdly efficient at gathering information in the early years…
…and they can be a surprisingly physical threat.
Not to the Hulk, but still.
First hero fight: the Hulk vs Ant-Man and Wasp.
Avengers: 0
Hulk: 1
Avengers: 0
Hulk: 2
Meanwhile Thor has gone into a completely different quest.
Thor finds and confronts Loki, looking to AVENGE what he’s done.
Loki has a trap ready: some trolls. Yeah I’m sure that will hold Thor.
Never change, Thor, never change.
Unfortunately for Loki, Silver Age Thor can do pretty much anything.
Although I would rather avoid knowing how Thor rubs his hammer.
Meanwhile on Midgard*, Iron Man almost causes a plane to crash looking for the Hulk.
*Earth
Little known fact, the Avengers are canonically founded in Detroit.
Iron Man does a lot better in his second fight with the Hulk: it’s essentially a tie.
Avengers: 1
Hulk: 3
However there’s only 2 pages left, so Thor has to show up to stop the fight to delivery the real villain.
Loki’s surprise attack is to turn himself radioactive.
I’m guessing Thor and the Hulk are only bothered by the sudden light, right?
However it’s Ant-Man of all people who defeats Loki, because his ants burrowed a tunnel to take him into a lead tank.
Which I’m guessing Ant-Man took with him, because the fight was happening at a car factory.
And I really hope Detroit doesn’t carry out atomic tests beneath its factories.
Also Thor knows that Loki cannot stay radioactive for too long because shut up.
Ant-Man suggests taking the opportunity to form a team, and everybody agrees… even the Hulk.
He will famously leave the team next issue.
I absolutely love that the canonical reason for the team’s name is that it sounds cool.
Historical significance: 10/10
It’s the Avengers!!!
Silver Age-ness: 8/10
The Hulk is posing as a robot clown strongman AND the evil god of magic is defeated by shoving him inside a tank.
Does it stand the test of time? 7/10
Silliness aside, this holds up rather well. The team forms completely by accident, and despite the initial fight they actually try to reason with the Hulk several times.
However the interactions between heroes are still kept at a minimum, and Thor solving everything with his side quest feels very disconnected.
How close is this to the modern team? 7/10
While they are admittedly modeled after the Justice League, the Avengers develop in kind of the opposite way.
The JLA begins as a well-established team of friends and colleagues, while the Avengers are barely hold together for quite a while.
Over time, however, the Avengers creates several unique internal dynamics that the JLA lacks for the longest time. To me the JLA often feels like its members don’t really interact with each other between missions, while the Avengers get their own subplots quite early… mostly because the Avengers have had members without their own series for the longest time, while for the JLA that starts to be the case only in the 80s.
Tracking the whole history of the Avengers would take way too much time, and I’ve already talked about the team multiple times, including my personal ranking of its members.
They’re not always my favorite team and frequently not my favorite series, but considering how they touch every single corner of the Marvel Universe… to me, the Avengers ARE the Marvel Universe.
It’s kind of funny how just a few months after this issue is published, the idea that Loki is the only one capable of making illusions becomes obsolete (Mastermind in X-Men # 4).
I agree. The Avengers, right from the start, are essential for the Marvel Universe. Their very existence is a subtle yet powerful indicator that this is a world where many heroes have and attempt to keep a specific but very meaningful level of mutual awareness and support.
It is too bad that the meaning of the name “Avengers” has been so dilluted in the last twenty years or so. It has not been quite as bad as the dillution of the brand “Justice League”, but it was still severe.
May I suggest an addendum of sorts for this post? Unusual as the “Loki meddles with radio transmissions” origin is, it still recurred in the Marvel Universe.
It is almost a parody; in Hulk #265 (published in 1981) Rick Jones is again using radio in order to ask for help – this time, to contact the Avengers in order to stop and free the Hulk while he was under the Corruptor’s control.
It pretty much amounts to presenting the resulting team (a very short-lived one, the Rangers) as the next generation of the Avengers. I don’t think the story attempted to lampshade the parallels of their origins, though.
Somehow the Rangers had 16 appearances in all, but in all honesty I will be surprised if they were significant in any beyond Hulk #265 itself
I don’t think the Rangers were ever thought to be the next generation of Avengers, simply a Southwestern-themed hero group.
I remember reading somewhere (but not sure where so can’t cite the source) that the reason Thor went on a completely different quest within the issue is because Avengers #1 was such a rush job and thrown together at the last minute that Lee & Kirby incorporated several pages that Kirby had already penciled for an as-yet unused Thor story. So Loki ended up as the villain who united the Avengers as a result of using whatever semi-completed material they had on hand that they could readily plug in and fill some pages.
Not sure if the pages were from an issue of Thor that was still in production or if they were from a story that had been abandoned. If they cannibalized a scheduled future issue, it might be interesting to look at the subsequent issues of Thor to see if any feel like last minute rush jobs to replace the issue that was repurposed into Avengers #1. Though, given the general quality of Silver Age stories, it’s likely impossible to judge a rush job from a normal one.
“… mostly because the Avengers have had members without their own series for the longest time, while for the JLA that starts to be the case only in the 80s.”
Not quite. During the 1970s, Hawkman, Atom, Green Lantern, and Aquaman all lost their own series yet continued to appear in the JLA. Also, Green Arrow, Black Canary, Elongated Man, and Red Tornado did not have their own series at the time, although some of these were featured in back-up strips such as Green Lantern’s backup in The Flash and The Atom’s backup in Action Comics. Later ’70s additions such as Hawkwoman and Zatanna also did not have their own series. Only Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and The Flash kept their own series throughout the ’70s.
Funny how Captain America now has the tag line, the First Avenger, when he wasn’t even in the starting line up. (And by the time he joined the Hulk had already left.)
That description was invented purely for the movie.
Yeah, but the MCU is now…is “the tail wagging the dog” the idiom? (And Cap’s been part of the team so long I suspect a lot of people think of him as an original.)
It’s kind of ironic that The Wasp doesn’t get her name in the cover heading (girls don’t count?), but Janet’s the one who coins the name The Avengers.
“What did we avenge here? The Hulk’s good name?”
“Shut up! It sounds cool!”