Kangconquers

Is this current Thor? The one who is the All-Father and fighting Elder Gods in his current book? Because if it is, he solos.

@professorrespect

Ultron one shots most of the League. The stronger members are gradually worn down and defeated.

@swaggiejay:

I guess you’re new to Thanos? He’s considered a Transcendent tier. He’s between Surfer/Thor and Odin. He’s beaten Thor several times, once in the seventies with just two eyeblasts.

Notably before Odin fought Thanos, he one shotted Surfer. Thanos sustained numerous similar blows without succumbing.

I’d estimate Thanos to be roughly three times as strong as the Surfer canonically.

@swaggiejay:

Thanos went toe to toe with Odin. I’d say it’s a pretty fair outcome.

Clears through Starlin Force.

All Dooms are Doom, and Doom is the flagship villain of Marvel. Bountiful Wank, always.

I'm going to be a negative nancy, since you basically picked out my top 5 runs ever, and pointed out everything that was great about them. I'm going to run down the negatives of each, before I officially decide on my top run.

Going back to Busiek, I find some of his attempts at social commentary with the Triune Understanding a little cringe and dated. The run does seem xenophobic, and gets stuck on Triathlon's religion, a thinly veiled reference to his race. Instead of showing The Avengers embracing diversity, and introducing interesting new members of color, Busiek digs in his heels and defends a basically all white core roster. It's a bit gross, and unnecessary.

That said, Busiek defined Kang for the modern era, and wrote the best Ultron story ever to boot. He took the classic Avengers, and brought them into the 21st century. The run as a whole is a gem for that alone, even if I disagree with his politics. If you removed that on-going story thread, the run would be perfect.

Hickman's run is a sprawling master work, a sort of sci-fi mystery wrapped in a superhero space epic. In theory, this could also be a perfect run, but I did find some of his concepts unresolved. He introduced concepts like the Map-Makers, the Black Priests etc, only for them to disappear after an issue or two, never to be heard from again.

I also wish that Hickman relied more on some standard Avengers characters, instead of using creations of his own liking, and random characters that he favored. Kang and Ultron playing bigger parts, as well as a few more classic Avengers, would be nice. I felt The run turning into a coda for his Fantastic Four run at the end, with The Fantastic Four, Doctor Doom and Molecule Man taking over the story in the last two arcs, a bit problematic. It doesn't make it any less of a story, but it makes it less of an AVENGERS story.

I'm not a huge fan of Brian Michael Bendis's style of writing for an Avengers book. It's heavily dialog driven, decompressed and not the wide screen epic on the level I expect my Avengers books to be. There's at least a year's worth of issues in Iron Fist's town house.

That said, I can't deny that he's the greatest Avengers conceptualist since Roy Thomas, completely redefining the team, and the franchise in a way that still impacts how people look at it today. Disassembled, House of M, Secret Invasion, Dark Reign. So many of the great Avengers arcs, and concepts that people still yearn to see play out on the big screen are his ideas. So even if his style isn't for me, I can't deny the impact of what he did.

Stern's run is nearly flawless, given it's era. The only thing I could criticize it for is having a hyper specific roster. I also think the existence of West Coast Avengers kept it from being the all-time definitive run, as he was only allowed to play with half of the toys in making his stories.

I feel like if Shooter hadn't screwed Stern out of writing the West Coast Avengers book, we would've seen our first interwoven Avengers epic three decades before Hickman did it.

Roy Thomas's run is very silver agey, and has some lulls, but the man defined The Avengers to the same degree that Chris Claremont defined the X-Men. He was also responsible for the first major multi-issue arcs in Avengers history, including arguably, the first Marvel event, The Kree/Skrull War. I think Thomas had the most important Avengers run, but I struggle to call it the best.


Mulling over it, I'm going to give the W to Buseik's run as being the best AVENGERS run, while Hickman's run is the best book overall.

Mongol Sr. was thought to be > Thanos based on scaling with 1980s Superman.

@professorrespect: Mongol Sr’s star shone way brighter on here 8-10 years ago.