The Avengers: Heroes, Icons, Assembled is the full-package

On the surface, it’s a very simple thing that The Avengers: Heroes, Icons, Assembled does well. It takes the potentially complex plot of comic books, specifically The Avengers, and distills their existence since 1963 into something understandable, approachable and entertaining. This is a reference book-style collection of the super team’s history that all but jumps off of the pages and makes you wish that you’d been reading along with it since their inception. But that’s coming from a comic book kid who wishes that they had a time machine to go back and collect the series from when they first saw them in the bookstore. It serves as a bridge for the comic book casual, comfort food for the faithful and an example of a pop culture time capsule that’s as comfortable in a library as it is in your living room.  

This is a big, encyclopedic book that’s as much fun to look at as the comic book. The pages in The Avengers are printed on thicker, glossy, almost cardboard stock paper that gives each of the images or panels the attention that they deserve. It shows dozens, maybe even over a hundred different covers from The Avengers that span decades. Like the other books that Rich Johnson has done for properties from Marvel Comics, this is impossible to ignore. You might be a person who is averse to comic book art and the medium as a whole; but The Avengers’ presentation is thorough, professional and provides numerous examples as why they’ve endured.

I liken it to country music. While you may not be a fan of the genre, if a book along with the same high-quality content, hundreds of eye-catching pictures and easy-to-digest text came across your field of vision you’d be intrigued. While you might not purchase the Alan Jackson discography from eBay, you would have some inkling as to why it’s endured for so long to so many people. The Avengers is like that, but to the comic book medium.

The Avengers: Heroes, Icons, Assembled is divided up into four chapters. These chapters exist more for the sake of breaking the book into digestible sections, as opposed to separating them for chronological flow or character reasons. Even the introduction, which is a very short one-page overview, lays down how The Avengers came to assemble amongst a sea of individual superheroes. It all boiled down to a gap in the publishing schedule and there were a handful of individual titles, like Thor, Ant-Man and Iron Man, that were doing well. Jack Kirby and Stan Lee put a couple of them together, knew they’d add and subtract from the roster from time to time and the rest is comic book and movie legend.

There have been many different incarnations of The Avengers. The New Avengers, West Coast Avengers, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, Dark Avengers and more. I remembered most of them, but there were still one of two inceptions that surprised me, but made sense when you looked at the overall canon of the characters. Each group is given a very basic overview that lets readers of any level know why this particular group was formed and who was in it.

The classic stories and bad guys are all in the book. Age of Ultron, Infinity, Secret Invasion, Avengers vs. X-Men and so many more are highlighted. The text succinctly sets up what led to the tumultuous events, which Avengers engaged in the battle, and how it plays into their greater world. This also plays into the strength of graphic novels and the fact that they helped parlay this medium, and manga to an extent, to a much larger audience. Graphic novels and collected manga editions allow the stories to be consumed more easily. The quality of the stories, depth of the characters, and brilliance of the art are still the same, but you don’t have to worry about collecting every single issue of the comic book. Readers who pick up The Avengers: Heroes, Icons, Assemble might be curious or motivated to read the entire collected graphic novel that encapsulates that story. It could be an older story they have heard about or were unaware that its plot ran parallel to one of the movies.

This is fun to read. It’s potato chip and kitten video evidence that you can’t just consume one. The art begs you to look at another page and to discover another adventure from The Avengers. It might not make you into a comic book fan, but that’s not the book’s purpose. It sets out to be an entertaining, and fun-to-read overview of the classic Avengers stories from the comic book and succeeds. It distills dozens of characters into stories that most people only know from the movies and brings it home to the medium that made them awesome.

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