In Marvel Comics: The Avengers there’s a point where, after rescuing Captain America, he says something to Kamala Khan. I don’t even remember what he says, but whatever it was had something to do with The Plot. It was probably some words of heroic affirmation, that tough guy “ya did the right thing, kiddo” that can’t come from anyone else. Hearing it made me feel the smallest tinge of emotion, of comic book fantasies come to life. Captain America is a good guy, is speaking to Kamala Khan, is speaking to me. This is my moral failure, and it only worked before reality asserts himself.
Kamala Khan is taking this from a guy who looks like he definitely fought in the Iraq War.

When Crystal Dynamics unveiled their Avengers team all of those years ago when we still had big physical press conferences, there was laughter and applause. Videogames seem to have conquered the uncanny valley, and yet: here were our heroes, off brand as ever. I don’t know, after all, if this game started as some kind of horrifying movie adaptation, but those…faces. All of them decked out in the most off-brand versions of their own costumes: better than a made for TV movie, yet still, somehow worse than the Brazzers version.

The Avengers is not, as Crystal Dynamics would assure spectators for weeks after, an adaptation of The Marvel Cinematic Universe. It simply was a suspicious equivalent to it; meant to evoke the feeling of participation without actually hurting the intellectual property. Honestly I can’t knock them because the sad thing is the approach Works. Play through The Avengers for a few hours and Kamala’s story does all of the heavy lifting. None of the writers need to resolve or even introduce characters: MCU fans know Iron Man’s deal, just as they know Thor’s deal.

Marvel’s The Avengers is a game about Halloween costumes. Like a majority of Superhero games, the story being told is about how Cool superheroes are. It works for the same reason there’s a billion dollar movie franchise starring actors who’s performances can be described as “freaked out about being in front of a camera”. Like all brainless entertainment there’s an attempt to cover real issues, but by covering them in the sugar-coated chocolate of Pure Entertainment. Why make a story resonate? You’re standing next to fucking Iron-Man!

No real characters and motivations can exist in the temporal flux that is this videogame. Captain America has seventy years of history for writers and artists to draw on. There can be comics where the character becomes a literal Nazi, but the tapestry afterwards can be filled with reactions to that. When these comics are adapted in this way, they delve into caricature. A team interested in really delving into why people like these characters could have told an interesting story. Instead The Avengers says: we like them because they are cool.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe started in 2008 with Iron-Man. It, along with The Dark Knight started the never ending deluge of Superhero Everything. I read comics for fucking years, and now it feels like the only sane reaction to this is to resist anything Superhero as soon as I am presented with it before my brain faces erosion.

Iron-Man was a good movie: I still hold that line. It is nakedly problematic, but it attempts to interrogate a storied character and figure out why we might already be, or want to become, obsessed with him.

Further explorations of the Marvel, fuck, brand, have weighed poorly on me. You cannot mention Iron Man without mentioning the actor who plays him, or any of these other actors now. A dozen fully identical movies that all have plots that can be described as Actor Responds To The Idea They Are Playing This Character. Fans love that shit, they eat it up. Isn’t it so wacky that Robert Downey Jr. is Iron-Man?

When talking to anyone who’s an insignia t-shirt wearing fan of this shit, they all talk about the movies where the actors and directors have to make a movie like it’s the worst thing in the world. When one part of the franchise returns to reality to examine the characters: it’s not what the fans like.

Darwyn Cook said they wrote comics for a smart 12 year old, and now it feels like Superheroes are exclusively movies for Dumb Adults. Here are some bright colors, some fun one liners. Iron-Man 2 has a Bill O’Reiley cameo and the line “I’m tired of their liberal agenda” from a guy who pilots a weapons platform to the middle east on weekends. I bet a smart 12 year old would turn their nose up at this shit.

The Avengers isn’t an adaptation of The Mavel Cinematic Universe, but it is emotionally gesturing towards it. Captain America is so because he has the costume and attitude, as is The Hulk and whoever else. Superhero comics infiltrate every medium now, at the behest of corporate overlords who know People Love Symbols. Will we strip the creative history hundreds of people have sweated for? Probably, cuz that shit makes money.

Make your own and you’d get sued to oblivion, but there may not be a stronger argument for the fact that many of these characters belong in public domain as this videogame. Were I to segue into the mechanical analysis, we’d probably find even more questions. Who is Thor if I don’t get to throw his hammer, after all?

Nothing has devalued faster than the idea of Superheroes to the companies that own them. Corporations let artists that made them what they are die in the cancer wing; They do it while they make a billion dollars off of the characters that artist made. They’ll turn right around and make a series about people discovering the power of hope.

Every single time there’s a crude gesture towards emotion reality kicks in. Why the fuck do I care about this dollar store Hulk, looking like a version of Mark Ruffalo someone found on sale. It is not as if The Avengers has a problem of too many characters to juggle, it’s just that there really aren’t any to begin with. Divorced from their history, divorced from the way comics ask questions and reflect the world – they become shallow escapism. Empty bodies in recognizable corporate logos.

As I get older I want to like these goofy comics still. No one makes it easy, not fans, not the people that make them. I want to enjoy seeing how an artist draws their interpretation of a seventy year old character can tell you what the story is going to say about their place in the real world. I even want to like the ones for adults, where people say Piss and Fuck and Have Sex. Instead, the single thing that made anyone like this shit in the first place is the way they’ll be bled of all meaning. Recognizeability – the idea that everything has to be approachable and represent the most marketable idea.

Captain America marched with The Civil Rights movement in comic books, but is there a place for that here? Will The Avengers ever use The Hulk to examine the way violence dominates even the so-called higher educated pursuits? At best there might be gesturing, as in the actual plot of the game, but never any kind of room for the characters to be used.

Should we forget about this videogame? Probably, fuck, absolutely. Like the marketability of Superheroes, they’ll never let us. Here comes Daredevil! What’s that you Magnificent Marvel Fans it’s Hawkeye! Dead eyed and dressed accordingly, here’s all of the characters you grew up with, and the strongest indictment that we should all be running as far away as possible.

If the answer to the question of superpowers is only ever To Hit A Robot, why the fuck do we need to keep asking in the first place.

Who are The Avengers and what does their newest iteration reveal about superheroes?

75 years of comic storytelling have brought us to this point, and past several Points of No Return.
The American Comic Book will be dead, one day. Long live the American Comic Book.

But you can’t have The Avengers without pulling together a dozen different parts of The Marvel Universe. Superhero teams almost by necessity require people who don’t get along.

Kamala is the first character we’re introduced to and the last one who says An Important Thing in the plot. Kamala in the comics is Ms. Marvel, but she’s never really referred to in the story by that name. More often than not she’s called Kid or Little Girl.

The experience of Kamala’s story is that she’s our cipher. Excited to be around The Avengers in a way that lets the player feel the same way. It’s okay to be a nerd, you’re standing next to Iron Man etc;
But Kamala’s story opens with her escaping her house.

The presence of a robot ran paramilitary force is taken by everyone in New York as normal. Not only does the story not really lean into this before whisking us off to be A Superhero – it treats the idea that only another paramilitary force can save people when this happens. Our boys in spangly outfits and billion dollar weapons platforms, they get to do it because they know better.

Every year the conceit that there’s a military task force that knows better gets more and more harrowing. Every year we try to make them more real, more grounded: the idea of The Superhero comes face to face with itself. Kamala knows the only people who can save the world are The Avengers, because that’s what they do.

Her story is really about that personal drive towards destiny; In her soul she knows what is right, who she is, and what is true. But every where she goes what she feels is not validated until it’s validated by someone older and whiter. Kamala Khan cannot be a superhero until Tony Stark signs off on it.

Before Kamala can meet The Armored Avenger, she has to meet The Incredible Hulk. Alias Bruce Banner he’s really the one responsible for setting the plot in motion. Caged to a terrifying monster who doesn’t “do justice” so much as “gets pointed at badguys” Bruce is the one to utter the “Yes The Avengers are dangerous” line to a panel of anonymous judges.

Of course we learn everything went wrong from the actions of a few deceitful people. Fulfilling even in the realm of escapism the old conspiracy theory that there are no systems, only bad actors. Bruce Banner is tested and found wanting.

Like the movies do, The Avengers says that the most interesting part about Bruce Banner is not that he’s unable to control his anger, but that he’s a softhearted rube outside of that. I bet the Bruce Banner of this game lives in a trailer that has lots of fist-sized holes in the drywall.

Someone does actually live in a trailer when we meet him, and that’s Tony Stark. Here, Tony is voiced by Troy Baker doing Nolan North doing Robert Downey Jr. Smarmy and wisecrackin, I long for the alcoholic mess of the Demon in a Bottle (*Iron Man issues 120 through 128) Iron Man. Now every time we’re faced with this mess, his demons are able to be vanquished through charm and sarcasm.

Tony is immediately ready when prompted with evidence that he did not actually Fuck Up to Suit Up again. For the rest of the game, Tony is a pure escapist vacuum. Everything he does because he’s a rich genius is treated as a logical end. Everything he’s planned for is necessary.

Where The Avengers works is when all of the characters stand next to each other and get Pissed Off. Every good story with these characters is generally about how they’re all individual failures that can pull together and get the job done. It is when our real cast is introduced that Kamala really takes a back seat. Her position of viewpoint bounces back to sidekick, and to token person of color repeatedly.

It works, but only to the detriment of the one character that actually has stakes in the story.
Clearing the air about some of these characters, The Avengers is pure fantasy and also endemic of how these franchises take the work of creators and turn it into drivel. Kamala’s story isn’t true shorthand for her experiences in America – but does have a strange undercurrent of showing how America expects its immigrants to worship the heroes of the American canon.

Not once does Kamala ask if having a weapon-outfitted helicarrier above an American city is a bad idea. It’s only bad when The Badguys do it. Anything we do, well, we get to get away with it because it is Right and it is Necessary. Who are these heroes for?

Captain America hangs over the plot of The Avengers more than anyone. Certainly more than Thor, who doesn’t do shit. From the moment things kick off – with The Death of Captain America (*Captain America vol. 5, #25–42) we’re told he’s the only thing really holding it all together. With no Cap, there’s no Avengers. It is the Words From The Man himself that manage to make me feel any emotion.

Why? Why believe what this blonde haired, blue eyed soldier-of-fortune has to say. Everything he does in comics is treated as the will of the country, yet he looks like the guys we spent all of World War II fighting. Far removed from his history as a science experiment, and yet…curiously dressed like he’s ready to fight in The War on Terror. I don’t know the history of Captain America here – but I can assume it’s closer to Mark Millar’s impression of the character.

If Kamala is supposed to stand aside for all of these people, what does that tell us? The Avengers has a cynical view of Superheroes, more in line with The Boys than anything else. Corporate sponsored, government sanctioned. They’re here to step up when no one else can, or when someone else has.

Maybe the mistake is reading too much into the opening statement. How many Superhero games am I going to have to play before I realize they’re really not being made for me? How many times will I defend the property of Gotham City, will I let all of the interesting aspects of the characters be dropped for excess and entertainment?

Marvel’s The Avengers ends with a closeup on a framed picture of the event the game calls A-Day. When everything went wrong, but moments before Kamala was standing with all of The Avengers.
But we’re with Kamala through the entire events of A-Day, and we, as players, know this moment never happened.