It’s Friday plus lol does anything even matter at this point so let’s burrow into the back-issue bins for some old and/or obscure comics.
Once again, I’m admittedly writing about a big name from a big publisher, but Avengers Classic from 2007 was, relatively, a brief blip and was certainly a little odd. Maybe a lot odd.
On the surface, Avengers Classic is obvious. A serial reprinting of Marvel’s popular Avengers title. The reprints have new cover artwork, which has been fairly typical for reprints for decades. (This makes some sense, even when the original covers were iconic Jack Kirby drawings, because it has always been ordinary for publishers to fuss over different options for cover art, knowing its importance to sales. It has probably become even more reasonable as printing technology has improved, and modern coloring in particular involves rich hues and gradients which 1960s comics art was never intended to blend with.)
Also on the surface, Avengers Classic is very obviously modeled on the Classic X-Men reprint series of a couple decades earlier. That doesn’t seem so odd, but the more I examine this in detail the more odd it becomes.
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