Are the Avengers America’s Most Toxic Work Force?

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Essay

One thing that drew Leigh Bardugo to the Avengers as a girl was that their turnover rate meant they were always hiring.

By Leigh Bardugo

I bought my comics from a newsstand just a few blocks from our apartment in the San Fernando Valley. As a kid, I thought it was a big deal to walk those few blocks and buy something on my own. The newsstand was wedged between a pizza place and a beauty supply called the Bee Hive, and it was a little seedy. You were just as likely to see guys buying issues of Hustler as you were kids snapping up “X-Men.” But mostly you’d see men and women arrayed in a line, magazines in hand, backs slightly bowed, heads hanging as if too heavy for their necks.

The corner smelled perpetually of cigarettes and damp newsprint. I didn’t like it there, but I needed my Spidey fix. My knowledge of comics was scant. I liked Spider-Man because he was funny and he was familiar. He had his own strip in the daily paper. Every Saturday morning, I caught up with him and his Amazing Friends. That was my buy. But the makers of comics are no fools, and so, one weekend as my eyes scanned the racks, there was Spider-Man hanging upside down, surrounded by a group of heroes I didn’t know.

I was an odd, quiet, bookish kid and, honestly, kind of tacky. For all my love of “Little Women” and “The Witch of Blackbird Pond,” I loved the “Solid Gold” dancers just as much, and could watch the video of Heart’s “These Dreams” on loop for hours. My life was microwave dinners and falling asleep in our quiet apartment before my mom made it home from work. I wanted friendship and wholesome adventure, but I also wanted big hair and mansions and sequined leotards.

My willingness to pick up that first “Avenger” comic was sparked by three vital factors: the familiarity of my beloved web slinger, the promise of a bargain (a veritable buffet of heroes for one low price), and the intrigue of the two women at the bottom of that cover, She-Hulk with her flowing green hair and the red-booted, gloriously caped Scarlet Witch. These people looked noisy, exciting, glamorous. “Spider-Man — an Avenger?” the cover queried. I didn’t know what an Avenger was, but I intended to find out.

I’m tempted to lump my love of the Avengers in with the same affection for powerful weirdos that drew me to the X-Men, Guardians of the Galaxy and even the A-Team. But their group dynamic doesn’t quite match up with the tropes of exceptional outsiders and found families — at least in the comics. The Avengers roster has grown so vast and varied that, of course, some of its characters fall into the category of deadly and persecuted oddball. But their group dynamic is not defined by persecution or otherdom. Instead, they’re the best of the best, anchored by a god, a one-percenter and a resurrected icon. They are Earth’s mightiest heroes, brought together not by desperation, but by the fact that someone has to get the job done.

I didn’t remember the actual story of that first comic that lured me into the Avengers’ world, so I looked it up. In Issue No. 236, Spider-Man does indeed try to join the Avengers — and he does it because he finds out the Avengers make $1,000 per week. If the Fantastic Four represent a fantasy of an actual family, and the X-Men represent a fantasy of found family, maybe the Avengers represent a fantasy of adult life and, well, work. The story lines they follow offer comics fans another kind of twist and a different kind of team. After their early adversary Space Phantom is exiled to limbo, the expectation is that, having successfully bested this villain, all of our heroes will shake hands, brush off the battle, and maybe go out for shawarma. Instead, just one issue after our Avengers assemble, the Hulk is done with this crew.

The Hulk knows he doesn’t fit into this particular corporate culture. His high-angst, heavy-damage ways are more suited to a solo artist — or to an outsider team with a gift for handling chaos. He’ll be back, of course, but Ant-Man (in his many different incarnations) and the Wasp don’t last much longer. This establishes a pattern we’ll see again and again with the Avengers of new hires that do and don’t work out.

Surprisingly, some of the Avengers with the most staying power are villains who often maintain a sense of ambivalence about the role they have to play in this particular organization. At any given time and in any given run, the Avengers are constantly recalibrating their moral compasses, each hero or villain or antihero’s continued participation in a mission dependent upon an individual sense of right and wrong. So while the sheer strength and conviction of Cap, Thor and Tony Stark create a kind of overpowered stability, it is repeatedly and thrillingly undermined by the people they invite onto the team. People date whom they shouldn’t. They team up, break up, join up with rivals, leave in an apocalyptic huff, return to the fold. The atmosphere among the Avengers is less league of heroes bound by honor than Earth’s most hostile work environment: a constantly shifting, conflict-generating story machine.

Spidey may have been the bait, but what kept me coming back to the Avengers was that spinning-top sense that everything could be upended through the force of a single personality and its influence on the group. Powers can be lost and regained. Universes can unravel. Like most kids, I dreamed of being exceptional and escaping the ordinary world. But who I wanted to be changed from moment to moment — sorceress, assassin, warrior, queen, hero, villain. Among the Avengers, there was always an opening, a chance to apply. They revealed a thousand doors to the Marvel Universe and gave me the giddy belief not only that anything could happen but that, for a short time, in whatever guise, I could be a part of it.

Leigh Bardugo is a New York Times best-selling author, most recently of the novel “Hell Bent.” This essay is adapted from her foreword to “The Avengers” in the Penguin Classics Marvel Collection.

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