The Four Color Media Monitor

The pretentious Tom Brevoort wrote on his Substack site (via ComicBook) that back in the mid-2000s, when they first set about launching the direction stemming from the awful Avengers: Disassembled, that when they first developed Young Avengers, they supposedly didn't like the idea Joe Quesada was involved in launching, built as it was on early examples of what we now describe with the slang "woke":

I believe Allan Heinberg once alluded that there was some audience skepticism to Young Avengers initially before its release in 2005 (which informed the framing of the first issue). Do you recall if Young Avengers was anticipated or dreaded by audiences before it came out? Thankfully at the end of the day it was a beautiful success!

Oh yeah, nobody liked the idea of YOUNG AVENGERS before the book came out, most of all me. I thought it was another dopey idea that Joe Quesada had come up with. But once Allan Heinberg was on board to create it, we came up with ways to make it work and to not have it be what everybody was dreading. This is entirely the reason why the first house ad we made up for the series, which ran in AVENGERS #500, was focused upon the idea that “They’re Not What You Think”

No kidding. This was a series where Hulkling and Wiccan were a token LGBT couple, and they claim this wasn't what everyone was dreading? On the contrary, if there was something else anybody with more common sense might've been dreading at the time, it's that this would be the millionth example of of a team series where one or more members were coupled with each other, not with civilian co-stars. Now that I think of it, did Scarlet Witch ever have a civilian boyfriend (she was involved with Hawkeye, Vision and Wonder Man)? Did Quicksilver ever have a civilian girlfriend (he was involved with Crystal)? If not, that's got to be speaking volumes of a huge flaw in superhero team titles of the past - they built on cheap insularity. Rather than take the challenging path of creating civilian ladies and gentlemen to serve as the lovers for the superheroes and superheroines, even writers who I most admire seemed determined to just stick with the easy-peasy notion of heroes dating each other.

And it wouldn't be surprising if Quesada had anything to do with the woke direction Young Avengers took, which Brevoort and his correspondent gush about without offering any sales figures to corroborate the claim it was a huge success. Lest we forget, many editors can lay out certain elements they want an assigned writer to build a story and characters around. Even Brevoort may have worked out some of the PC cliches for Heinberg to go by in creating the cast for Young Avengers. And, lest we forget, even if Young Avengers wasn't so woke, it'd still have been soured by how it all grew out of the directions that followed Avengers: Disassembled, one of the most atrocious "events" of the mid-2000s, turning Scarlet Witch into a scapegoat, and one of the worst stories of the times that brought down mainstream superhero comics. It would seem stories like Disassembled only exist as a shoddy excuse to introduce wokeness, and indeed, that's what both Disassembled and DC's Identity Crisis were intended for back in the day. Brevoort, as main Avengers editor, was part of all that embarrassment back at the time too, so, no surprise he'd be so fluff-coated about the whole dismal affair, which Brian Bendis was the main writer for.

I sometimes thought Brevoort was quite a boaster, and this certainly indicates he is. It's sad he was never really qualified for the job he unfortunately first got 35 years ago.

Labels: Avengers, bad editors, crossoverloading, golden calf of LGBT, marvel comics, misogyny and racism