Avengers: Disassembled Review (Brian Michael Bendis, David Finch)

Avengers Mansion ‘splodes! Ultrons attack - and then Kree! Heroes die, She-Hulk hulks out, and Tony gets drunk at the UN! Whas goin onnnn…?!

Avengers Disassembled hasn’t aged well in the 17 years since it was published. Brian Bendis goes full Bendis in this one, giving readers the entire gamut of “exciting” action Avengers tropes for what I’m sure was a big deal at the time (or at least was meant to feel like it) but looks silly and pointless now.

All of the characters who die in this book have long since been resurrected while the reveal of why any of this was happening was trotted out again and done better by Bendis a year later in House of M. The Avengers do “disassemble” at the end even though anyone reading this knows that the team would get together again in no time, which only underlines how useless the storyline is and makes you wonder why it was written in the first place. Basically it’s just an excuse for fanboys to get all sentimental about the Avengers title hitting the 500 issue milestone.

Still, we got some pretty good splash page art from a multitude of talented artists as a result, and the art in general is pretty damn good though I don’t know why David Finch made nearly everyone look like they were squinting the whole time! And Scarlet Witch’s entrance was creepy as hell - I can see why Marvel Studios decided to use this aspect of her character in the recent WandaVision show.

Overall though I wasn’t impressed with the noisy, dumb, cliched superhero action that fills up most of this book, not least because the weight Bendis tries to give it has been undone for some time now - hence why I think it hasn’t aged well. Avengers Disassembled is just another terrible Bendis Avengers book. If you want to read Avengers done right, Mark Millar’s Ultimates series, which was being published around the same time as Bendis’ Avengers run, is the one to check out instead.