The Avengers: 4 Things The Comics Can Learn From The Movie

3. Likable Characters

Here€™s another thing the Avengers movie had in spades, and something it took from the comics. The Avengers may not be a family in the same sense as the Fantastic Four or the X-Men, but they aren€™t the Super Friends, either. You€™ve got a lot of very strong personalities in this group and when you put them all together, sparks will fly. And those interactions are fun to watch. Even if you had never seen any of the films that led up to The Avengers, even if you€™d never picked up an Avengers comic in your life, you left that theater with at least one favorite character. Probably more than one. Each character had a role to play, each character had a distinctive voice and each one had something to like about them. These days, that€™s a lot harder to find in the comics. For a long time, the way the Avengers were written in the comics meant their personalities were almost completely hidden behind dialogue that was completely interchangeable. Even now, the flagship Avengers title is too concerned with the epic stories that the characters feel completely faceless. The team has been loaded up with so many characters that it€™d be hard for them to get any screen time normally, but with the story-lines being so encompassing, it completely overshadows the characters to the point that they feel almost irrelevant. While the epic stories are important, it€™s the characters that help ground the stories. If you lose track of one or the other, you lose track of what makes the Avengers such an awesome book. There€™s a balance that needs to be struck, and the movie managed this balance wonderfully. Just because these characters are aliens, robots, super-geniuses, demigods, or monsters doesn€™t mean they don€™t have human emotions and human foibles.