Marvel Comics Exec Editor Reveals ‘All-New, All-Different Avengers’ Met Early End Because ‘Champions’ Stole Its Thunder
More than just ‘a terrible team line-up’ and ‘being released as part of a widely-panned publishing initiative’, Marvel Comics Executive Editor Tom Brevoort has revealed that Champions and Marvel Rising were to blame the short-lived All-New, All-Different Avengers Vol. 1 received its early cancellation order.
The first proper assembly of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes following the events of Secret Wars, the Mark Waid penned All-New, All-Different Avengers Vol. 1 saw a yet-again-broke Tony Stark working with Vision and Sam Wilson to take a handful of ‘younger generation’ heroes – Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan), Spider-Man (Miles Morales), Sam Alexander (Nova), and Jane Foster (Thor) – under their wing in order to both fill the gap in civilian protection left behind by the team’s absence and mentor them in the way of proper superheroics.
Yet, despite being the core Avengers series running at the time, the team would ultimately be disbanded after just 15 issues, with the team’s older members choosing to carry on their mission with the help of Hercules, Spider-Man, and The Wasp’s daughter Nadia Van Dye in Avengers Vol. 7 and the younger ones choosing to team-up with Amadeus Cho, the Vision’s daughter Viv, and a time-displaced Cyclops to lead their own team in the pages of Champions Vol. 2 (both titles of which were also helmed by Waid).
Though this switch-up unfolded almost a decade ago, its behind-the-scenes circumstances were recently brought to public attention courtesy of Brevoort, who first broached the topic while reflecting on All-New, All-Different Avengers Annual Vol. 1 #1 as part of the August 10th entry of his Man With A Hat Substack blog:
“The ALL-NEW ALL-DIFFERENT AVENGERS ANNUAL #1 came out on August 10, 2016, and was one of the more successful things we did during that abortive run, at least from a creative level. I seem to recall that we wound up having to put this book together in a short amount of time, likely to fill some budgetary shortfall caused by some other project being delayed.
“Accordingly, writer Mark Waid and I hit on the idea of making the issue an anthology story focusing on the stories written by Ms. Marvel’s fan fiction group. This gave us the latitude to deviate wildly from continuity and to do stories that were more broad and bizarre than you might typically find in an issue of Avengers. The framing sequence was written by Kamala’s creator G. Willow Wilson, which freed up Waid to do a fun story with Chip Zdarsky.
“We also opened up the doors to other creators, so Natasha Allegri contributed a meta She-Hulk adventure, Zac Gorman and Jay Fosgitt incarnated Ms Marvel and Miles Morales as anthropomorphic animals, Faith Erin Hicks provided a Squirrel Girl/Ms Marvel throwdown, and Scott Kurtz did a story concerning Kamala’s heretofore-unknown internet boyfriend. It was a very entertaining Annual, but it failed to make much of an impact at all, even with the lovely Alex Ross cover fronting it. But it’s a little gem that is well worth seeking out on the back issue market.”
Later asked by a fan if he could explain “what made All-New, All-Different Avengers an ‘abortive run'”, the Marvel Comics editor would elaborate in his next blog entry, therein revealing that it was the company’s own rush to capitalize on their new legacy heroes that ultimately led to its failure:
“Right after we started All-New, All-Different Avengers, there was a push to do animation and other media with a group of our younger characters. This eventually saw expression as . But initially, the thought was that the initiative was going to be called Champions, and that’s why that series was begun a short way into ANAD Avengers Vol. 1′s run, pretty much tanking the entire premise of that series.
“In the end, Champions Vol. 2 wound up being a better, more focused series, so it was all for the good, but it meant that the ANAD Avengers Vol. 1 run, which we thought would run indefinitely, needed to be terminated a lot earlier than we’d anticipated.”
