Fun as it is, the pop-art nature of Mighty Avengers #1 is more than a mere nostalgia play. Rather, it serves a thematic purpose, both for Tony Stark and for Marvel Comics. The formation of the Mighty Avengers comes as part of The Initiative storyline, the follow-up to the Civil War storyline. As in the MCU movie that bears its name, the Civil War in Marvel Comics saw Iron Man and Captain America come to blows over the issue of superhero registration.
However, writer Mark Millar, who served as architect for the Civil War event, was much more willing than Kevin Feige to have fans hate the belligerents. Framing himself as a futurist who saw what the people would demand, Stark demanded that his fellow superheroes unmask and register with the government. He went so far in his quest that he hunted down other heroes, he enlisted Reed Richards to create a secret prison in the Negative Zone for those who would not register, and created a clone of his recently-deceased ally Thor to help him carry out his plan. His actions even led to the death of Steve Rogers, a death that lasted quite a while by comic book standards.
In short, things looked pretty grim for Iron Man at the end of Civil War. Thus, The Initiative offered a chance at redemption, as Stark—who took the place of Nick Fury as director of SHIELD—starts to give the world its superheroes again. And the flagship of The Initiative was the Mighty Avengers.
The Mighty, The Fallen
As fun as the first issue of Mighty Avengers is, the series never forgot its relationship to the superhero Civil War. In fact, Marvel published another Avengers book at the same time, New Avengers, which focused on a team of heroes who kept up the fight, despite refusing to register. These heroes—led by Luke Cage, and including Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, Wolverine, Iron Fist, Doctor Strange, and Clint Barton in his Ronin guise—did their good deeds knowing that the Mighty Avengers would arrest them on sight.
Indeed, both series gave plenty of time for the characters to wonder about the morality of their decisions. As the more street-level heroes, the New Avengers saw themselves as the authentic group, a position that Marvel seemed to endorse by having Cage and company discover a hidden Skrull attack long before the Secret Invasion crossover began in earnest. For their part, the Mighty Avengers insisted that they were doing the necessary work of superheroes, that they put aside their own personal feelings about secret identities and government regulations to save the world.
At its best, Mighty Avengers operated something like a superhero deconstruction. Bendis and Cho, the latter eventually replaced by the ever-reliable Mark Bagley, would serve up a heaping helping of two-fisted action. Issue after issue pit the team against monsters and Ultron and symbiotes, to say nothing of the Skrulls. At the same time, the series would stop for the heroes to consider their moral positions.
