‘Mighty Avengers’: Come For the Diversity, Stay for the Quality

February is Black History Month, and I admit I feel pretty lousy about using it as an excuse to review the Marvel Comics book Mighty Avengers. After all, I hate to be seen as pandering, and the reason you read it shouldn’t be because it has one of the most diverse cast of heroes in any comic book, but because it is fun, well written and beautifully drawn.

However, as a fan of Luke Cage since he was first introduced in the 1970s, I can’t ignore the fact that he is a black man leading this new Mighty Avengers team. Joining him in the diversity parade are Monica Rambeau (now called Spectrum), Sam Wilson (Falcon), black Latino Victor Alvarez (the new Power Man) and semi-official member Adam Brashear (Blue Marvel). Also on the team are Latina Ava Ayala (White Tiger), Jessica Jones, She-Hulk, Superior Spider-Man and whoever it is that is wearing the Ronin suit now (still a secret in the comic).

The only white male on the team aside from Peter Parker/Otto Octavius is Danny Rand (Iron Fist), Cage’s long-time hero partner. And Superior Spider-Man isn’t on the team long, as he and Cage have a great fight over leadership.

This is the second Avengers team that Cage has led, the first being the second iteration of the New Avengers, which ran from 2010 to the end of 2012. It is also the second version of the Mighty Avengers, the first being the one led by the original Ms. Marvel, written by Brian Michael Bendis and at first drawn by Frank Cho. In fact, Bendis created the New Avengers as well, and both books were offshoots from the events of the Civil War saga.

The new Mighty Avengers book is written and drawn by the less well known team of Al Ewing and Greg Land, but with no drop in quality from the older title. In issue No. 6, Land is replaced by Valerio Schiti, and the quality never missed a beat.

However, the first five issues of the new book suffered from a bit of what plagued the Cage-led New Avengers for a while as well — they both were essentially dumping grounds for spillover elements from the action in the bigger titles. In the current Mighty Avengers, that spillover comes from Thanos’ appearance on Earth during the Builder’s War.

It isn’t until this latest issue, No. 6, that the Mighty Avengers have begun to develop their own villains and deeper stories, pulling elements from White Tiger’s past, with hints about things in Blue Marvel’s past as well. And there is a lot of past to mine in this team, not the least of which comes from Cage himself.

The relationship between Luke Cage and his wife Jessica Jones is one of the healthiest marriages in all of comicdom, and it helps ground the team that was given the mandate by Captain America to hold down the home front on Earth when he and the team in the main Avengers book went out into deep space.

Right now the Mighty Avengers evokes the best of the early days of the Fantastic Four — a ridiculously overpowered team of heroes that keeps saving New York City again and again, doing it with humor, drama and wonder. And that is no small feat.

Now I just have to figure out who the new Ronin is — a mystically aware martial arts expert who can’t be seen as being in the United States by the authorities. At least he is no longer wearing the costume-shop Spider-Man ripoff Halloween costume (although that was a hilarious bit).