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Visit the original place where these letters of comment appeared ar the Avengers Message Board See Ian's parody fan fiction from Baron Zemo's Lair at The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom
Pro and Con the Avengers Crew It is clear that Mark Gruenwald felt strongly that the Avengers required some kind of back-up personnel other than Jarvis. Avengers #300 listed around a dozen people that the team had hired as pilots, security staff, secretaries etc. In practise only about half a dozen of these ever appeared in issues of the Avengers, and those that appeared most frequently did so as supporting cast in Gruenwald's Captain America book. After Gru's tenure as editor of the Avengers ended these people faded away again, and are most definitely gone after the hiatus of Heroes Reborn. Now there are all sorts of good logical reasons why an operation like the Avengers needs more than one support person. Even Jarvis has to go to the lavatory sometimes. Presumably that's why the team has to leave an Avenger on monitor duty whenever they go off to face a crisis, on the grounds that only a superhero can answer the Avengers' telephone. Whilst there are all kinds of experts on the team, only Quicksilver is known to be a speed typist, only Mantis was really expert in the garden, and only Tony Stark can sort out their balance sheet (are broken quinjets tax deductable?). It makes sense to call in people with professional skills so that the heroes can concentrate on those things that only they can do, like fighting Ultron. The main practical reason against a Crew is that they might be vulnerable the next time the Masters of Evil come visiting, but in that case why keep even Jarvis? In actual fact, the argument against a Crew is dramatic rather than practical. Because comics are episodic and the reader may be looking at the book for the very first time with any given issue, a good writer has to reintroduce all the characters every issue. Bad enough to have to fill in the reader on eight or nine Avengers without having to explain a dozen support staff as well. At the worst the writer has to justify why all these non-superpowered but still heroic good guys aren't running forward with zap cannons in their hands to help fight the invading legions alongside their employers. Still this is something a good writer can get around, and on the whole I would like to see that there is more than Jarvis to the Avengers' infrastructure. They don't even need to be very prominent. I just want to know that Hank does have somebody to wash his test tubes at the end of his research and that somebody tends to that apple tree where Hawk and Mocky carved their initials. Time to reintroduce the Avengers Crew?
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