Summary
The team ofMarvel’smost elite heroes who assembled to save the world are known asThe Avengers,Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. They were already a popular superhero team that then had a meteoric rise in popularity through their portrayals at the heart of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With having their own big three in Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor, powerhouses like the Hulk, and agents like Hawkeye and Black Widow, the team lives up to their mighty epithet.
There have been many very different versions of Marvel’s top team in comics, movies, and animated television shows. Here are five ofthe greatest Marvel Avengers rostersshown in each of these mediums.
5Earth’s Mightiest Heroes
The Famous Animated Roster
This is one of the most well-known iterations of The Avengers. Just as theJustice League Unlimitedanimated series introduced a new generation of children to the Justice League,The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroesintroduced a new generation of kids to the intricacies of The Avengers as a team and the world they live in.
This team included Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Ant-Man, and The Wasp as its initial members, with Captain America (who is typically a founding Avenger) joining slightly later on, along with Hawkeye and Black Panther, to make up the main team. Later on in the series, more easily recognized and powerful Marvel heroes join the team, such as Vision and Ms. Marvel, and even heroessuch as Spider-Man, Luke Cage, and War Machine.
The series gave us two seasons to familiarize ourselves with this roster and the trials and tribulations they would have to go through. In the first season, they challenged villains such as Baron Zemo, Loki, Ultron, and most infamously, Hydra. In the second and final season, the stakes rise with villains such as Doctor Doom, Red Skull, and Galactus facing off against the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.
4The New Avengers
An Updated Squad
Any Avengers team that includes bothSpider-Man and Wolverineas key members is a quality team for sure. That is the case withThe New Avengers, a version of the team that appeared in a series of comics written by Brain Michael Bendis and Jonathan Hickman. Promotional art featuring the New Avengers shows Carol Danvers, The Thing, Luke Cage and, as mentioned previously, Wolverine and Spider-Man. This should give fans an idea of how powerful a team this is.
The founding members of this team were Iron Man and Captain America, as is usual with Avengers teams being founded, but also Wolverine, Luke Cage, Spider-Man, and Sentry, which is not as typical. As the team grew throughout these storylines, they were joined by immensely capable members such as Iron Fist, Ronan, and Power Woman.
The New Avengers dealt with issues such as rioting superhuman criminals,agents from S.H.I.E.L.D., mega mutants, the whims of the Scarlet Witch, manipulative masterminds, their reality being meddled with, superhero registration acts and grand civil wars taking place between many superpowered beings.
3The Uncanny Avengers
X-Men Assemble
The Earth’s Mightiest Heroes in collaboration with the heroes who are sometimes referred to as the next step in human evolution. What happens when an assembled Avengers squad and the Uncanny X-Men are combined? You get theUncanny Avengers, a team featuring members such as Captain America, Thor, Wolverine, Rogue, Scarlet Witch, Havok, Wonder Man, Sunfire, and The Wasp.
For anyone looking for the strongest Avengers and X-Men in the Marvel Universe, they will find them on this team. Its roster boasts the likes of Quicksilver and Vision, as well as powerful individuals who are not typically key members of either team, such as Deadpool andThe Human Torch. With heroes and antiheroes like that alongside Sabertooth and Doctor Voodoo, it’s no surprise this team is so great.
In ‘The Red Shadow’, we see the team’s beginnings, with Captain America and Thor offering Havok the opportunity to lead an Avengers team. The Avengers Unity Squad was later formed, featuring Sunfire, Wasp, and Wonder Man. They fought together against the Apocalypse Twins, usedKang the Conqueror’stechnology to save the planet, and went on various other adventures in this collaboration of pure Marvel power.
2Hickman’s Avengers
A Hectic Roster
A strategic Avengers Machine was used to build a vast squad of powerful heroes, including Captain America and Iron Man. This was the case in the storylines for theAvengerscreated by Jonathan Hickman. In it, during a galactic war with the Builders, a team that included both a mix of new heroes, old villains, and classic Avengers combined to create quite an intimidating force.
Hickman’s Avengers are a vast roster of heroes, from Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor to Spider-Man, Wolverine, Captain Marvel, Captain Universe, Hyperion, Shang-Chi, and Spider-Woman. This Avengers iteration is a stacked team of raw power with heavy hitters in every rank.
With this version of The Avengers, great threats must be faced, including villains with mysterious shadowy abilities, alien races equally as dangerous as they are ancient, bomb threats on foreign planets, altered humans, and genetic coding.The Avengers deal with problemson Earth and in space through these runs. From minds being wiped to Mars being terraformed, there are a whole host of interesting and strange scenarios, conflicts, events, and battles to be explored when reading Hickman’sAvengersrun.
1Endgame Avengers
The Many Saviors Of The Universe
This is the Avengers team that most people will be familiar with, hailing from the record-breaking box office-destroying finale and the most important arc in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to date. The Avengers roster showcased inAvengers:Endgame, including that of the ranks shown during the final battle, is one of the largest and most powerful Avengers rosters ever shown to fans of the franchise.
The team is lead by the MCU Big Three: Iron Man, who during the film used his genius to create time travel, Captain America, who was shown to be worthy of wielding Mjölnir, and Thor, who had almost single-handedly killed Thanos in the last outing. There is also a version of the Professor Hulk in this movie, with this universe’s Bruce Banner combining the brains and brawn of both sides of his persona and making them work together, as well as a Hawkeye who has trained as Ronin, and an even more determined and trigger-happy Black Widow, to make up their core members.
That alone would have made these Avengers incredibly powerful, but the army they fought Thanos within the final battlewas far more expansive than that. The Endgame roster contained Captain Marvel, Doctor Strange, Ant-Man, The Wasp, the Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther with his Wakandan army, Spider-Man, Valkyrie, Rescue, and more. This was the Avengers squad that destroyed Thanos and revived half of the universe, making them easily one of the greatest ever seen.
