The world can’t exist without the Avengers. At least, the world in Marvel Comics can’t. After Brian Michael Bendis’s destruction of the Avengers in Avengers Disassembled, a lot of Marvel fans were upset. I was one of them. If you haven’t read that book, go read it and see if you’re upset too.
At any rate, any reconstruction of the Avengers was going to have to be a lot different. Marvel Comics chose to take their powerhouses, basically the guys who sold the most comics, and pair them with personal hero favorites of Bendis. That list includes Luke Cage and Spider-Woman. Granted, Bendis has made these characters pull their weight in the strip, but fans wouldn’t have expected them to be in the ranks of the Avengers before.
Captain America, Spider-Man, Iron Man, and Wolverine are high rollers in the comics game. Putting them in the series makes good sense on some levels. Captain America and Iron Man have both been Avengers before. They have a history. And both of them have worked with Spider-Man and Wolverine on other occasions.
In the original Avengers comics, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby also gathered their heavy hitters from the 1960s that weren’t on a team and brought them together to chase down the Hulk, who was on a mad rampage inspired by Loki. The heroes had to band together to defeat a menace no one else could deal with.
That’s the setup in Breakout. But Bendis weaves in a lot of plot points that he’s going to touch on in future volumes of this new series. Matt Murdock (Daredevil) is on hand when Electro manages to bust everyone out of an island prison. We get some really good set pieces of some of the characters before they plunge into the fight. In fact, Bendis does a few quick double backs with each issue collected in the graphic novel to turn back time and pick up story threads from before the action breaks out.
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